The Cloisters(65)

“You haven’t, have you? Now that you’re thinking about it. Who did she ever introduce you to? No one, right?”

“Why does that matter?”

“Because,” he said, his hands flung wide, “someone did it. Someone here killed him. Someone who is walking through the museum right now. You, me, Rachel, Moira. And you’re refusing to see it.”

It was a reality I wasn’t prepared to face, because if I did, it would only mean one thing: more loss. And so, I had rationalized it. Compartmentalized. I hadn’t, until then, at least, been willing to see Patrick’s death as murder. Even through the questioning and the evidence, I had continued to believe there was another alternative, another fate that waited for Patrick. I rose from the bench and walked to where Leo stood.

“I have to get through this,” I said quietly. “I can’t quit. Not now.”

He reached out and touched a strand of my hair, his calloused knuckles brushing against my neck as he did it. I looked up at him, willing him to lean down and kiss me. I wanted to take comfort in him, in something that seemed to be stable in a world that kept shifting around me. A world that, he was right, I couldn’t see as completely as I wanted to.

“Ann,” he said. “I hope you’re clever enough to survive this.”

Behind us, the door to the gallery groaned open. I could hear her shoes before I heard her voice.

“We should go,” said Rachel. “Ann?”

“Ann and I were just discussing getting some dinner. Weren’t we?”

I nodded, my face still upturned at Leo, my back to Rachel. The silence was tense, and I rolled the words I wanted to say around in my mouth until I felt sure of them.

“I think I’m going to spend the night with Leo,” I said, still looking up at him.

“What?”

I turned to face Rachel. She looked fragile and washed out. Her dress, I noticed for the first time, hung awkwardly off the boniest parts of her body—her shoulders and her clavicle, her hip bones that jutted through. It was the way grief had looked on me. I didn’t know when she had become even thinner, but I saw it then, her body framed between the wooden statues of Joan of Arc and Saint Ursula.

“I’m going to get dinner with Leo,” I said again. “If you don’t mind, that is.”

“Of course I don’t mind.” Her arms were crossed. “We all make our own decisions.”

For a minute I doubted what I was doing and said, “Do you want me to come—”

“No,” she said before I could finish. “I don’t.”

She turned to leave, but when she reached the door that would take her out to the Bonnefont Cloister and the sun, just set below the horizon, she turned back and said, “Careful, Ann. The top of the wheel is a scary place to be.”

The door closed behind her.

“What did she mean by that?” Leo asked.

“Nothing,” I said, but as we walked through the galleries, I couldn’t help but take one last look at the wheel of fortune and the figures lashed to it. Rachel’s words burned in my mind.





CHAPTER NINETEEN


I met Laure downtown on a cramped side street where neat rows of brick apartment buildings blocked out the morning sun. The breakfast counter was tastefully finished with black and white hexagonal tiles and mirrors in oil-rubbed bronze frames, glossy wood tables accompanied by leather chairs. Plates piled with thick slices of toast and fried eggs were delivered to waiting diners, and I scanned the room for Laure before spotting her on a stool at the bar that faced the street, where walkers and cars combined to create the tissue of the day.

After a gig in Red Hook, Leo had invited me to spend the night, but I hadn’t had time to wash my hair. The smell of stale cigarettes still clung to my clothes—the same clothes I had worn in the wings of the stage, watching other acts prepare for their turn. Rushing out the door to meet Laure, I had pulled my hair back into a ponytail, my curls limp; I hadn’t wanted to brush them out. I wanted to remember the way Leo had wound them around his index finger before pulling them. Before telling me I was coming home with him—it was never a question.

Leo and I hadn’t talked about what we were doing, and sometimes I wondered if he had other women on other nights in the same bed. But it was still easy to push those thoughts away; I didn’t want Leo every night anyway. Rachel wouldn’t have let me.

“You look—” Laure sipped her coffee. “Rumpled?”

I looked down at my dress that had spent the night crumpled on the floor. Leo’s apartment only had a small mirror above the sink in the bathroom, but I knew Laure’s assessment was right. I brushed my hand down the front of my dress, as if that would be enough to smooth out the wrinkles.

“At least you’re enjoying yourself in New York,” she said.

“The gardener at The Cloisters,” I explained. “We’ve—”

Laure nodded. “I had a gardener at The Cloisters when I first moved here, too.”

I looked down at the menu. I doubted Laure had brought me here to talk about my dating life or hers. Although I remembered her boyfriend at Whitman clearly—a soccer player who smoked incessantly between classes and always had a worn copy of Howl tucked in his back pocket. I wondered what he was doing now; I couldn’t remember his name.