Her words disappeared under the rumble of the gurney wheels on the stone floor. I followed them to the ambulance and kissed Leydon as they loaded her into it. An outside chance, that was better than no chance at all.
Back inside the chapel, I lay on the front pew to wait for the police. I’d been running for hours, ever since I got Petra’s alarm. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t take in another thought. If the police didn’t arrive soon, I’d fall asleep with any homeless people who sought shelter here.
Above me I saw the railing around a small gallery where overflow visitors could sit during Convocation. If Leydon had gotten her injuries in falling from a height, that was probably where she’d been.
I forced myself to get up. On cement-laden legs, I walked behind the organ console to the gallery stairs. The gallery railing was only about thigh-high on me. If Leydon had stood there, working herself into a frenzy, she could easily have fallen over.
I looked around, wondering where she’d dropped her handbag. Leydon always used to carry an Hermès bag—it was one of those odd vestiges of her conservative upbringing, always carrying a handbag, almost always from Hermès, although every now and then she ventured into Chanel territory. Perhaps she’d had it over her arm when she fell. I tried to imagine the physics of the fall, the arc, where the bag would have landed.
My toes were cramping from all the pressure I’d put on them this afternoon. As I bent to massage them, I saw a piece of paper under the pew, written over in heavy black ink.
When I pulled it out, I recognized Leydon’s round, urgent scrawl, the way she wrote when she was cycling high. I saw him on the catafalque, she’d written over and over.
I was tucking the paper into my own bag when the door underneath the gallery opened. Thinking it might be the police, I hurried back down the stairs, but it was a trio of tourists, two women and a man.
They looked at me in consternation, which wasn’t surprising—I was barefoot and disheveled.
“You are rehearsing for a play?” one of the women asked.
“This is real life, I’m afraid.”
“We thought we heard you shouting,” the other woman said. “When we were coming earlier to look at the organ.”
“You were in the chapel? What did you see?” I stepped closer in my urgency, and they backed away in alarm.
“We saw nothing,” the man said. “We heard you and decided we must come back later.”
“It wasn’t me you heard. A friend of mine—did you see her—she fell—the police are on their way—if you saw anything, heard anything—”
“The police?” the man said. “No, we can tell the police nothing.”
He said something in German to the women, and they nodded. “We cannot stay for the police, we can miss our flight, or who knows what. They can put us in prison, perhaps.”
“But if you saw what happened—”
“But we did not see,” the second woman said. “We wanted to inspect the organ, which is famous: my husband is also an organist. And now there is no time. I am sorry about your friend, but we must leave.”
I was close to screaming with frustration.
“Please—”
The two women seized the man’s arms and hurried back to the western door. I followed and thrust one of my cards into the man’s shirt pocket. “If you remember anything that my friend said, please call me.”
13.
A LONG PITCH
WHEN THE POLICE SHOWED, I TOLD THEM THE LITTLE I knew—how I arrived late for my meeting with Leydon and found her spread-eagled across the chancel steps. Evidence technicians showed up and took photos in a desultory way, looking at the gallery, making little notes of angles and tangents.
“Were you a close friend?” one of the cops asked.
Close at one time, not any longer. “We hadn’t seen each other for a year or so,” I said.
“Do you know her frame of mind? Was she suicidal?”
“When she spoke to me this morning, she sounded very alert, very alive,” I said.
There was a commotion in the back of the chapel. We all turned to squint at the narthex and in a second or two a man in a well-cut summer suit burst up the aisle.
“Sewall!” I was astonished to see Leydon’s older brother.
“Victoria Warshawski? I might have guessed!”
“Guessed what?” The officer and I spoke almost in unison.
“My sister stole my car, and I got some report that she had ended up here at Rockefeller. You’re the police? You came in response to my report?”
“No, Sewall,” I said firmly. “They came because your sister is badly injured, nearly dead. Your car seems mighty unimportant.”
“What? Did she run it into a tree? She’s been out of the hospital for ten days, and if she’s taken her risperidone once since they released her—against my most urgent warnings that they keep her—I’d be astounded. She talked to Faith yesterday, and Faith couldn’t make head or tail of anything she was saying. It was all a jumble about spies, and then a string of obscenities directed at me! Poor Faith was so embarrassed she finally hung up!”