For a few moments he let tears of frustration run through the desert dust that coated his cheeks, then he reached into his pocket for his knife and began sawing at the rope above his head.
Moments later he was slumped on the ground, pounding his fists into the unyielding earth.
“Is it not over, Lord?” he rasped. “Is that what this means? Do You have more plans for me? Do You want me to search out the Mother and return her to the Resting Place? Is that what You wish?”
Kesev struggled to his feet and staggered to his Jeep. He slumped over the hood.
That had to be it. The Lord was not through with him yet. Perhaps He would never be through with him. But clearly He wanted more from him now. He wanted the Mother back where she belonged and was not about to allow Kesev to stop searching for her.
But where else could he look? She’d been smuggled out of Israel and now could be hidden anywhere in the world. He had no clues, no trail to follow...
Except the Ferris woman. Who was she? Had that strange, unsettling nun on the plane been her, or someone pretending to be her? And did it matter? All he knew was that the Explorer he’d seen in the desert that day had been rented on her card. There might be no connection at all. The Mother could have been stolen days before then.
He gazed up into the cold, unblinking eye of the night.
“All right, Lord. I’ll continue looking. But I search now on my terms, my way. I’ll find the Mother for You and bring her back where she belongs. But you may not like what I do to the ones who’ve caused me this trouble.”
FIFTEEN
Manhattan
Dan finished tightening the last screw in the swivel plate. He flipped the latch back and forth, watching with inordinate satisfaction how easily its slot slipped over the swivel eye. He fitted the shackle of the brand new combination padlock through the eye.
“We’re in business, Carrie.”
She didn’t answer. She was busy inside the coal room with the Virgin. Or maybe busy wasn’t the right word. Carrie was engrossed, preoccupied, fascinated, enraptured with the Virgin.
The Virgin...Dan had heard Carrie refer to the body or statue or whatever it was so often as “the Virgin” that he’d begun thinking of it that way himself. Certainly easier than referring to it as the Whatever.
After an uneventful transatlantic trip, the Virgin had arrived in New York late last night. He and Carrie had been on the docks first thing this morning to pick her up. After passing through customs they spirited her crate through the front door to St. Joe’s basement, through the Loaves and Fishes kitchen, and down here to the subcellar. The old coal furnace that used to rule this nether realm had been dismantled and carted off when the diocese switched the church to gas heat. That left a wide open central space and a separate coal room that used to be fed by a chute from the alley. Carrie had chosen the old coal room as the perfect hiding place. It was ten by ten, the chute had been sealed up long ago, and it had a door, although the door had no lock. Until now.
Dan opened the door and stuck his face inside. He experienced an instant of disorientation, as if he were peering into the past, intruding upon an ancient scene from the Roman catacombs. A functioning light fixture was set in the ceiling, but it was off. Instead, flickering candlelight filled the old coal room, casting wavering shadows against the walls and ceiling. A couple of days ago Dan had lugged one of the folding tables from the mission down here and placed it where Carrie had directed, and that had been just about the last he’d seen of her until this morning. She’d spent every spare moment of the interval feverishly dusting, scrubbing, and dressing up the room, draping the table with a blanket, setting up wall sconces for the candles, appropriating flowers left behind in the church after weddings or funerals, making a veritable shrine out of the coal room.
A short while ago they’d opened the crate and he’d helped her place the Virgin’s board-stiff body on the table. Carrie had been fussing with her ever since.
“I said, the latch is in place, Carrie. Want to come see?”
She was bending over the body where it rested on the blanket-draped table, straightening her robe. She didn’t look up.
“That’s all right. I know you did a great job.”
“I wouldn’t say it’s a great job.” Dan leaned back and surveyed his work. “Adequate is more like it. Won’t keep out anybody really determined to get in, but it should deter the idly curious.”
“That’s what we want,” she said, straightening. She turned toward him and held out her hand. “Come see.”
Dan moved to her side and laid an arm across her shoulders. A warm tingle spread over his skin as he felt her arm slip around his back. This was the closest they’d been since leaving Israel.
“Look at her. Isn’t she beautiful?”
Dan didn’t know how to answer that. He saw the waxy body of an old woman with wild hair and mandarin fingernails, surrounded by candles and wilting flowers. He knew Carrie was seeing something else. Her eyes were wide with wonder and devotion, like a young mother gazing at her newborn first child.
“You did a wonderful job with this place. No one would ever know it was once a coal room.”
“And no one should ever know otherwise. This is our little secret, right?”
“Right. Our little secret. Our big secret is us.” Dan turned and wrapped his other arm around her. “And speaking of us...”
Carrie slipped from his embrace. “No, Dan. Not now. Not here. Not with...her.”
Dan tried to hide his hurt. Just being in the same room with Carrie excited him. Touching her drove him crazy. Used to drive her crazy too. What was wrong?
“When then? Where? Is your brother—?”
“Let’s talk about it some other time, okay? Right now I’ve got a lot still left to do.”
“Like what?”
“I have to cut those nails, and fix her hair.”
“She’s not going on display, Carrie.”
“I know, but I want to take care of her.”
“She’s not a—” Dan bit off the rest of the sentence.
“Not a what?”
He’d been about to say Barbie Doll but had cut himself off in time.
“Nothing. She did fine in that cave with nobody fussing over her.”
“But she’s my responsibility now.”
Dan repressed a sigh. “Okay. But not your only responsibility. We’ve still got meals to serve upstairs. I’m sure she wouldn’t want you to let the guests down.”
“You go ahead. I’ll be up in a few minutes.”
“Good.” Dan wanted out of here. The low ceiling, the dead flowers...the atmosphere was suddenly oppressive. “You remember the lock combination?” “Twelve, thirty-six, fourteen.”
“Right. See you upstairs.”
He watched Carrie, waiting for her to look his way, but she had eyes only for the Virgin.
Shaking his head, Dan turned away. This wouldn’t last, he told himself. Carrie would come around soon. Once it seeped into her devotion-fogged brain that her Virgin was merely an inert lump, she’d return to her old self.
But there was going to be an aching void in his life until she did.
‡
Carrie listened to Dan’s shoes scuff up the stone steps as she pulled the zip-lock bag from her pocket and removed the scissors from it.
Poor Dan, she thought, looking down at the Virgin. He doesn’t understand.
Neither did she, really. All she knew was that everything had changed for her. She could look back on her fourteen years in the order—fully half of her life—and understand for the first time what had brought her to the convent, what had prompted her to take a vow of chastity and then willfully break it.
“It was you, Mother,” she whispered to the Virgin as she began to trim the ragged ends of dry gray hair that protruded from under the wimple. “I came to the order because of you. You are the Eternal Virgin and I wanted to be like you. Yet I could never be like you because my virginity was already gone...stolen from me. But you already know the story.”