CHAPTER 8
THE CRYPT
POV: RONAN
Theo sets her phone on the breakfast table beside my plate.
Cracked screen. Drugstore case with a plastic daisy glued to the back. Thirty-eight dollars and forty cents behind a passcode she’s used since she was fifteen: her mother’s birthday, backward.
“Off the windowsill in her cell,” he says. “Figured she’d want it.”
“She won’t get it.”
“Figured that too.” He pours his own coffee. He’s the only man alive who does that in my house. “The thin one’s awake.”
“And?”
“And he talks when he’s scared, and he’s very scared. Frank’s holed up at Conor’s cousin’s place in Quincy. And Conor wasn’t happy about the chapel. It was supposed to be quiet. In and out. Nobody was supposed to get shot.”
“Somebody always gets shot.”
“That’s what I told him.”
“Where is he?”
“Boiler room at the Seaport. Zip ties. Blanket.” Theo shrugs. “I gave him a sandwich.”
“Keep him breathing.” I turn her phone over in my hand. The daisy is chipped. “For now.”
Theo glances at the ceiling, at the stairs beyond the kitchen door, where footsteps are coming down. “Want me gone?”
“Yes.”
He takes his coffee with him.
She comes in thirty seconds later.
She’s in her own gray cardigan, the darned elbow, buttoned over a black sweater from the closet I know she didn’t want to take. Gray wool trousers. Hair down again. The bruise on her throat has gone the color of a plum, and she hasn’t covered it.
She sees the phone before she sees me.
“That’s mine.”
“It was.”
“Give it to me.”
“Sit.”
She doesn’t. She stands at the end of the table with her hands in fists at her sides and looks at me the way she looked at me in the office. Like she’s deciding whether to throw something.
I let her decide.
She sits.
Rosa sets a plate in front of her. Eggs. Toast. A pear sliced thin and fanned the way she used to cut them for herself on Sunday nights in the convent kitchen, when she thought nobody was watching.
She looks at the pear. Her lips part.
She doesn’t ask. She eats a slice.
“Rules,” I say.
She swallows. “You have rules.”
“Four.”
“Only four?”
“Four you’ll hear. The rest you’ll learn by breaking them.”
She puts the fork down. “Go on.”
“You don’t leave this house without Theo.”
“And if Theo’s busy?”
“Then you don’t leave this house.”
Her chin sets. “Two.”
“You eat what’s put in front of you. All of it.”
She looks at the plate. At the pear. Back at me.
“Three.”
“The curtains in your room stay open.”
“Why?”
“I like the light.”
She hears the lie. I watch her hear it. She doesn’t know what it’s covering yet, so she lets it pass.
“Four,” she says.
“The door between our rooms is mine.”
“I noticed.”
“Remember it.”
She folds her hands on the table. It’s a convent gesture. She doesn’t know she does it.
“And if I break one?”
“You won’t like what happens.”
“You don’t know what I like.”
The kitchen goes quiet. At the stove, Rosa stops moving.
I lean back in my chair.
“I know exactly what you like, Magdalene,” I say. “I watched you learn it.”
The color comes up her neck so fast it covers the bruise.
She picks the fork back up. Her hand isn’t steady. She eats another slice of pear like it’s a penance.
“I need to call someone,” she says to the plate.
“Who?”
She opens her mouth.
Nothing comes out.
Her father’s number has been disconnected since Monday. Sister Bernadette doesn’t own a phone. The girls she went to Catholic school with stopped texting the year she moved into St. Agnes.
She knows it, too. I watch her go down the list in her head and come up empty.
“You can’t keep me from everyone,” she says.
“There isn’t anyone.”
It lands. I meant it to.
Her eyes go bright. She doesn’t cry. She lifts her chin.
“There’s God.”
“He’s welcome to visit.” I stand and button my jacket. “Finish your breakfast. Then I’ll show you something.”
***
The door to the Crypt is behind the pantry, where my grandfather kept his wine.
Steel now. No handle. A pad of black glass at chest height.
She watches me press my thumb to it.
“Does everything in this house open for your thumb?”
“Everything that matters.”
The lock releases with a heavy sound, like a vault. Cold air comes up the stairs, dry and humming.
“After you, dove.”
