The Cloisters(89)

“What do you want to ask them?” I said, holding the deck in my hand.

“Ask them about my future.”

I nodded, starting to lay out the cards, a simple five-card spread. But each card that turned up was the same—the Ace, reversed. The only cards in the deck that had no illustration, save for a single image of their suit. I continued until I got to five cards, closing my eyes and feeling the softness of the vellum. When I opened them, I was shocked to learn that the remaining two cards had not changed the spread. There was the fourth Ace and the card I had slipped into the deck before Rachel had come in, before I had thought I would read for her at all—the Devil. When I looked at the cards that were supposed to sketch Rachel’s future, they showed me that there wasn’t one. At least, not one that I could see. There was only emptiness and sudden change. Death.

“Ann—”

Across the cards, Rachel’s color had moved from her cheeks to her chest, painting her collarbones a deep, uneven crimson. Before I could say anything, she stood and left the room.

I followed her downstairs, where she stood by the window.

“Did they tell you what happened to Patrick?” she said, not turning to face me.

Looking back, I realized they had. Only I hadn’t been good enough at the time to read them. “They might have.”

“I never pegged you as the kind of girl who would get so wrapped up in all this,” she said, now turning to face me. Her voice was thin and high. “You seemed so practical in the beginning.”

“You don’t understand,” I said, almost to myself. I thought of the work my father had done translating the pages, how he had puzzled over them, how they had always been meant for me, had been waiting for me. Not Rachel.

She laughed, and it sounded like breaking glass.

“The card came for you,” I said. “The Devil.”

Outside, lightning cracked across the sky, shaking the house and our bodies. The strike had been close, close enough that it had struck the boathouse, where flames were now licking the end of the dock and growing. Like the Tower card, the boathouse was ablaze. The heat of the lightning had defied the rain and set fire to the structure, which was beginning to collapse into the lake.

Rachel didn’t hesitate, but ran out into the storm, toward the fire. I followed, but the rain pelted my skin, and I struggled to see through the howling wind and smoke that spread low across the dock.

While Rachel knew the way instinctively, I had to keep my eyes on the planks to be sure I wasn’t nearing the edge. When I finally reached the end of the dock, Rachel was standing inside the boathouse. A corner of the building still smoldered against the rain and the roof had partially fallen away. Two boats that had been winched out of the water swung in the wind.

“You knew,” I said now, yelling over the noise of the storm. “You knew he had it. That he knew about the real cards underneath.”

I let the implication hang between us. Patrick had known about the cards, for how long, I couldn’t be sure. But I could be sure Rachel had lied to me.

She turned to face me, the wind whipping her hair. “What do you want me to say, Ann? Will it make you feel better knowing the details? Will they make a difference to you?”

“They aren’t details, Rachel. They’re the truth.”

“Okay. Fine. Look who has decided ethics suddenly matter. Yes, he knew. But he wasn’t the one to make the discovery. You were. That’s the truth.”

“You knew and you kept it from me.”

The downdrafts and thunder had moved east, booming echoes in the distance, but the rain remained, a series of hard pinpricks that bored into my skin.

Her eyes narrowed. “Did you go see Leo, too?”

I wondered, briefly, if he had told her, but the way she said it, sharp with curiosity, made me assume he hadn’t.

“I didn’t need Leo to figure it out,” I said. And while it was true, Leo had been asking me to see Rachel for who she was longer than anyone else.

“I thought you might. What did he tell you?”

“Nothing I didn’t already know.”

Rachel tipped her head back and laughed. There was no escaping the way her body shook with the movement, supple and tan. Even against a maelstrom, her beauty was a kind of refuge.

“You have no clue, Ann. How could you?”

That Rachel thought I had figured out so little gave me a pang of pleasure. I knew her better than she imagined. I had been paying attention.

“Leo has always had such an imagination. But I don’t suppose they really have enough to prosecute anyway.”

“No. He doesn’t think so.”

“Too bad, really.”

“He did say you killed Patrick, though.” The words had been rolling around in my mouth for days, and now they came roughly, almost misshapen to my own ears, and loud against the force of the storm.

“Now why would he think that?” Rachel took a step closer to me, and in the narrowed distance I had to fight the urge to retreat, to keep the buffer in place.

“Because he didn’t. And that card”—I gestured toward the house—“that card is motive, Rachel. You had to beat him to it, didn’t you? Once he had discovered the false fronts, you knew that was it.”

Something passed over Rachel’s face, but I couldn’t be sure if it was an emotion or the rain. “It could have been an accident,” said Rachel. “An overdose. A mistake. Leo has been known to make those, after all.” She looked me up and down.