The Cloisters(71)

At the end of the hallway was Rachel’s bedroom. I’d only been in it once, a few days after I moved in when I needed to ask her a question about what time we were leaving for work, but she had answered at the door and then quickly closed it. Now, I took the opportunity to open the door and peek inside. It was like mine, only larger, with four windows looking onto the park; mine looked onto the neighboring building. Her room was white and tidy, bed made neatly, folded clothes on a chair. But it was the bookcases that caught my eye. Floor-to-ceiling shelves made of rich wood that contained not only philosophical treatises but countless works of fiction.

I pulled out a copy of Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy only to discover it was a signed first edition. This was true of countless volumes I selected. And there were rare books too, some manuscripts, a miniature book of hours, each in a brown plastic box to protect them from the sunlight. I tried to imagine what it must be like to have so much money that I could afford to purchase the objects I studied.

Next to Rachel’s bed were two side tables with clear glass lamps and cream-colored drum shades. Above the bed hung a small engraving, a copy of Dürer’s drawing of the goddess Fortuna. Only after a minute did it strike me that it might be real.

From the living room, I heard a soft swoosh and rushed back down the hall to make sure Rachel hadn’t arrived to catch me snooping, but it was just the door to the terrace that had slipped closed. I had forgotten to prop it open with the stone stopper.

I returned to Rachel’s bedroom and pulled open the drawer of a bedside table just to see what was inside: three neatly ordered pens and a leather-bound notebook. I closed it before the temptation to open the book became overwhelming. But the truth was, I was looking for evidence—something to support what Laure said, something that could explain the edginess Leo showed when the topic of Rachel came up. Something, even, that might indicate how much she really knew about what happened to Patrick. But the only thing I discovered was that Rachel was surprisingly rigid—all her clothes were folded at right angles and her books were organized by date and theme. Her bed was made with the precision of a martinet; she had expensive taste. Rachel could be petty, ambitious, sometimes a little mean, but none of that indicated murder.

Again my phone rang. This time I picked it up, seeing my mother’s name on the screen. It had been weeks since I had talked to her on the phone and not just sent a quick text in response to her increasingly alarmed inquires.

I ran my finger across the screen and answered, “Mom?”

“Oh my god, Ann. I have been trying to reach you for weeks. Are you okay? I read about the thing. At the place you work. The death.” She whispered it, and I wondered who had told her. My mother, I knew, didn’t read the papers.

“It’s okay,” I said, searching for the voice I used to use when she was like this—tiptoeing along the boundary between dizzying concern and panic. “I’m okay. The police are handling it. All of it.”

“I really want you to come home, Annie. I do. I told you the city wasn’t a safe place.”

It was true. When I first got word from the Met that I had been admitted to their program, my mother had listed the many reasons why New York was dangerous, much more dangerous than Walla Walla, or even Seattle. But while these fears had given my mother a reason to stay, they could never have stopped me from going.

“The city is plenty safe.”

“When are you coming home?”

It was the question I had been dreading, the reason I had been evading her calls and been short and noncommittal over text. I still didn’t have any concrete plans, any concrete place lined up to stay.

“I don’t know, Mom.”

“Because I need to make plans to drive to Seattle to pick you up. You can’t just expect me to drop everything when suddenly it turns out you have to give it all up. When you have to come home because there are no other options.”

“There will be other options,” I said, perhaps a little too forcefully.

“Don’t yell at me. It’s not my fault.”

“I’m sorry, Mom.”

“You’re just like your father,” she said. “I don’t want you to end up like him, losing everything. I want you to come home before it comes to that.”

“I will, Mom. I promise.” Although I intended to do no such thing.

As the sound of her crying came through the line, I wanted to comfort her, to say something that might make her feel better. But the truth was that she couldn’t know how close I had come to what had happened to Patrick at The Cloisters, that I was beginning to feel, perhaps like Rachel already did, that death followed me everywhere I went. That on my darker days, I wondered if I was the one who had brought it with me, to The Cloisters.

“This is why I didn’t want you to go in the first place,” she said, her voice now breaking. “Because this is what happens when you go out into the world—when we go out into the world, Ann. We lose. The deck is always stacked against us.”





CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE


At the Cloisters, the staff had started to spend much of their time comparing notes—divulging the questions they had been asked by the investigating detectives, sharing their own theories as to what had happened. The silent stone hallways were now full of soft whispers and hushed conversations, words that dried up when Rachel and I walked by. It was hard not to take this reaction personally, but it was impossible to ignore the reality—we had been the ones closest to the event, to Patrick. And as long as the investigation was ongoing, we languished in its shadow.