The Cloisters(67)

On my darker days, I had bounced this thought around. Laure wasn’t the first one to prove to me that I was easy to abandon, and it had struck me that it would be easy enough for Rachel to leave me out if things got tight. After all, I was the new hire—the outsider. I often wondered if I would ever be anything else. But I was also learning that it wasn’t too late to look out for myself, first. Rachel and I were friends. We were conspirators and collaborators, but Laure was telling me something I already knew: I needed a contingency plan.

I studied the cutlery and white napkins that had arrived with my breakfast.

“Are people saying she had something to do with Patrick’s death?” I asked.

“I don’t know if people are saying it. But I’m saying it. I’m saying it to you, right now. I think she did.” Laure waited a beat before she asked, “Do you?”

“No,” I said. The Rachel I knew wasn’t that messy. She was meticulous and methodical. Killing Patrick in front of me, in front of an entire museum of people, wasn’t Rachel’s style.

“You don’t know her the way you think you do.”

“Have you ever considered that maybe you don’t?” I was surprised to hear my voice rise, a fierce and glottal catch at the back of my throat.

She put a hand on my arm. “You should get out of The Cloisters.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean working with Rachel Mondray hasn’t ended well for anyone I know. If I were you, I would start looking for a new job. Today.”

I almost laughed. It was impossible. Leave the cards, the work, and the manuscripts of The Cloisters? Leave my father’s translations and Lingraf’s papers in Rachel’s hands alone? My best hope for the year ahead was to stay. Leaving now would only mean one thing: I would have to go home and leave it all behind, not just my ambitions but the objects themselves. And I wasn’t willing to do that; I would stay.

“Haven’t you noticed a pattern, Ann? Death clings to Rachel. It follows her everywhere. It can’t all be coincidence.”

“She’s had some bad luck,” I said. But I knew it could be something else entirely, too, something I wasn’t ready to share with Laure, so I continued, “Don’t you think if Rachel had systematically murdered those closest to her, someone would have noticed by now? Have you considered that she might also be a victim?”

Laure folded her hands in her lap. “I think it’s possible she’s both,” she said. “Maybe Patrick—”

She shrugged and let the implication settle uneasily between us.

“I just want to be sure that you’re going to be okay.”

I couldn’t resist looking at Laure while I pulled a few bills from my wallet and left them on the bar next to my uneaten breakfast. She seemed sincere, but I found it impossible to trust someone who had walked out on me when I needed them the most.

“Rachel’s taught me how to look out for myself,” I said, getting up from the bar.

“Ann, if you ever need anything—”

I turned before I reached the door, angry that the offer was coming now. Now that I didn’t need anything from Laure.

“Isn’t that the same offer you made before you left Whitman? If I ever needed anything? I did need something, Laure, long before I got to New York. I needed you. I needed a friend.”

She started to open her mouth, but I wasn’t ready to hear her excuses.

“Well, I have that now.”



* * *



On the subway ride uptown, I swayed back and forth across from a group of schoolgirls crowded around a single phone, laughing and pointing at whatever was unfolding on the screen. I could already see them fitting into their roles within the group—the smart one, the pretty one, the nervous one. Maybe that was why I had never managed to find a wide group of friends: none of the roles fit. And now that I was older, I wasn’t plastic enough to mold myself into someone else. New York had taught me that I no longer cared if I fit; I preferred to stand out.

Walking through the entrance of The Cloisters always felt like abandoning the modern world at the door: a maze of hand-cut stone walls and Gothic arches, skeletal rib vaults and narrow hallways. It was difficult to imagine that outside these cool walls the city glittered fast and hard despite the languid summer sun. The word cloister, after all, derived from the Latin claudere, meaning to close. Here, we closed ourselves in against the rest of New York.

What Laure had said remained at the edge of my mind, needling me. And while I tried to let the research and the library pull me back into the world of discovery, I found myself glossing over pages of text before noticing what I had missed, my mind wandering down other hidden pathways. A walk through the galleries, I decided, would help clear my head.

There was something about being able to see works of art whenever the desire moved you, a series of casual, individual impressions that added up to a bigger, more complete picture. Now, when we went to other museums in the city, I found it stressful to have to take in all the details of a work in one viewing, as a visitor. Would I catch the delicate shadows on the Tintoretto, notice the way Monet built up his impasto if I only had a few minutes, one day, with the work? Working in a museum bred familiarity in the truest sense of the word—the works at The Cloisters had become like family to me.

I walked through the galleries, nodding at the security staff as I made my way into the gardens, hoping I might run into Leo. But when luck didn’t put him in my path as I wandered the cobbled pathways and lingered at the lavender and lemon balm, I decided to walk under the last Gothic arch in the Bonnefont Cloister and toward the garden sheds.