CHAPTER 5
THE WRONG WOLVES
POV: NOEMI
Sister Perpetua finds the ring at ten to six on Sunday morning.
She's emptying the poor box by the side chapel, the way she does every Sunday before mass, counting quarters into a coffee can. Then she stops and holds something up to the candlelight.
A gold band. Heavy. A man's.
"Somebody," she breathes, "put a wedding ring in the poor box."
The sisters crowd around her. I don't. I stay by the scaffold with my hand closed over the key under my collar, and I watch Mother Agathe take the ring out of Sister Perpetua's fingers and tilt it to read the inside.
Whatever it says takes the color out of her face like a thumb wiping chalk.
"Forever, Diane," Sister Perpetua reads over her shoulder. "Who's Diane?"
Nobody answers. Three of the older sisters look at each other, and I know what they're thinking, because I'm thinking it too.
Diane is in Destin. Diane's husband cleaned out his desk on Tuesday night and drove off with sixty thousand dollars of the dead's money.
Men who drive off with sixty thousand dollars don't stop to give their wedding rings to the poor.
Mother Agathe closes her hand around it. "A donation," she says. "We'll pray for the donor. Places, Sisters."
The last pew is full before the bell.
I don't have to turn around. The weight comes down on my neck at the Confiteor, and I kneel under it, and I think about a thumb that moved on the back of my neck at the chancery, and about a man who knew.
You did that.
For me.
I wait to feel sick.
I don't.
Through my fault, I pray, and strike my chest, and under my palm my heart is going like I've been running toward something.
***
I spent Friday and Saturday in his mother's chapel, on my back on his scaffold, cleaning ten years of rain and two hundred years of candle smoke off a saint's face with cotton and my own spit.
He didn't touch me again.
He didn't even come in. On Friday afternoon, I felt him in the sacristy doorway for an hour, and I didn't turn around, and he didn't speak. When I finally climbed down, there was a satsuma on the bottom rung of the scaffold. Peeled in one spiral.
At night, the housekeeper brought a tray to my room. I locked the door. I lay on a mattress thicker than any I've ever touched and listened to footsteps come down the hall at midnight and stop outside.
They stayed there a long time.
He didn't try the handle.
I lay awake wanting him to.
On Saturday, the car brought me back to Saint Veronica's, the way Mother promised. I didn't turn the crucifix back around.
He knows anyway.
***
After mass, I watch the Dauphine gate from the second-floor landing window.
A grey sedan sits at the curb out front. Two men in it, not talking, not reading, not doing anything but watching the street. His.
At the Dauphine gate, Tee-Jean waits.
He checks his watch. He lights a cigarette. He leans on the bars. Forty minutes. Then he flicks the cigarette into the gutter, pushes off the gate, and on his way down the street, he looks straight up at the landing window.
Straight at me.
He smiles and touches two fingers to his forehead, the way you'd salute a lady.
***
Oil size has a window.
That's the first thing an old gilder in Chalmette taught me, the summer I was seventeen and swept his shop for five dollars a day.
Mix it at four in the afternoon, and it's ready for leaf at eleven at night and useless by two.
The leaf won't wait for you. You go when the size is ready, not when you are.
I mixed a pot for the bishop's altar at four o'clock.
At eleven, I can't sleep anyway.
The side chapel is dark except for my work lamp. I'm up on the scaffold in my smock over my nightgown, with the man's cardigan from the donation box buttoned on top, and I'm laying leaf on the Virgin's crown, one square at a time, breath held so it won't lift away.
I'm humming. I don't notice until I stop.
Behind me, a key turns in the lock of the Dauphine Street door.
I don't move. The leaf sits on the tip of my brush, trembling.
Nobody comes in that door at night. Mother has the key. Father Duclos has the key. Neither of them has ever used it after compline in three years.
The door opens.
Three men. Street light behind them. The one in front has a gold tooth.
"Evening, Sister," Tee-Jean says. "You missed our ride."
"The men out front—"
"Are out front." He spreads his hands, friendly as ever. "Real nice of your friend to tell everybody which gate he was watching."
I don't understand it. I don't have time to.
The first man grabs the scaffold and shakes it.
The pot of size goes over. I catch it by the rim before it falls, and I throw it, all of it, a fat yellow arc of linseed oil into the second man's face. He screams and claws at his eyes. The scaffold lurches under me, and I go over the rail and fall six feet onto the one who was shaking it.
We hit the tiles together. My elbow cracks against stone.
A hand clamps over my mouth.
I bite it.
