17. The Third Pew
THE THIRD PEW
EMILIA
Tonight, I find out what I look like dead, and my first note is that the blood is wrong.
"It's pooling uphill," I tell them, lying flat on the safe house floor, a wig from a costume shop dampening my hairline. "Blood obeys gravity. I researched this for book two, Chapter Seven, and if I caught it, Gianna catches it. Tilt the floor or move the wound."
Above me, Tommy looks at Leo with an expression I can read upside down. "She's art-directing her own murder."
"She's right," Leo answers grimly, kneeling to adjust the spatter with a painter's focus.
There's something almost unbearable about how steady his hands are, while his jaw isn't. He arranges me like evidence, his fingers cold against my neck, and looks away first when our eyes meet.
Can stage anything, this man. Just can't watch himself do it to me.
With the photograph, Tommy carries it out the door at 11:40 p.m., ahead of Gianna's midnight.
We buy time, not safety. Gianna will want paperwork next, a coroner's intake.
We get, at most, days from the lie. But days are what we need, because spread across the floor behind us, in pencil, paperback, and twenty years of buried memory, is a map to the thing everyone is killing for.
We work through the night. The work looks like this: my six novels open on the floorboards, his intelligence maps taped to the wall.
At the center, I pin my mother's photograph, the first decoration this room has ever had.
I read my passages aloud, let the memories come, and Leo sits across from me with a legal pad, catching what falls.
It hurts in a manner I don't have clean words for. Some passages are only words. Others are doors.
The garden paragraph in book one is a door.
Night jasmine, a stone wall, and the smell arrive whole.
My body, nine years old, is barefoot on flagstones the rational part of me has never touched.
I sway where I sit. His hand closes around my ankle, steady and wordless, and holds on until I find my way back into the present tense.
"The smell came first," I manage. "Then her voice, somewhere to my left. She was always to my left out there."
"Cecilia planted that jasmine the year you were born." His voice drops to a whisper. "Massimo tried to have it pulled out after she ran. The groundskeeper refused. He said some things in that house belonged to the signora, the lady, no matter who paid him."
I write that down myself in the margin of my novel, next to a paragraph I can no longer call fiction.
There was another voice in the garden, to my right, while hers was to my left. I don't remember the words, just the timbre, low and patient, a voice that wouldn't startle a child. I write it in the margin and keep going.
By 4 a.m., we have three locations, and I found each on my own page.
A church in Brooklyn, from book three: the cracked pew, the bell tower, the one Leo's margin note named months ago.
Then, a bank in Connecticut, from book five, the scene reviewers called my most atmospheric, a cold room with numbered walls that turns out to be a child's memory of a safety deposit vault.
And the wine cellar of the Severino estate, from book four: the hidden room behind the racks I was so proud to invent, down to the sweating stone and a door that opens to a sequence of bottles.
"Two of these we can reach." Leo taps Brooklyn, then Connecticut.
His finger stops over Greenwich and stays there.
"The third is the hardest ground in the family.
Gianna lives at the estate now. She installed herself as your stepfather's caretaker two years ago, which means she controls the gates, the staff, the visitors, and the version of reality the old man lives in.
Nobody enters that property without her arranging the welcome. "
The word stepfather hangs in the air between us. What my mother told me was a story I've carried for twenty years without examining the joints.
"Then we start with the church." I'm already reaching for my coat. "Tonight. Now, before the photograph stops working."
"I'll go," he counters. "You'll stay with Tommy, behind steel, while I…"
"No." It comes out harder than I mean it to, or exactly as hard as I mean it to.
"Read my face, Leo, you're good at that.
I'm not your asset, not a civilian you're protecting.
My mother hid something in that church with her own hands.
Whatever it is, she left it for hands like hers.
" I hold his stare. "I'm going to be the one who finds it. "
For a moment, the fixer and the man fight it out behind his eyes, and I watch the man win. I bank the image for later.
"Then we go together," he concedes. "You do exactly as I say until we're inside. After that," his mouth tips, almost a smile, "you outrank me. It's your mother's church."
