CHAPTER 2
THE FONT
POV: RONAN
I know because I watch it climb.
Under the number, the thermal feed from the smoke detector in her ceiling. Beside it, the camera in the streetlamp across Adams Street that I paid the city to upgrade in September.
Three angles. One woman.
Mine.
I don’t touch myself while I watch her. I don’t need to. I sit in the leather chair with my elbows on my knees and my mother’s rosary wrapped around my fist until the beads bite, and I watch Magdalene Holloway come apart in my veil.
When she presses her palm to the window, I stop breathing.
Down in the car, Theo flashed the lights twice. My order. Anything more and I’d have been down there myself, and she isn’t ready for that.
Tomorrow she will be.
Now it’s 11:47. She’s asleep. Fifty-eight beats a minute. Veil still on, pooled across the pillow like spilled ink. Ring still on her finger.
She didn’t take anything off.
I lean back and let the chair creak.
My grandfather called this room the wine cellar. I gutted it the week I buried my mother. Now it’s concrete and steel, nine screens, a server rack humming against the far wall, and a corkboard no one sees but Theo.
Two years of her are pinned to it.
The soup kitchen. The pharmacy. The bus stop on Dorchester Avenue where she waits for the 17 with her collar turned up. Her twenty-second birthday, eating the corner piece of a cake she thinks came from a parishioner.
Every one of those moments, someone was with her.
Me.
Everything that keeps her alive runs through something I own.
The bank that holds the mortgage on St. Agnes.
The company that won the roof, the boiler, the new rail in the choir loft, three shells deep under my name.
Mother Clare knows exactly who the anonymous donor is and has the good sense never to say it out loud.
The Archdiocese of Boston thinks I’m a philanthropist.
The Archdiocese of Boston is wrong about a lot of things.
The door at the top of the stairs opens. Heavy tread. Theo doesn’t knock. He’s the only one who doesn’t have to.
“Speak,” I say.
“You’re going to hate this.”
“I hate most things. Speak.”
Theo comes down into the light. Thirty-three, blond, the face of a choirboy and the hands of a longshoreman. Snow melts on the shoulders of his coat.
He holds out his phone.
“Frank Holloway surfaced. Kavanagh card game at the Ironside, tonight. Lost eleven grand in forty minutes.”
“With what money?”
“Exactly.” Theo’s jaw flexes. “He was playing on a marker. Conor’s cousin asked what he was putting up. Frank said—” He stops.
“Say it.”
“He said, ‘The girl in the convent. She’s legal, she’s clean, and she’s still mine to give.’”
The room goes very quiet.
The server fans hum. On the screen, Mae turns in her sleep. Her hand slides off the pillow, and the gold catches the streetlight.
I set the rosary on the steel desk. Carefully. So I don’t break it.
“Where is he now?”
“Gone. Out the back before our guy got to him. We’re looking.”
“Look harder.”
“There’s more.”
Of course there is.
Theo swipes to the next screen. A column of numbers. “Our friend at Eastern Bank flagged these last week. Twenty-five hundred a month for fourteen months, from a Kavanagh laundry front into a personal account.”
“Whose?”
“Monsignor Gerald Albright.”
I look at the name for a long time.
“And the office. Tuesdays.”
Theo nods once. “The Holy Rood rectory backs onto an alley. No cameras. The Kavanaghs have used it twice that we know of to move girls. He gets her alone in that office Tuesday night, and Wednesday morning she’s on a boat.”
Tuesday nights. My office. Just you and me.
His knuckle on her jaw.
God bless you, Monsignor.
She blessed him. She blessed the man who was going to sell her.
“Boss?”
I stand.
I take my coat off the back of the chair and shrug it on. I pull my gloves from the pocket.
“Where is he?”
“Albright? Rectory. He counts the collection alone on Monday nights. Likes to—” Theo tips an invisible bottle.
“Get the car.”
“You want me to bring a couple of—”
“No.”
Theo looks at me. Eleven years. He knows what that no means.
“Clean or loud?”
“Clean.” I take the rosary off the desk and wrap it around my hand. “He’s a man of God. Let God find him.”
***
Holy Rood is a squat brick church in Brighton with a potholed lot and a rectory that leans against it like a drunk against a bar.
