side pressed hard against the door.
She realized her lip was trembling. She was going to cry.
Stop it. Stop it.
The scratching stopped. The door knob ceased moving.
Quiet, except the hushed hiss of rain.
They’ve gone, she thought. Relief as sweet as cordial flooded through her. They’ve gone.
Then she heard another slow, sly noise down the hall.
The door to Miriam’s bedroom was creaking open.
Chapter 22
N icholas woke bleary-eyed with a splitting headache. It was quarter to nine. How had he slept so late? Then he remembered how frustratingly last night had gone. What a fractured quorum he’d convened: an Indian Christian minister, a recent widow arcane as a sphinx, a white witch forced a thousand kilometers away… and himself.
Well, it was like the old saying: If you want something fucked up properly, form a committee. That’s what he’d done. Who knew how much later into the night Pritam Anand and Laine Boye had kept arguing about whether Quill was alive or dead, whether the murders were connected or coincidence. Nicholas felt a fool for telling them so much.
Fuck them both.
He believed more than ever what he’d said last night: Quill was smart. She knew no one in their right mind could believe that a woman could live so long, could hide in the middle of a crowded suburb, could get away with so many murders.
He showered swiftly, dressed, slipped on the elderwood necklace. There was a pay phone outside the shops on Myrtle Street. He needed to see how Suzette was doing.
The world outside felt waterlogged. The torrential rain last night had swelled the gutters to fast-running freshets. The footpaths were wet, and the grass strips flanking them leaked water onto contiguous driveways. Gray clouds massed overhead, pressing down like monstrous fists and threatening to finish work left undone.
Nicholas jingled his pocket-a few coins, enough to phone Sydney and see if Nelson was improving. What if he wasn’t? What if he got worse? What if he died? He felt a slow wheel of fear tighten straps in his gut. Then it will be your fault.
A car slowed behind him. Then another vehicle slowed and stopped a few steps ahead of him. Police cars. Four doors opened and four officers stepped around him.
“Mr. Close?”
Nicholas recognized two of the police and smiled without an ounce of fondness. It was Waller, accompanied again by her huge mountain gorilla constable.
“Fossey and Silverback, together again. Don’t you guys miss Rwanda?”
Waller’s scowl didn’t budge a millimeter.
“Mr. Close, we’d like to ask you some questions.”
P ritam had been up since six.
He’d awoken sore and cold on the pew, and the sight that greeted his eyes was of Christ suddenly sideways, as if God had decided crucifixion was, in fact, a poor fate for His only begotten son and so had uprooted the cross.
Pritam stood, shambled to the presbytery, put on the kettle. He felt as if he’d had no sleep at all. Sipping tea, he unplugged the telephone, plugged in the modem, and switched on the church laptop.
Laine Boye had been right. If one dismissed Nicholas Close’s theories, boiled away the speculation and happenstance, all that was left was one simple coincidence: Eleanor Bretherton looked uncannily like Mrs. L. Quill. Pritam wished he could dismiss that as a fluke, but he’d seen John staring at Bretherton’s photo and turning pale. That was enough to warrant a bit of effort. He opened his search engine and started typing.
An hour later, Pritam sat back in his chair. He was stunned. His eyes stung from poor sleep and from staring at the screen, but his heart beat excitedly. His Internet searches had been an instinctive crawl, sniffing after suppositions, following flimsy hunches. He’d expected in his heart to find nothing. Instead, what he’d discovered shortened his breath. A quotation by Flavius Josephus crawled in his skull: “Now when Noah had lived three hundred and fifty years after the Flood, and all that time happily, he died, having lived the number of nine hundred and fifty years…”
Pritam.
The printer-he had to find the printer. Nicholas and Laine would need to see this-
Pritam?
He looked up. Was someone calling him?
He listened. Only the steady tocking of the clock, the whisper of drizzle. No.
Anyway, the printer. He’d seen it in the storeroom and-
“Pritam?”
He froze. There was someone calling him from outside. He went to the side window and peered out. He could see no one. However, the visitor could be round the front.
“Pritam!” came the voice again. A man’s voice, and his tone was urgent. Pritam fetched an umbrella from the hatstand.
“Pritam Anand!”
“Coming!” he called. He struggled to free the umbrella, accidentally pressed its button and it popped open, one rib jabbing him in the thigh. That’s bad luck, that.
“Pritam!”
He opened the door and hurried outside. The rain spat on the umbrella. He walked carefully along the slick path beside tall hibiscus bushes. The voice had come from the road fronting the church. There! He could see a figure on the opposite footpath. The man held an umbrella and leaned on a cane; his shadowed face was unclear through the drizzle.
“Pritam?”
Pritam squinted. The man’s stoop was familiar. But it couldn’t be…
“John?”
Reverend John Hird stood on the other side of the road. He waved the walking cane he held. Beside him was a small suitcase.
“They released me from the hospital! I’ve been trying to phone, but it’s been engaged all morning. Have you been downloading porn, you dirty black reprobate?”
Pritam smiled and frowned simultaneously.
“But, John, you… I saw you…” Had he dreamed Hird’s death? He was suddenly so tired, he wasn’t sure of anything.
“Here!” John waved him over. “Give me a hand.”
“Okay,” said Pritam, stepping onto the road. “But I don’t-”
The car hit him with a dull and meaty thud, and hurled him up the road. The driver slammed the brakes too hard and the car slid. One locked wheel snagged Pritam’s leg and ground flesh and bone into the bitumen. Car and victim finally stopped. The rain fell blindly.
The old woman watching from across the road hobbled quickly away.
T he kitchen smelled sharply of herbs and oils. In small, clean bowls were blue borage flowers, dandelion flowers, plucked waxy ivy leaves. In a glass bowl was maidenhair. In a mortar was a handful of poplar bulbs. Suzette lifted the heavy pestle and started pounding them into a tart, scented paste.
“What are you making?”
Suzette looked up. Quincy was in the doorway.
“I thought you were playing with Daddy?”
Quincy shrugged. “He fell asleep.”
Suzette nodded. Both she and Bryan were exhausted. They took turns watching over Nelson; neither was