She hesitates on the top step. I watch her calculate. The stairs. The dark. The man behind her.
She goes down.
At the bottom she stops so suddenly I almost walk into her.
Nine screens.
They glow on the far wall in three rows of three, blue and gray and green. The server rack hums against the left wall. The leather chair sits in front of the desk where I leave it every night.
She doesn’t look at the chair.
She looks at the screens.
Top row: the front steps of this house. The kitchen, where Rosa is wiping down the counter. The garage.
Middle row: Adams Street, snowy and gray. The chapel at St. Agnes, empty, candles out. A cell on the third floor of the east wing. An iron bed stripped to the mattress. Three white veils folded on a shelf. A blind, up.
Bottom row, center screen.
A bedroom. Carved headboard. White sheets, still tangled. A black nightgown folded across the foot of the bed where I left it.
Her bedroom.
She makes a sound. Small. Like something stepped on.
“You put cameras in my room.”
“In both your rooms.”
“Upstairs.”
“Yes.”
“Last night.”
“Yes.”
Her hand goes to her throat. To the bite.
“After you left,” she says. “I—”
“You pulled the veil over your face at eleven fifty-two,” I say. “You didn’t sleep until two-ten. You said my name once, around one.”
She turns around.
Her face is white except for two hot spots on her cheeks. Her eyes are enormous. For a second I think she’s going to hit me, and I think I’ll let her.
“Monday,” she whispers.
She means the window. The veil. The bed. Her own hand.
“Yes.”
“You watched.”
“Every second.”
She should run. I watch her think it. I watch her look at the stairs.
Then I watch her remember that the door at the top of them opens for my thumb.
She doesn’t run.
She turns back around, slowly, to the last wall.
The corkboard.
I built it for no one. Nobody sees it but Theo, and Theo doesn’t look.
She looks.
Two years of her, pinned in rows.
The soup kitchen. The bus stop on Dorchester Avenue, collar up. The CVS line, a jar of vanilla hand cream in her hand. The laundry room window from the alley, steam and a white veil. A kitchen at midnight, a paring knife, a pear. The corner piece of a birthday cake on a chipped plate.
A girl on the front steps of St. Agnes with one suitcase on a November afternoon, looking up at the door like it might not open.
She stops at that one for a long time.
She moves along the row. Slowly. Her finger doesn’t touch the prints. It hovers an inch away, the way you’d point at something in a museum.
It stops at the bus stop.
November. Her collar up. Beside her on the bench, half out of the frame, a man in a gray parka, reading a paper.
“He sat next to me,” she says. “Every morning. For a week. He always had a paper. He never turned the pages.”
“No.”
“Then he stopped coming.”
“Yes.”
She turns her head and looks at me.
“Where is he?”
“Worcester.”
“Is he alive?”
“He’s in Worcester,” I say.
She looks at me a long moment. Then back at the wall.
The CVS line. A man two places behind her, too close, his eyes on the back of her neck.
“And him?”
“He lost his license. He doesn’t drive past St. Agnes anymore.”
The laundry window from the alley. A shadow at the edge of the frame, under the fire escape.
“Him?”
“He was the first,” I say. “He doesn’t do anything anymore.”
She doesn’t ask what that means.
She stands in front of two years of her own life and looks at every man at the edges of every picture, and I watch her count them. Her lips move. Latin.
“Eleven,” she says finally.
“Twelve. One isn’t on the wall.”
“Why not?”
“Because I didn’t want to look at him.”
She’s quiet.
“I never saw any of them,” she whispers. “I never knew.”
“You weren’t supposed to.”
Then her eyes move to the top right corner.
The newest print. Monday night. Taken from the streetlamp across Adams Street.
A window. A black veil. A woman’s palm pressed flat to the glass.
She lifts her hand and touches the edge of the photograph with one finger.
“You were the car,” she says.
“Sometimes. Sometimes Theo.”
“And you watched me through the—” She gestures at the screens, the corkboard, all of it. “All of this.”
“Yes.”
She’s quiet a long time. Behind us, the servers hum. On the bottom center screen, her empty bed.
“How long,” she says, “has the car been there?”
“Two years.”
She doesn’t run.
She reaches up and straightens the photograph I pinned crooked.