Saint Agnes sits on a corner in Carroll Gardens, its brownstone and copper gone green, older than the houses that crowd it. Leo picks the side-door lock in nine unhurried seconds while Tommy idles a block south. We step inside, and the smell hits me at the threshold.
Wax, stone, old incense, and beneath it, something my body answers before my brain does.
My knees weaken. I wrote this smell, gave it to a fictional church in book three, and a reviewer praised my imagination.
It was never imagination. Sunday mornings, her hand around mine in the dark of this exact nave.
"Third pew," I whisper, not knowing I'm going to say it until it's said.
We walk up the side aisle, our footsteps soft on the stone, the only light the red sanctuary lamp and the streetlight bleeding through the stained glass.
The third pew on the left has a crack along the seat, a long, dark seam worn smooth at the edges.
In book three, I gave that crack to a pew where my heroine hid a letter.
I remember thinking, where did that come from, what a strange, specific detail, and writing it anyway because it felt true.
Sitting in it, my body knows this seat: its height, its give, the cold of the wood through my coat.
"She used to whisper here." My fingers find the crack and follow it, the wood warm under my hand, just as her hand was warm. "I thought it was praying. It wasn't praying."
The memory comes up slowly, like something surfacing from deep water, her perfume, her mouth at my ear, her voice pitched beneath the organ. "She said, if anything ever happens to me, remember the third pew."
The sentence rests in the empty church.
I'm not in the pew anymore. White dress, legs dangling because they don't touch the floor.
My mother leans toward me, her mouth at my ear, telling me something I can use someday, calmly, as if she's teaching me a phone number.
I was five. My head drops forward, just an inch, just enough. "I thought it was a game."
Then I'm finally crying, without sound, without permission, my shoulders not even moving, just the heat going down my face onto the back of my hand.
She had to teach me that. Had to teach a five-year-old that, under organ music, to be calm because she already knew.
I had to put it in a novel twenty years later because some part of me never put it down.
Leo doesn't speak. He doesn't reach for me.
His hand rests on the pew beside mine, palm down, close enough that I could put my hand on top of his if I wanted.
The choice he leaves me with is its own kind of love.
I leave my hand where it is. He leaves his where it is.
We breathe in the same air for a little while.
"I never once asked myself why." My voice has been through something now.
Leo crouches in the aisle, watching me with an expression I've never seen on any of his faces, something stripped and reverent, the precise coordinates where his two worlds intersect.
"Under the seat," he murmurs. "Check the underside."
My fingers trace the wood beneath the pew and find it almost at once: a panel, hand-fitted, swollen with decades yet loose enough to move.
More than twenty years ago, a young woman knelt in this exact place with a screwdriver in her purse, a daughter beside her in a white dress.
She did this work while others prayed. The thought lands harder than I'm ready for.
I work the panel free with both hands, and behind it, taped into the cavity, I find a package wrapped in oilcloth, the tape gone amber with age.
Twenty years. It sat here through twenty years of Sundays, three feet below the congregation, while my mother served coffee at a diner two states away, checked the locks twice, and never told me why.
She did the work and left the answer, trusting that twenty years of strangers' knees would not find it, because she trusted me to come back.
A piece of me, older than I knew, goes still in honor of that.
Beside me, Leo lets out a breath I didn't realize he’d been holding.
Inside the oilcloth: a small brass key with a number stamped on its head and a sealed envelope, with my mother's handwriting on the front. One word. Not my name now, and not my cover name.
Emilia.
I cannot move for a long moment. My mother's hand was here. The ink flowed from her pen, the strokes from her wrist. That curve at the end of the 'a' matches my own writing, though I don't know where I learned it. She set down the pen, licked the seal, and handed it to a twenty-year-old.
I touch the ink with one fingertip, as gently as touching a face in a casket, to be sure.
Somewhere in the room behind my eyes, a voice I now know how to follow begins the lullaby Leo gave me an hour ago. This time, the whole song, not just the two lines my mind kept from me since the day she went into the ground.
Stella stellina, la notte si avvicina. My mother singing me to sleep from the only place she still lives.