CHAPTER 5
NOT ANYMORE
POV: MAE
Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace—
Nine of us are in the choir stalls. Mother Clare is at the chancery downtown, answering questions about a dead monsignor. Sister Bernadette is beside me, flat and loud and half a beat behind, the way she always sings.
The singing stops.
Two men walk down the center aisle. Wool coats. Snow on the shoulders. One is big, head shaved to the skin, a Bruins scarf around his neck. The other is thin and twitchy and keeps his hands in his pockets.
They smell like beer and diesel. In seconds the whole chapel smells like it.
“Evening, Sisters,” the big one says. “Which one of you’s Holloway?”
Nobody answers.
My heart does something strange. It doesn’t race. It goes slow and heavy, like it’s counting.
Unus. Duo.
“This is a house of God,” Bernadette says. She doesn’t stand. She doesn’t need to. “You’ll take your hats off in it.”
“I’m not wearing a hat, Grandma.”
“Then take your head off.”
The thin one laughs. The big one doesn’t. He walks to the choir stall and puts his hand on Bernadette’s shoulder and shoves, hard, and she’s seventy-three, and she goes sideways into the pew with a sound I’ll hear for the rest of my life.
I stand up.
“I’m Holloway.”
The big man looks at me. Up and down, slow, the way Albright did. Veil. Collar. Hands.
He smiles.
“Frank says hi.”
***
He takes my arm above the elbow and walks me into the sacristy like we’re going somewhere together.
The thin one stays in the chapel. I hear Bernadette swearing at him. I hear him tell her to shut up.
The sacristy is small and cold and smells like old incense and furniture polish. Cabinets for vestments. A sink for the chalices. The shelf where we keep the candle snuffers, long brass poles with little bells on the ends.
He shuts the door with his heel.
“Your old man owes a lot of money,” he says. “You know that?”
“I don’t have any money.”
“Everybody says that.” He pushes me back until the vestment press hits my spine. “Frank says you’re the down payment. Says you’re clean. Says the church kept you nice.”
His hand comes up to my veil. He pulls. The pins tear out of my hair and the white cotton comes away in his fist.
“Let’s see what nice looks like.”
His other hand closes on my throat.
Not hard. Not yet. Just enough that I feel how big it is. How easy.
I think of Albright’s knuckle on my jaw. The man in the soup line with his thumb on my wrist. My father at the kitchen table, not looking at me.
Every man who ever put a hand on me and waited for me to say God bless you.
My hand finds the shelf behind me.
Brass. Cold. Heavy.
I don’t say God bless you.
I swing.
The snuffer catches him across the cheekbone with a crack like a dropped plate. The little bell on the end jingles. He staggers sideways, roaring, one hand clapped over his eye, and blood leaks out between his fingers.
“You fucking—”
He comes back at me with his fist already swinging—
The sound is smaller than I expect. A cough. Like a book dropped flat on a table.
The big man’s head jerks sideways.
Then he isn’t a man anymore. He’s only weight. He folds onto the marble in front of the vestment press, and something dark spreads out from under him across the white stone, and some of it is on my shoes.
Some of it is on my face.
I can feel it. Warm. Running.
In the doorway, a gun lowers.
Black, long-barreled, thicker at the end than guns in movies. A black leather glove around it.
Ronan Draven steps into the sacristy and closes the door behind him.
He doesn’t look at the dead man. He looks at me.
“Magdalene.”
I can’t answer. The snuffer is still in my hand. The bell on it is still jingling, very softly, because my hand won’t stop shaking.
He crosses the room. The gun disappears somewhere inside his coat. He takes the snuffer out of my fingers the way you’d take a knife from a child and sets it on the counter by the chalice sink.
Then he takes my face in both gloved hands.
“Look at me.”
I look. The scar. The gray eyes, darker in this light, almost black.
“Did he hurt you?”
“I hit him.”
“I saw.”
