A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel #1)(102)

“The earth was so soft from all the rain that the tree displaced almost the entire mound,” St. Sebastian says of the muddy mess. “So after I chopped up the tree, I grabbed the shovel and thought maybe I could clear some of it away, you know. Just the worst of it.”

“Of course,” I say, approaching the former altar. “Smart idea. Was there anything underneath the mud?”

“Yes,” he says slowly.

My blood races fast and curious. “There was? Like the original church altar? Saint, that’s a huge deal!”

“I found something made of stone—I think it was the church’s altar. But . . . Poe—”

I’m to the altar now, ready to move around to where the most mud seems to have been cleared away so I can see the stone, but something in St. Sebastian’s voice stops me. I turn to face him.

He’s stopped a few feet behind me and he’s holding something out. Something small and colorful in his hand.

“It’s plastic,” he says, a little hoarsely. “So it didn’t—”

I take the little card out of his hand, and I’m about to ask him more questions—what it is and where near the altar he found it and why he looks so upset right now—but then I glance down, and everything in my body seems to rush up toward my head. My stomach, my heart, my blood—everything floating up and crowding my mind until I can’t breathe or hear or think.

From my fingertips, a happy, healthy, and alive Adalina Kernstow Markham smiles up at me. Probably the only woman in the Kansas State Licensing Bureau’s history to smile in her driver’s license photo, but there you have it. She was a smiler. Every picture of her on a dig was her covered in dirt and grinning up over some piece of pottery that looked like every other piece of pottery that she’d found. She’d only been in her mid-thirties when she left us, but even by that young age she’d had smile lines around her eyes and mouth.

She used to laugh so much that strangers would compliment her on it.

I look down at her driver’s license and nothing makes sense for a minute. Why is it here, in the chapel, why is it covered in flecks of mud?

“It was behind the altar,” Saint says quietly. “My shovel caught the tip of it, and then I had to.”

“Had to what?” I whisper, turning back toward the mud.

“I had to keep digging,” he says. Sadly. “To see if there was more.”

I take a step and then another step, but I’m not even really sure where I’m going or why I’m going—except I do know, that’s the terrible truth, I do know where I’m going.

I do know why.

Saint didn’t have to dig deep. Less than foot down and a foot into what used to be the hummock of the altar, I see the pearled scatter of finger bones. Higher up, the deceptively graceful curve of an orbital bone and the unmistakable beginning of the dome of a skull.

A human skull.

Human finger bones.

My mother’s driver’s license trembles in my hand.

“No,” I say.

“The license was where maybe a coat pocket would have been,” he says softly. “Poe, I’m so sorry, I’m so fucking sorry.”

“No,” I say again, louder this time. My voice doesn’t sound like my own—it’s garbled and broken and so high-pitched it sounds like a child’s. “No.”

“Poe . . .”

“They searched here,” I tell him, my voice still wavering and thin. “They searched here. They didn’t find her. She wasn’t here, this isn’t her—”

“Poe.”

“It can’t be her,” I say, I plead, and then I’m crying, so fast and so hard that my entire body is shaking with it. “It can’t be, I know it can’t. She can’t really be—”

I’m on my knees now, but I don’t remember falling there. I’m on my knees and Saint’s on his too, and he’s holding me, crooning something low in my ear, soothing me like you’d soothe a wild animal. He’s stroking my hair and rocking me back and forth and nothing is real, nothing can be real right now or ever, ever again.

“Shh,” Saint comforts me. “Shh.” And then he starts murmuring something I don’t recognize at first, until suddenly I do. It’s the Salve Regina—the closing prayer of the Rosary. One of those prayers Catholic children grow up with stitched into the background noise of life, one of those prayers so ever-present that I can’t even remember when I first learned it.

“Hail, holy Queen, mother of mercy,” he says, “Hail, our life, our sweetness and our hope.”

I know he’s searching for something, anything, to help me right now, even a prayer he doesn’t believe in. But it works. The familiar cadence of the words cuts through my hysteria the tiniest bit—I’m able to fill my lungs, able to feel the cold mud on my knees.

“To thee do we cry, poor, banished children of Eve,” he continues, and I’m able to breathe again and again and again. I know this prayer, I’ve heard my parents pray it. I grew up praying it. I’ve heard Becket pray it.

I murmur the next part along with St. Sebastian, clutching my mother’s driver’s license tightly in my hand as we do. “To thee do we send up our sighs,” I say. I dare a look at the bones again, at where they peek out from the wet, rich earth. “Mourning and weeping in this vale of tears.”