The Cloisters(90)

I knew all about Rachel’s accidents and Leo’s mistakes.

“Why didn’t you tell me about you and Leo?” It felt like the one question I would allow myself that reached the places that hurt me the most.

“It might have ruined your fun. And Leo is very fun.” She smiled, thin-lipped, strained.

I looked out across the lake, where the water was inky black, roiling like the open ocean at night. In that moment, I wanted desperately for her to be able to talk me out of it, to shift the blame to someone else, to erase her past, erase my own, as if we could start over.

“You didn’t need to know,” she continued. “You might never have known any of it if Patrick hadn’t taken you to Stephen’s that day. Did you know that I was supposed to go with him? Not you. He took you as a punishment, I think. As a way to tell me I was replaceable. But I think he saw in you what I did. Someone who could be secretive, someone who could put their success above the well-being of others, someone like me. You are like me, Ann.”

“I’m not a murderer,” I said.

“I hate that word,” said Rachel. “Murderer. The belladonna is the real murderer. I suppose you could call me the hand of fate, actually. I prefer it to murderer. More musical.”

“And what about your roommate?” I asked.

Rachel laughed. “How do you even know about that?”

“I read the reports.”

“Oh my god, Ann, always the researcher. I did not kill her. She jumped from our window of her own free will.”

“But Patrick—”

“But Patrick, but Patrick,” Rachel mimicked. “Really, Ann. You didn’t know Patrick; you didn’t know what it was like before you came. I couldn’t stand him. The way he pawed at me and talked to me about the future. I knew that all the work I was doing at The Cloisters was only because he liked me. If that changed, it could all be taken away at any minute. I decided to change that.”

It struck me that in some sense, Rachel and I had both been at The Cloisters because of Patrick’s favor, a favor that necessarily cut both ways.

“And he wasn’t even a scholar,” she continued. “Not anymore anyway. He was always busy buying things and hoarding them in that sad house of his in Tarrytown. And usually, it was just junk. He was a bad curator and an even worse collector. Why do you think I slept with Leo? Because I wanted to. Why do you think I slept with Patrick? Because I felt I had to.”

I wasn’t sure how much of this was true; I’d never seen Rachel do anything she didn’t want to. But I knew what it was like to feel trapped. I, too, would have done anything to stay at The Cloisters, just as I would have done anything to escape Walla Walla.

“But that idiot—” She shook her head. “Years of buying second-rate manuscript pages and counterfeit reliquaries, and he finally stumbles on something good.” She laughed. “Those cards. He didn’t know what he had. But you knew.” She took another step closer so that I could have easily reached out and touched her. “You knew what they were. What was Patrick going to do with them? Put them in frames around his house? Maybe donate them if he ever really evaluated what he had. Write an article that touched on a few narrow-minded themes. No. I wasn’t going to let that happen. I did it for us, Ann. For us.”

“We could have brought him in, we could have—” But as I said it, I knew it wasn’t true. It wasn’t what either of us wanted, and I wondered if maybe I had purposefully ignored the reality that Patrick knew, that he had figured it out.

“He didn’t deserve that.” Rachel almost spit out the words. “All these years, it’s always great discoveries by great men. I knew that if we had shared this with him, we would have been relegated to coauthors, at best. Everyone would think the discovery was his. That he had recognized quality when everyone else, over the centuries, had been fooled. But he was the fool. Not us. Not you. He never would have known, but for that night in the library. He was right, you know. It turned out the drugs did give him more clarity. That night, he finally noticed there was something wrong in the feel of the cards, and he kept working them and working them trying to figure out what it was. I did my best to distract him, but he was obsessed. Until finally it clicked, and he found a way to pull apart the false front. That was when I knew it was time.”

“So you poisoned him.”

“I told you, I’m not a murderer. After a few hours that night, Patrick thought he needed a little more, a topper, something that would help him see more clearly, just one more dose, so I went to the garden shed and found the plant. I ground the root of the belladonna in Leo’s shed and offered it to him. I watched him mix it in his water. And I sat there, quietly, as he drank it, willingly. Greedily, even. If he’d been attentive, he might have noticed how different it was, but I think, on some level, he wanted it, you know? It was his choice.”

The way she justified it, as an act that could have easily been avoided, chilled me. The logic deeply flawed.

“Rachel, you’re not describing choice. Patrick didn’t have a choice. Your interpretation of choice is a luxury, a curtain that separates us from fate. From a fate you’re authoring.”

“Choice is the one thing we all share,” she said, brushing off my comment. “It’s the ultimate level playing field.”