“Just an old friend,” I repeated, depressed. “I’m going to see if she went to the coffee shop.”
“It closes at four in the summer. You might check the chapels, Bond, or Rockefeller. She wanted to know where else on campus angels soared and I suggested those two places to her.” She hesitated. “I did wonder if I should call campus security. I can still do it if you think—well, do you think she might be a danger to herself?”
I scrunched up my mouth—I didn’t know what Leydon might do. “I haven’t seen her for a while, so I don’t know how shaky she is these days. If I don’t find her at either of the chapels, I’ll call the cops myself.”
I ran down the rest of the steps and jogged through the portico connecting the divinity school to its chapel. Bond Chapel was dark, too, with narrow stained-glass windows that flashed jagged prisms onto the walls. I went up the single aisle to the altar, shining my flash underneath the communion table and into the corners. The only person I found was a homeless man, asleep in one of the pews. My light woke him; he backed away from me in alarm, muttering curses.
I left Bond and moved as fast as I could on my sore feet to Fifty-Ninth Street, past the president’s house, to Rockefeller Chapel, whose carillon tower dominates the neighborhood. The tower is almost twenty stories high, and I wasn’t sure they locked the stairwell.
I pulled open one of the heavy doors and entered into silence and twilight. I stood at the entrance to the nave, involuntarily hugging my arms across my chest: the stones seemed so cold, so ominous, that I felt chilled, despite the heat outside.
The building is the size of a cathedral. The arched stained-glass windows didn’t let in much of the late-day sun, and the lamps hanging from the vaulted ceiling were so remote they might as well not have been switched on.
I strained my ears for any sound, a sob, a laugh, but heard nothing. “Leydon! Leydon?”
My voice bounced around the walls and gave me back a mocking echo. I started up the central aisle toward the chancel, my shoes setting up what sounded like a drumroll. Too big, too loud. If Leydon were in here she’d surely hear me, but if she were feeling abandoned, depressed, she might not be able to respond. Leydon crouched under the kitchen table—the image kept popping into my mind. I pulled the pencil flash from my bag again, shining it under the pews as I searched.
I found her lying facedown near the chancel steps. Her red-gold hair glinted under my flashlight. I knelt next to her, smoothing it back from her forehead.
“Leydon, I’m sorry I was late. Was that too much for you to bear? Did you decide a nip or two of Jim Beam would carry you while you waited for me?”
I kept my voice soft, a loving croon, despite the words. I’d learned long ago how cruel it was to add my criticism to the demons already attacking her.
I put an arm under her to turn her over. That was when I realized something worse than drunkenness was going on. Her left arm flopped against me at an inhuman angle. She must have tripped on the chancel steps, then hit her head as she fell, knocked herself out. I put my fingers on her neck, praying for a pulse. I hoped I was feeling one, but my hands were cold, they were shaking, I couldn’t feel anything.
“Fessa! Idiota!” I snapped under my breath. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Get an ambulance here, now, on the double.”
I removed my arm from beneath her as gently as I could and called 911. “Inside the chapel,” I said, fighting for calm.
The dispatcher took the details, told me not to move her, but to keep her warm if I could. I ran across the chancel, looking for something to wrap around her, an altar cloth, an abandoned sweater, anything. In a box behind the organ console I found a stack of yoga mats and blankets, and grabbed one of those.
The ambulance crew arrived an hour, or maybe only a minute, later—in a crisis all time spent waiting for help feels like eternity. When I heard the front doors opening, I stood and called out, waving my flashlight as a beacon.
The two techs, a man and a woman, trotted up the central aisle. They were carrying a portable gurney and neck-stabilizing gear. They had industrial flashlights that they placed close to Leydon so they could see what they were doing.
As they knelt and started bracing her neck, the man asked how it had happened.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I found her like this. I thought she tripped on the chancel steps.”
He shook his head. “The cops will tell us for sure, but I’m feeling breaks in her arms that didn’t come from tripping and falling.” He gently probed her sides. “She has broken ribs, too.”
He and his partner slid her onto the gurney and stood in a quick, fluid motion.
“We can’t wait for the police,” the woman said. “You’ll have to talk to them. There’s an outside chance—”