The side door isn’t locked. He thinks he’s the only predator in the building.
I find him in the baptistry.
It’s a small round room off the nave, lit by one lamp. The font stands in the center: gray marble, waist high, wide enough to dunk a baby, full of water blessed at last year’s Easter Vigil.
Albright sits on the step beside it with the collection bags open at his feet and a bottle of altar wine between his knees. Collar unbuttoned. Cheeks red.
He’s counting twenties into a stack.
“Monsignor.”
He jumps so hard the bottle rolls. Wine spreads across the tile like a wound.
“Who— this church is closed. How did you—”
“Door was open.” I step into the light. “You should be more careful. Bad people everywhere.”
He sees the coat. The gloves. My face.
He knows my face. Everyone in this diocese who takes money knows my face.
“Mr. Draven.” He tries to stand and doesn’t quite manage it. “What a surprise. Is this about the roof? Because the Archbishop’s office—”
“It’s about a postulant at St. Agnes.”
The color leaves him all at once.
“I’m not sure who—”
“Magdalene Holloway. Twenty-two. You touched her face tonight after vespers.”
“I counsel a great many young—”
“You told her to come to your office on Tuesday.”
“Her father asked me to help her!”
“Her father offered her at a card table three hours ago.” I take another step. “To the same men who’ve been paying you twenty-five hundred a month for fourteen months.”
His mouth opens.
Nothing comes out.
“So I’ll ask once, Monsignor.” I let the rosary swing from my fingers, black beads catching the lamplight. “How many?”
“How many what?”
“Girls. Through that back office. To the boats. How many?”
He starts to cry. It’s an ugly sound, wet and high. “I’m a man of God. You can’t— I’m a man of God—”
“Then He knows the number. I wanted to hear you say it.”
He lunges for the door.
He’s old and drunk and slow, and I catch him by the back of the collar without trying. He’s heavier than he looks. Soft. I walk him backward three steps and bend him over the rim of the font.
“Please— I’ll leave— I’ll never go near her, I swear to—”
“Don’t,” I say. “Not in here.”
I push his face into the water.
He fights. They always fight. His hands slap at the marble, at my sleeves, at nothing. Holy water sloshes over the rim and soaks my shoes. Bubbles break the surface in a silver stream, then smaller, then slower.
I hold him there and think about his knuckle on her jaw.
I think about her whispering God bless you because nobody ever taught her she was allowed to say no.
I think about a boat.
When he stops moving, I count to sixty anyway.
Then I lift him out and lay him on the tile beside his spilled wine and his open bags, face down, one arm under him. A drunk old man who slipped on a wet floor. I knock his temple once against the edge of the marble step so the story holds.
I pick a single twenty off the stack, fold it, and tuck it in his breast pocket.
Boat fare.
At the door I look back. Water drips off the rim of the font. The lamp hums. The blessed water is still rocking in the basin, a little slower each time.
I push a bead along the cord.
One.
***
In the car, Theo doesn’t ask. He never asks. He hands me a towel for my sleeves and pulls onto Washington Street.
I take out my phone.
She’s still asleep. Fifty-six beats a minute. Veil still on.
In the corner of the frame, her breviary sits on the chair, spine up, one corner hanging over the edge.
“Mother Clare,” I say.
Theo’s eyes find mine in the mirror. “It’s one in the morning.”
“She’s up for Lauds at five. Call her at five-oh-one. Tell her the benefactor has concerns about the books. Tell her he wants to review them in person. Today.”
“And if she asks why?”
“Tell her St. Agnes closes in January unless he’s satisfied.” I watch Mae’s hand curl on the pillow, the gold bright against the white. “And tell her he’d like the postulant who keeps them to deliver them herself.”
Theo’s mouth twitches. “Just the books.”
“Just the books.”
“Boss.”
“What.”
“Once she walks into that office, she doesn’t walk out the same.”
I watch the lace rise and fall with her breathing.
Two years I’ve kept her behind walls I built and let her believe they were God’s. Two years I’ve been the car at the curb, the heat in the pipes, the cake in the kitchen.
Tonight a man tried to sell her through a back door.
Tonight she put her palm on the glass for me.
“No,” I agree. “She doesn’t.”
I turn the phone face down on my knee.
“Tomorrow, her walls come down.”