When she had finished the dishes, she’d wandered into the living room and turned on the television, but after a bit of channel surfing, she switched it off. Silence echoed throughout the house. Finally she’d climbed the stairs to her room, her stomach tight with anxiety. She sat on the bed and stared at the bottom drawer of her bureau. She was nearly faint with the need to feel the razor blade against her skin and considered the risks, the door with no lock, her mother’s strange and volatile mood. No. She would have to delay until it was safe. She rocked on the bed, waiting, and in the stillness, broken only by her own heartbeat, she heard the shrink’s voice. Take care of yourself, Rain. And if you can’t take care of yourself, call me. Well, good luck with that. Like a midget shrink with a stupid, smelly dog could change the world. Could make things right. Could bring Lucy back. Could make the police find the murderer and put him in jail. She sat stiffly, willing time to pass, willing the tears that welled to evaporate. But after a while, as if someone else had slipped into her body, she got up and rummaged through her desk until she found the shrink’s card in the back of a drawer. It was stuck in that stupid little book she had never bothered to read or return. She sat on her bed with the book and the crumpled card and stared at the telephone number. Call me. It was all hopeless. Utterly hopeless. She fell back on the bed and gazed blindly at the ceiling, and after a while, exhausted as a two-year-old, she escaped into sleep.
Now, awake in the dark, she was aware of a deep ache in her stomach. Hunger pangs, she supposed—she had eaten almost nothing at the disastrous dinner—or perhaps something more serious. Serve everyone right if she had an ulcer or a tumor or something. She thought again of the razor taped to the underside of her bureau drawer. She swung her feet to the floor, flicked on the bedside lamp, and checked the time. Two a.m. Surely her parents were now asleep. In the pool of light cast by the bulb, she saw the shrink’s card on the pillow and next to that the book. A miniature book, hardly bigger than an oversized deck of cards, just like Dr. Mallory was a miniature woman, with a little dog, living a safe and boring little life, nosing into other people’s business. Rain didn’t trust her one bit. And seriously, who had even heard of a book that small, anyway? It couldn’t be much of a story. Hardly worth the trouble. She picked it up and flipped it over. From the back cover, a black-and-white photo of the author stared up at her, a woman sitting in an armchair, holding a book in one hand and a cigarette in the other with a serious, almost stern look on her face. Above the strong jaw, her lips were dark with lipstick, but it was her gaze which transfixed Rain. The author stared directly out at her with an intensity that made her want to look away. The dark eyes seemed to be seeing straight into her mind. Into her heart. Straight to the truth.
In spite of the heat—even at night there was no relief from the heat, and her mother thought air-conditioning was unhealthy so everyone had to suffer—Rain felt chilled. She pulled her feet back on the bed and slid beneath the sheet. Leaning back against her pillow, she opened the book to the first page. The first sentence took her far from Port Fortune, transported her to Norway and the fjord between tall mountains. She reread the words, soothed by their cadence, and continued on to discover the town of Berlevaag, the little child’s toy town where the buildings were painted in pastel colors. And as easily as that she was drawn into the story. Something about it, the way it was written—a toy-town painted many colors—reminded her of the fairy tales her father used to read to her in the evenings before she went to bed. She wondered what it would be like to live in a place of many colors instead of the dreary gray shingles or white clapboards of Port Fortune. Once her grandparents had mailed her a postcard from Bermuda, a photo of pastel-painted cottages. That was the closest she would ever get to such a town.
The book was only fifty-four pages in length, but it took her longer to read than she would have imagined. Although she usually read quite quickly, she found herself deliberately slowing her pace, sometimes rereading whole paragraphs or pages, worrying over the individuals on the island. The last line, Philippa’s telling Babette how she would enchant the angels, caused her throat to ache for reasons she couldn’t understand. She clasped the book close to her chest and at last fell back asleep. She dreamed of a town painted many colors and peopled by a general who looked a bit like her father and a cook, a woman who looked nothing like her mother and who wore ugly black shoes and held out her arms to her. She woke at eight, the book still on her chest.
The story remained with her: the sisters Martine and Philippa and the mysterious Babette. Who would have thought such a small book could raise so many questions? Why would Babette spend all of the lottery money on the dinner? Why would the general return to the island? Did people really behave like that? Lucy, she thought. Lucy would have loved talking about the story.
“Rain?” Her mother’s voice called from the hall. “Are you awake? It’s after eight.”
Rain slipped the book beneath her pillow.
It was later, in the shower, that she realized that for the first time in many months, a night had passed in which she had forgotten to scout the house after everyone slept, to check the locks on all windows and doors. The fear that had settled in her chest since Lucy disappeared eased, and she felt a flash of reckless freedom.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Two boys swept past me, their skateboard wheels skimming the sidewalk, and I felt a flash of annoyance and then a clutch of resentment at their wild and careless freedom.
I watched until the boys disappeared around the building’s corner and then unlocked the doors to the boat barn. The air was a few degrees cooler inside, and I rolled the doors shut to keep the heat out as long as possible. There still had been no break in the temperature, each day melting into the next. I planned on beginning the scheme for the second panel on the north wall, a grouping that would include Columba, Leonard, Martin de Porres, Simon, Blaise, Augustine, and Monica. Five men and two women. A mother and son. From the start it had been decided that the saints should mirror the diocese’s congregants in ages, occupations, and ethnicities, but culling the final forty-two from the hosts of the saints had proved more difficult than I would have imagined, and I still found myself debating some of my choices among the hermits and scholars, the fishermen and farmers, the lawyers and poets, merchants and bankers and ascetics, who peopled the ranks of the saints.
I had overslept that morning and was relieved to find Elaine Neal was not waiting for me. She had agreed to pose as Monica, and with her narrow face lined with suffering, she appeared every bit what I envisioned the old nun might have looked like, not dissimilar to the painting by Vivarini I had come across in one of Father Gervase’s books. Elaine was a member of Holy Apostles and the owner of Port Fortune Books and had been enthusiastic about the project from the beginning. Occasionally in the past weeks she’d shown up at the studio with another volume about the saints to add to the library I was acquiring. Before I knew it, people would be gifting me with rosary beads.
“Hello,” she called from the doorway. “Not late, am I?” She was slightly out of breath and leaned on her cane, a sturdy, serviceable stick of some hardwood—walnut or oak perhaps—with a knobbed top. In her other hand, she carried a folded copy of the Boston Globe.
“Right on time.” It hadn’t occurred to me to offer to pick her up, and I regretted this oversight.
“I was delayed at the store. A bit of trouble there.”
I switched on a couple of fans. “Nothing serious, I trust.”