I don't mean to. My teeth just close, the way they would on a satsuma, and keep closing through skin and meat until they hit something hard. Copper floods my mouth. He howls and rips his hand away, and I spit his blood onto the floor of Saint Veronica's.
"Bitch—"
"Lonnie. Don't mark her." Tee-Jean's voice, still friendly. "Mr. Boudreaux was real clear."
Something goes over my head. Cotton. A pillowcase.
It smells like bleach and cigarettes. Plastic bites into my wrists, and I'm lifted, kicking, and carried out the Dauphine door into the cold, and the last thing I see through the weave of the pillowcase is the work lamp still burning on the chapel floor, and the Virgin with half a crown.
***
The van smells like diesel and shrimp.
I count the turns. Left. Left. A long straight run with the tires singing on a bridge. Right. Gravel.
When they pull the pillowcase off, I'm somewhere cold.
A long room. Tile walls, sweating. Steel tables. A rail running along the ceiling with meat hooks hanging from it in a row, twenty-two of them, and a drain in the middle of the floor that smells like brine and bleach and something dead underneath.
A shrimp plant. The river is close. I can smell it through the walls.
They sit me on an overturned crate and loop the zip tie on my wrists through another one, around a pipe. My feet are bare. I lost my shoes somewhere between the chapel and the van. The floor is so cold it burns.
Then the door opens and a man comes in carrying a paper cup of coffee.
He's older, near sixty. He wears a white linen suit in October, which nobody in New Orleans does unless he wants to be looked at, and three gold rings on one hand. His voice, when he speaks, is soft and warm, like a man who runs a funeral home.
"Sister Noemi." He sips. The smell of chicory reaches me across the cold. "Or is it Miss Delacroix now? I hear you've been sleeping in the Garden District."
"I've been working."
"Mm. Your daddy worked too. Worked me for forty thousand dollars over eighteen months of bourré and bad bets." Ambrose Boudreaux pulls a stool over with his foot and sits down in front of me, knees wide. "You know what he put up when the money ran out?"
The cold climbs my shins.
"Me."
He looks pleased, like a teacher. "So he told you."
"He didn't have to."
"No. I don't suppose he did." He turns his cup in his rings. "He was bringing you to me the night he went off the Chef Menteur. Sad thing. And after, somebody paid a convent to hide you away. I let it go. I'm not a greedy man. A girl in a veil isn't worth a war."
He leans forward.
"But now the Deacon's sending cars for you."
"I don't know what that means."
"No?" He laughs, softly. "You know what they call Gideon Valcourt on the river, Sister?"
I don't answer.
"The Deacon. He takes a dime out of every dollar that floats past Algiers Point. Man shorted him last spring. They found him hanging off the Industrial Canal bridge with his pockets full of dimes." Ambrose sips his chicory. "That's who's been sniffing round your veil."
I think of a gloved thumb dragging down my lower lip.
Sooner or later, novice, I'll own the rest.
I think of a wedding ring in a poor box.
What moves in my chest isn't fear. It's worse than fear.
It's pride.
"He won't pay you," I say.
"Oh, he'll pay." Ambrose stands and brushes off his knees.
"The only question is what. He wants you, and I've got you, so we'll find out together what the Deacon thinks you're worth.
" He turns to the door, where the man I bit is standing with his hand wrapped in a bloody rag.
"Lonnie. Nobody touches her. She's merchandise. "
"Yes, sir."
Ambrose leaves.
Lonnie stays in the doorway a moment longer, looking at me. He holds up the hand in the rag.
"Boss won't be trading forever," he says. "And when he's done? You and me got business."
The door shuts.
The lock turns.
***
I can't feel my feet after the first hour.
I count the meat hooks. Twenty-two. I count them again. I hum the Salve Regina and break off in the same place I always do, the high note I've never once hit.
I try to pray.
The words come out the way they always do, in order, worn smooth. Hail, holy Queen, Mother of mercy. They don't go anywhere. They hit the tile walls and slide down with the sweat.
So I stop.
I close my eyes, and I think about a man in the last pew who has never once taken communion. A man who put a lock on my door and a key around my neck and a lawyer's wedding ring in the poor box. A man who hangs men from bridges with their pockets full of dimes.
I think about what he'll do when he sees the empty chapel on his screen.
And I'm not sorry.
I should be. Somewhere in this plant, men are sleeping, or drinking, or playing cards, and if he comes, they'll die. I know it the way I know gold leaf will tear if you breathe on it.
But I know something else, too. Something nobody at Saint Veronica's knows. I know how to walk away from a man who's calling my name. I've done it once, on a highway, in the rain.
I didn't look back then either.
So I don't pray to God.
I pray to him.
Come for me.
Then do whatever you want to them.