over the very spot where the old priest, Father DiGennaro, had collapsed just a few nights before, the cell phone spilling from his hand. There was nothing to mark it now, nothing to alert anyone passing by that a man had died there. But then, she sometimes thought there was no place on earth that didn’t bear that same stain; others might not see them, but she could, everywhere. Live long enough, she thought, and the whole world starts to look like a graveyard.
The onyx urn containing Randolph’s ashes rested on a marble pedestal, and from time to time the priest looked over at it with a show of deference, as if it contained some presence, some essence… -something other than what it did, which was purely dust and rubble. Kathryn had no illusions. For someone in her position, it would have been impossible to feel otherwise.
When the priest intoned his last prayer and the ceremony was over, Kathryn said good-bye to the other mourners from under her black veil. Randolph’s sisters, with whom she had never gotten along, trailed out, dragging their spoiled progeny, and the boating pals shook her hand, no doubt heading off to the yacht club to get drunk in his honor.
Father Flanagan came to her side, and after she had thanked him for his words, he said, “No, I must thank you.”
“For what?”
Gesturing upward, where the hats of the previous Cardinals had been reattached to the rafters and the ceiling work was again under way, he said, “I was told that you had made a very generous contribution to the church, to cover all the expenses of the roof repair.”
That she had done. Out of guilt. If she hadn’t given the old priest such a shock, he might have one day died, peacefully, in his own bed, instead of on these cold stones. The next day, she’d written a check. Writing checks was easy.
“May I escort you out?” he asked, but she said that wasn’t necessary. Cyril had already taken the urn in his gloved hands and walked her down the aisle to the great double doors with their Tree of Life motif.
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.”
Kathryn stepped into the vault, and Cyril closed the vault behind her. A pair of casement windows, their glass as occluded as the door, allowed a pale nimbus of light to infiltrate the chamber, which was larger than it appeared from outside. The marble walls at this level were inscribed with various quotes from Scripture, and a bust of Archibald Van Owen, the bearded railroad baron who had founded the family fortune in the late 1800s, glowered over anyone entering.
A few steps down, the chamber opened up, and on the granite slabs to either side rested perhaps a dozen caskets, their brass handles tarnished with age, their once-gleaming wood now dull and covered with a thick film of dust. And on two shelves that ran around the four walls of the crypt, there were a host of urns, in everything from porphyry to porcelain, containing the cremated remains of other family members. The air inside was cold, but not altogether still-the place in the ceiling where the vine had broken through allowed the tiniest hint of fresh air. In the uppermost corner, a spiderweb a yard wide trembled, and the marble beneath it bore a broad yellow- and-green stain from the seepage of rain and melting snow.
A wave of repulsion swept over her, but not from the cold or the dreadful occupants of the place. It was the sight of the black spider herself, scuttling across the fine filaments, reacting no doubt to the unusual air currents in the room and thinking her web might have trapped some unlucky prey; first the spider went one way, then the other, looking in vain. And Kathryn, trapped for centuries in a web from which there was no apparent escape, could not help but feel like prey herself.
Stepping down, she went to the wall and, raising a gloved hand, cleared a space on the shelf, before placing the urn holding Randolph’s remains on it. For a few seconds, she let her hand rest atop it, as if in benediction; but in actuality she was simply waiting for some corresponding emotion, some sense of finality or even sorrow.
But there was nothing. It was a scene she had played already, too often, and it had grown stale. Her heart was as dead as the occupants of the crypt.
Instead, she found herself thinking of other times, now long removed. Times when she had genuinely been
