The Listener in the Loft

PROLOGUE

THE LOFT

POV: LUCIEN

I’m in the choir loft of St. Anselm at two in the morning, and the girl below me is lighting a candle she can’t afford.

A dollar a votive. The sign is hand-lettered and taped to the iron rack, and she reads it every night like it might have changed. Then she lights one anyway, drops a quarter in the brass box, and whispers an apology to the saint.

I’ve been paying the other seventy-five cents for three years.

She doesn’t know that.

She doesn’t know a lot of things.

She doesn’t know that on Tuesday I bought her father’s debt from a bookie in Gretna for thirty cents on the dollar, and that Gus Arceneaux now owes three hundred and eighty thousand dollars to me.

She doesn’t know that on Wednesday I bought the building she sleeps in. The laundromat, the four rooms above it, the rusted fire escape outside her window. The letter ending her lease is already printed. It goes under her door tomorrow.

She doesn’t know that the bed her mother has slept in for three years, in the quiet wing of St. Clement’s, is paid for by a parish fund with exactly one donor.

She thinks God is punishing her.

God has nothing to do with it.

The loft is black. Nobody has sung up here since the diocese cut the choir, and the organ pipes stand behind me like a row of dead men. Dust. Beeswax. A century of incense soaked into the wood.

Below, Noelle moves down the rack with the long-necked lighter, one flame at a time.

Her father’s coat hangs to her knees. Her hair is twisted up and stabbed through with a charcoal pencil, and there’s a gray smudge on her cheek where she wiped it without thinking. She’s been on her knees scrubbing the aisle since eleven. She’s so tired she sways.

Twenty-three years old. Forty-one dollars in the bank.

Mine in every way but one.

I roll a bead of my mother’s rosary under my thumb and watch her.

The west door groans.

She turns. So do I.

A man stumbles in off the street with Bourbon Street still shining on him. Loud shirt. Plastic go-cup. He sees the candles, and then he sees her, and his whole face changes.

“Well, hey there, church girl.”

“We’re closed,” she says.

“Door was open.”

“It’s always open. You still have to leave.”

He laughs and comes down the aisle anyway. She doesn’t back up. I like that about her. I hate it about her. She holds the lighter at her side and waits.

“Just want to light one for my mama.”

“Dollar.”

“Don’t have a dollar.” He’s close now. Close enough to wrap his hand around her wrist, and he does. “Maybe you could spot me.”

She doesn’t scream.

She clicks the lighter and drives the flame into the back of his hand.

He howls. The go-cup hits the floor and rolls under a pew, bleeding something red across the stone. “Crazy bitch—”

“Get out.”

He goes, cradling the hand, cursing her all the way to the door. It bangs shut behind him.

She stands alone in the candlelight, shaking so hard the flame in her fist jumps.

I’m already on the back stairs.

The side door lets out into the alley between the church and the old rectory wall. Wet brick. Piss. The river. He’s bent over by the drain, sucking the burn, muttering about lawyers.

He never hears me.

My palm goes over his mouth. My other hand goes to the side of his head, and I turn it. Hard. There’s a sound like a green branch breaking. He folds into the wet leaves like a dropped coat.

I look down at him for as long as it takes to be sure.

Then I take out my phone.

“Alley behind St. Anselm,” I tell Bastien. “He fell. Drunk. Cracked his head on the curb.”

“Understood.”

I go back up the stairs.

Four minutes. She’s still at the rack. She hasn’t lit the last candle. She’s staring at the door he went through, rubbing her wrist where he held it, and I feel that touch on her skin as if it were on mine. I’d kill him again if I could.

She turns and looks up.

Straight at the loft.

She can’t see me. There’s no light up here, and I don’t move. But she looks at the exact place I’m standing, the way she has for months, and something in her face opens.

“I know you’re there,” she says to the dark. Her voice is small in the big stone room. “I’m not crazy.”

I don’t breathe.

“If you’re real—” She stops. Swallows. Her fingers go to the bare hollow of her throat. “Come down. I’d let you.”

Every muscle in my body goes to the stairs.

I stay.

Not tonight. Tonight she walks home alone for the last time, through streets I’ve paid for, to a room I own, and she sleeps without knowing she’s been heard.

She lights the last candle. Drops her quarter. Whispers sorry to the saint.

Then she’s gone, and the west door sighs shut behind her.

I come down the aisle to the rack. Her flame is the newest, still reaching. I step over the red smear on the stone, fold a hundred into the brass box, and pinch her candle out between two fingers.

She won’t need to pray to anyone else.

Enjoy your last night of freedom, lamb.

Tomorrow, you’ll wear me around your throat.