The moment the doors were opened, she was hit by a freezing blast and had to navigate her way down the steps carefully. The limousine was still warm inside, and she nestled down in the backseat while the wind and snow battered the windows. It was a half-hour drive, maybe longer in this weather, to the Calvary Cemetery on Clark Street, the oldest Catholic cemetery in the archdiocese, where the Van Owen family mausoleum had been erected more than a century ago. She rode in silence, accompanied only by the sounds of the tires skimming through the slush and the regular beating of the windshield wipers. Cyril knew when she wanted to be alone with her thoughts.
And her thoughts had turned in the direction they so often went of late … to David Franco and what progress he might be making in his search for the Medusa. He had been in Italy only a matter of days, but Randolph’s death—the last in a string of so many—had reinforced in her the need to find the mirror again, and with it, she hoped, the answers to her unending dilemma. But what were the chances? Others had gone before, and they had either returned empty-handed, or, as in the case of a certain Mr. Palliser, been fished out of the river Loire with a grappling hook.
The mission, she knew, should come with a warning, but then who would take it?
All along the lakefront, jagged hunks of limestone and ice were piled up like a jumble of building blocks, and the lake itself was a gray, heaving slab, the wind teasing its surface into whitecaps. The late-afternoon sun was barely visible, and what light it shed was cold, dim, and diffuse. It was not a landscape Mrs. Van Owen would miss. With Randolph gone and no reason to stay, she was determined now to head for some warmer clime … and reinvent herself as she had done countless times before. She owned other homes, under other names, all over the world; she would inhabit one of them. The one thing she could never do was stay in any one place too long, lest she eventually arouse suspicion.
And her time in Chicago, plainly, had already worn out.
As they approached the cemetery, Cyril slowed down and turned under a Gothic archway with the Greek letters for Alpha and Omega—Christian symbols, as Kathryn was keenly aware, for God as the beginning and the end—in a triangle above the driveway. Even passing under them, Kathryn felt a sense of trespass. The limousine rolled through the deserted, windswept grounds, past rows of bleak stone monuments and crypts, beneath the barren branches of the trees that Dutch elm disease had so far spared.
“It’s around the next bend,” Kathryn instructed Cyril, “on the left side.”
The Van Owen mausoleum was easily the most ostentatious in the entire cemetery. Designed to resemble a Greek temple, and made of the same white limestone piled up in the breakwaters separating Sheridan Road from the lake, it sat on a slight rise, commanding an unobstructed view of the lake. Not that that did its occupants any good, Mrs. Van Owen reflected. Well over a hundred Midwestern winters had dimmed its luster, and even opened a crack in its roof, where some tenacious vines had penetrated and taken hold. When the cemetery staff had once asked Randolph if he wanted the vine removed, he had said, “Leave it be—it’s the only living thing for a square mile.”
Kathryn felt the same way.
Cyril stopped the car in the middle of the roadway, since both curbs were banked with snow and ice. Only one other car was even visible, a hearse, its tailpipe emitting a plume of smoke as it lumbered off into the farther reaches of the graveyard.
Kathryn gathered her fur coat around her, and once the door was opened, stepped gingerly out onto the ice. Cyril was holding the urn in the crook of one arm, and she took hold of the other to keep her balance. Together, they stepped over the snowy curb and plowed up the hill through the blustering winds. The door to the mausoleum was nearly ten feet high, and it was made of black iron, filigreed around a thick slab of opaque glass. Kathryn dug deep in the pocket of her plush coat and removed an iron key ring that looked as if it should have opened the wards in Bedlam. She handed it to Cyril, who was unable to insert the key into the frosty, recalcitrant lock.
But he had come prepared, and after clearing the hole with the end of a screwdriver, and then injecting some WD-40, he was able to get the key into the lock then crack the door, as ponderous as any bank vault, open.
“Shall I come in with you?”
“No,” Kathryn said, cradling the urn in her arms. “Why don’t you just take the car around the loop, so we’re heading in the right direction when I’m ready to go? I’ll need ten or fifteen minutes.”