Byrne nodded.
'Sometimes good news?'
'Sometimes.'
Anna looked at the wall next to the stove. There were three pictures of Lina — at three, ten, and sixteen.
'Sometimes I am at the market, I think I see her. But not like a grown-up girl, not like a young woman. A little girl. You know how little girls sometimes go off on their own, in their minds? Like maybe when they play with their dolls? The dolls to them are like real people?'
Byrne knew this well.
'My Lina was like this. She had a friend who was not there.'
Anna drifted away for a moment, then threw her hands up. 'We have a saying in Greece. The heart that loves is always young. She was my only grandchild. I will never have another. I have no one left to love.'
At the door Anna Laskaris held Byrne for a moment. Today she smelled of lemons and honey. It seemed to Byrne that she was getting smaller. Grief will do that, he thought. Grief needs room.
'It does not make me happy this man is dead,' Anna Laskaris said.
'God will find a place for him, a place he deserves. This is not up to you or me.'
Byrne walked to the van, slipped inside. He looked back at the house. There was already a fresh candle in the window.
He had grown up in the mist of the Delaware, and always did his best thinking there. As he drove to the river Kevin Francis Byrne considered the things he had done, the good and the bad.
You know.
He thought about Christa-Marie, about the night he met her. He thought about what she had said to him. He thought about his dreams, about waking in the night at 2:52, the moment he placed Christa- Marie under arrest, the moment everything changed forever.
You know.
But it wasn't you know. He had played back the recording he'd made of himself sleeping, listened carefully, and it suddenly became obvious.
He was saying blue notes.
It was about the silences between the notes, the time it takes for the music to echo. It was Christa-Marie telling him something for the past twenty years. Byrne knew in his heart that it all began with her. It would all end with her.
He looked at his watch. It was just after midnight.
It was Halloween.
Chapter 70
Sunday, October 31
I listen to the city coming to the day, the roar of buses, the hiss of coffee machines, the clang of church bells. I watch as leaves eddy from the trees, cascading to the ground, feeling an autumn chill in the air, the shy soubrette of winter.
I stand in the center of City Hall, at the nexus of Broad and Market streets, the shortest line between the two rivers, the beating heart of Philadelphia. I turn in place, look down the two great thoroughfares that cross my city. On each I will be known today.
The dead are getting louder. This is their day. It has always been their day.
I put up my collar, step into the maelstrom, the killing instruments a comfortable weight at my back.
What a saraband.
Zig, zig, zag.
Chapter 71
The massive stone buildings sat atop the rise like enormous birds of prey. The central structure, perhaps five stories tall, one hundred feet wide, gave way at either end to a pair of great wings, each of which bore a series of towers that fingered high into the morning sky.
The grounds surrounding the complex, at one time finely manicured, boasting Eastern Hemlock, Red Pine, and Box Elder, had fallen fallow decades earlier. Now the trees and shrubs were tortured and diseased, ravaged by wind and lightning. A once impressive arched stone bridge over the man-made creek that ringed the property had long ago crumbled.
In 1891 the archdiocese authorized and built a cloister on top of a hill, about forty miles northwest of Philadelphia, establishing a convent. The main building was completed in 1893, providing residence to more than four dozen sisters. In addition to the vegetables grown on the nearby fifteen acres of farmland, and grain for the artisan breads baked in the stone ovens, the fertile land around the facility provided food for shelters throughout Montgomery, Bucks, and Berks counties. The sisters' blackberry preserves won awards statewide.
In 1907 four of the sisters hanged themselves from a beam in the bell tower. The church, having trouble attracting novitiates to the nunnery, sold the buildings and property to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Five years later, with four new wings built onto the original building — including two tiered lecture halls, a pair of autopsy theaters, a state- of-the-art surgery, and a non-denominational chapel built into one of the apple groves — the Convent Hill Mental Health Facility opened its doors. With its two hundred beds, sprawling grounds, and expert staff, it soon gained a reputation as a thoroughly up-to-date hospital throughout the eastern United States.
In addition to its main purpose — the treatment and rehabilitation of the emotionally disturbed — the facility had a secure wing maintained and staffed by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Corrections. In its twenty beds slept some of the most notorious criminals of the early twentieth century.
By the early 1950s the facility's funding had begun to dry up. Staff were laid off, buildings were not maintained, equipment became outdated and plagued by time and disrepair. Rumors of inhumane conditions at Convent Hill circulated. In the 1970s a documentary film was made, showing deplorable and sickening conditions. Public and political outrage followed, with a million dollars being pumped into the coffers.
By 198 °Convent Hill had once again been forgotten. More gossip of corruption circulated, as did tales of incalculable horror. But the public can only be outraged about something for so long.
Convent Hill closed for good in 1992 and its inmates and patients were moved to other state-run mental health facilities, as well as to correctional facilities throughout New York and Pennsylvania.
Over the next eighteen years the grounds were bequeathed to the elements, the vandals, the ghost-hunters and derelicts. A few attempts were made to secure the facility, but with its nearly two hundred acres and many points of entry, much of it surrounded by forest, it was impossible.
The fieldstone wall near the winding road that led up to the entrance still bore a sign. As Kevin Byrne and Christa-Marie Schцnburg approached, Byrne noticed that someone had altered the sign, painting over it, rewording the message. It no longer announced entry to what had once been a state-of-the-art mental-health facility, a place of healing and rehabilitation, a place of serenity and peace.
It now announced entry to a place called Convict Hell.
As they drove the twisting road leading to the main buildings, a thin fog descended. The surrounding woods were cocooned in a pearl-gray mist.
Byrne thought about what he was doing. He knew the clock was ticking, that he was needed back in the city, but he also believed that the answers to many of his questions — past and present — were locked inside Christa- Marie's mind.
'Will you come back on Halloween?' she had asked. 'I want to show you a special place in the country. Well make a day of it. We'll have such fun.'