Something moves at the corner of his mouth. It isn’t a smile. It’s worse. It’s pride.
His thumb wipes across my cheekbone and comes away red. He looks at the blood on the leather for a second, then wipes it on his own coat like it’s nothing.
“You were outside,” I say. My voice sounds far away.
“I’m always outside.”
From the chapel comes a thump, a short cry, the scrape of something heavy being dragged. Then the blond man’s voice, calm: “Sister, I’m going to need you to step back.” And Bernadette’s: “I’ll step where I like, young man.”
Ronan doesn’t turn his head.
His hands move down from my face to my throat. He tips my chin up with two fingers and looks at the skin there, where the big man’s hand was.
It’s red. I can feel it. Four fingers and a thumb.
His face doesn’t change, exactly. It goes still. The way a pond goes still right before the ice cracks.
“Here?” he asks.
I nod.
He bends his head.
I think he’s going to kiss me. I’m braced for it. I’ve been braced for it since the office, since the glove, since the thumb on my lip.
He doesn’t kiss me.
He sets his mouth on my throat, right over the marks, and bites.
Hard. Teeth. Enough to hurt. Enough that I gasp and my hands fly up to his chest to shove him off—
And grab his coat instead.
And pull.
I pull him closer. His teeth sink one fraction deeper, and a sound comes out of me that has no business in a sacristy. His hand spreads flat at the small of my back and holds me against him. I can feel how hard he is through his coat. I don’t let go.
When he lifts his head, the skin on my throat throbs like a second heartbeat.
“Now it’s mine,” he says against my ear. “Not his. Mine.”
He steps back. Straightens his coat. Looks at me standing there with a dead man at my feet, my veil in the blood, and his teeth in my neck.
“You’re not staying here tonight.”
“This is my home.”
“Not anymore.”
***
The door opens behind him.
Sister Bernadette stands there with one hand pressed to her hip where she hit the pew, her glasses crooked, a red mark coming up on her cheekbone. She looks at the body. She looks at the blood. She looks at Ronan.
Then she looks at me.
I wait for her to scream. To pray. To call the police.
She crosses herself once, briskly, the way she does before she starts the mangle. Then she steps over the dead man’s legs, holding her skirt up out of the blood, and comes to me and puts something in my hands.
My breviary. Cracked spine. Everything tucked between Compline and the Psalms.
“You’ll want your prayers,” she says.
“Sister, I—”
“Hush.” She pats my cheek, the clean one. Then she turns and looks up at Ronan, all four foot eleven of her. “If you hurt this girl, I’ll know.”
He inclines his head. He actually inclines it. “Sister.”
“I bite,” she reminds him.
“So does she,” Ronan says.
***
He won’t let me go back for anything.
“Everything you need is already at the house.”
“My veil.”
He stops in the hallway. “It’s in the blood.”
“Not that one.” I hold his gaze. “Yours.”
For a long moment, he says nothing.
“Thirty seconds,” he says.
I run.
Up the back stairs, third floor, fourth door. My hand on the brass. It turns under my thumb the way it has every night this week, smooth and certain.
The cell already looks smaller. The iron bed. The crucifix. The jar of hand cream.
I don’t take the hand cream.
I take the black box from under my pillow. The lace inside it. The cream card with three words. I leave my white veils folded on the shelf, three of them, starched and perfect.
I don’t pull the blind.
When I come back down, he’s waiting at the bottom of the stairs with his hand held out. I don’t take his hand. He takes my wrist instead. His thumb settles on the inside of it, right over my pulse, and presses there, like he’s reminding someone whose it is.
We go out the side door into the snow.
The black car idles at the curb. The blond man holds the rear door. Ronan puts me in and gets in after me, and the locks thunk, and the smell of cedar and candle wax closes around me like a coat.
The car pulls away.
I twist in my seat.
The last thing I see of St. Agnes is my own window on the third floor. Blind up. Lamp off.
Nobody behind the glass.