“I don’t know. Try to think of something. We have two more towers to search. You probably won’t be able to reach me—the only reason I got this call is because I stepped outside to call my office. I’ll phone you back in an hour.” He hung up, leaving me staring at the phone once more, my blood pressure soaring, my ears ringing, my heart racing. In a fury of frustration, I screamed—a wordless bellow of rage—and kicked savagely at the closest thing to me, the heavy wooden frame of my bed. It hurt—I wondered if I’d broken my big toe—but I didn’t care; I hauled back the other foot and kicked the bed again. The bed scraped across the floorboards…and something clattered to the floor. Crap—had I broken the bed in my anger? Kneeling on the floor, I peered into the darkness, using my cell phone as a flashlight, the way Miranda had shown me.
The light glimmered off something made of metal: a bracket? a bolt from the bed? Lying prone, my head pressed against the nightstand, I fished it out. It was a key—an antique-looking silver key with a large oval head and several stubby ribs jutting from the spine. For a moment I thought it was Stefan’s skeleton key to the palace, but it wasn’t, not quite. The palace key had been ornate, practically a work of art, its head cut with intricate scrollwork and filigree; this one, on the other hand, was utterly unadorned—a blue-collar sort of key, more likely to be carried by some medieval janitor than a cardinal or chamberlain. It wasn’t just the head that was simpler; so was the shaft—it had only three pairs of ribs jutting from the spine, not half a dozen. Suddenly it hit me, and I ripped open the desk drawer and rifled through the jumble of papers and receipts until I found the note Miranda had left on my nightstand after spooning up behind me in my bed the night after we’d found Stefan’s body. “A souvenir,” the note said. “Maybe it doesn’t mean anything, but maybe it’s important.” When I’d awakened that morning and found the message, I’d thought that the note itself was the souvenir—an odd one, I’d thought, but then, Miranda’s mind often worked more obliquely than mine. But the words, I now realized, made more sense if they referred to something else—something that had fallen off the edge of the nightstand, perhaps, and lodged behind the bed…until this moment. Was this a key Stefan had given her? Or had he lost it in her hotel room the night he tried to persuade her to come with him?
Suddenly I felt a chill as I remembered Miranda’s barely intelligible words when Reverend Jonah had let me talk to her. “The key is to get the bones,” she’d said. Twice. My God, she must have meant this key. But what door, what hiding place, did this key unlock? It must not be a door at the palace, because Stefan’s master key—which Descartes and his men had a copy of—was different from this. What else had Miranda said during that important, frustrating, garbled call? She’d clearly been trying to tell me something else important, but much of the message had been mangled by the poor reception. She’d told me not to get greedy like Stefan, and then she’d said something about Stefan being interrupted. But then she’d added something odd, something I hadn’t understood: She’d told me to “be interruptible.” I’d been trying to ask her what that meant when Reverend Jonah had snatched the phone away from her and slapped her. “Be interruptible.” Turning the key over and over in my hands, I stared absently at it and repeated the words slowly, as if they held some magic, some mantra. “Be interruptible. Be interruptible. Interruptible.”
And then, tearing open my door, I raced down the stairs, flung open the wooden gate of the inn, and sprinted through the twisting streets, past the floodlit fa?ade of the Palace of the Popes, beneath the outstretched arms of the cathedral’s gilded virgin and oversized crucifix, and down a zigzag ramp to the northern edge of the city wall, toward the dark waters of the Rh?ne.
I’d just reached the base of the Bénézet bridge—the bridge of Incorruptible, Interruptible Saint Bénézet—when my phone rang. It was Reverend Jonah. “Now or never, Professor,” he hissed.
“Now,” I said. “Right now, by God. But you have to bring her to me. The bones and I are at Saint Bénézet’s Bridge. Walk up the sidewalk from the south side of the bridge. If I see anyone with you but Miranda, I’ll throw the bones off the bridge and into the river.”
What bones? The rhetorical question posed by Descartes still applied. I didn’t have the bones yet, didn’t know for sure they were here. But they had to be here. There was no other explanation that fit…and no time to look anywhere else.
“And if I see anyone with you, I’ll shoot the girl,” he countered. “If you have any doubt about that, remember what happened to your colleague.”
“What about the Sixth Commandment, Reverend? ‘Thou shalt not kill’? Or did God say you could ignore that one, when he took you up to Heaven for your private sneak preview of the Apocalypse?”