The Cloisters(80)

I piled them together gently and shuffled. I had never believed in asking the cards specific questions; it seemed such hubris to know what to ask. Instead, it was the feeling I was after, the web they created, the impression they gave. I pulled a Two of Swords reversed, a Page of Cups, and a Ten of Swords. Only Minor Arcana in the small spread. The Page of Cups, service and instinct, the sword, as always, especially reversed, the act of cutting in half. The Ten of Swords I rarely saw, but it meant misfortune, defeat. They showed me a break, a severing, and a departure, even an overturning, a reversal. Some of this I could place, other aspects were still unrecognizable to me.

“What do they say?” said Rachel from across the blanket.

“That I should trust my intuition,” I said quietly, sliding the cards back into the deck.





CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR


The article was almost ready for submission. It would, we both knew, do more for our careers than a summer job at The Cloisters ever could. For me, it was more than a ticket to the graduate program of my choice and an assurance that I wouldn’t end up back in Walla Walla. It was also proof that my father’s work as a translator, long unrecognized and hidden, would have a meaningful impact. An opportunity he might never have had while he was alive.

Opportunity. That’s what the article would give me—the chance to say yes or no, the chance to live in New York, the chance, almost, to rewrite the past. It was a career-defining moment, a once-in-a-generation discovery, the type of discovery that rarely happened for young women, especially at the start of their careers. And while Rachel and I fretted over every footnote and double-checked every translation of fifteenth-century Latin, Leo sat in a jail cell awaiting bail.

I had, the night before, dreamt about him. I dreamt we were at the bar in the Bronx where fans tipped lazily back and forth. There, over beers, he had whispered across the table that he had done none of it. That he hadn’t been the one to steal or poison Patrick.

The next day, when I told Rachel about it, she replied, “I’ve known him longer, and I think you’d be surprised what Leo is capable of.”

We were sitting side by side at her dining table, the late-afternoon sun pooling on the parquet. I moved my cursor down the screen, doing the tedious work of formatting dates and bibliographic information.

“When I started at The Cloisters, Leo was even more feral than he is now,” said Rachel, looking out the window to where the canopy of trees in Central Park swayed gently back and forth. Beneath them, families enjoying one of the last weekends of summer wandered the sidewalks. “He never talked to the staff. Patrick always said he was hired, like you, in a pinch because the long-term gardener quit unexpectedly and we needed someone. Now, after four years, it’s a miracle he was never fired.”

I didn’t say anything but kept scrolling, adjusting.

“If you ask me, I’m not that surprised. He never thought the rules applied to him. Leo likes to believe he lives both above and below all of society’s expectations. That’s how he always was as a gardener: too good for the job but also happy to be in the mud.”

Before coming to The Cloisters, I had long been an assiduous, if resentful, rule follower—someone who meticulously returned books on time, who followed every closing procedure at work. Seeing Leo be so joyously lawless had unlocked something in me: an enjoyment of chaos that had been building long before I came to New York. It was easy for someone like Rachel to look down on what Leo had done. The rules bent for people like her. There was invariably a workaround that could be bought or fixed with influence. It was, I thought, cowardly. What Leo had done took guts.

But I still recognized there was a gulf between stealing and murder. Leo was the type to break the law and flaunt it, but that didn’t make him a murderer. I kept the thoughts to myself, letting them swirl around inside me until they became a noxious brew of paranoia, one that left me increasingly on edge and sullen, but that seemed to leave Rachel more serene than she had been at the start of the summer.

Rachel stretched her arms overhead. “Why don’t we take a break? I’m tired of sitting at this table. Want to go for a walk?”

“I think I just want to finish this,” I said. It was mostly true; I did want to finish. We were so close, but I needed some time apart, too.

“Suit yourself,” she said, pushing back from the table.

From behind the screen of my laptop, I watched her pull her long hair into a ponytail and slip on a pair of running shoes. Then, when the door to the apartment had closed behind her, I moved to the window where I could watch her progress, waiting for her to enter the park before I picked up the phone and dialed the number on the card that Detective Murphy had given me. I stayed leaning up against the window, watching the edge of the park for the return of Rachel’s swinging ponytail.

“Can I talk to Leo?” I asked when she answered the phone.

“You mean can you visit him?”

“Sure,” I said. I had never known anyone who had been arrested before so I wasn’t sure what I could or could not do.

“If he wants to, yes.”

“Do I just come down—”

“Ann.” I could hear Detective Murphy organizing papers on the other end of the line. I imagined the phone cradled against her cheek, her disorderly office. “Can I ask what is going on?”

The truth was, I didn’t know what was going on, so I let the question go unanswered.