“Why, Mr. Thomas?”
“Brother Constantine is one of the lingering dead. I was given a key so I could let myself into anyplace on the property where he went poltergeist. I’ve been trying to…counsel him to move on.”
“You lead an interesting life, Mr. Thomas.”
“You’re no slouch yourself, sir.”
“You are even allowed access to John’s Mew.”
“We connected, sir. He makes good cookies.”
“You have a culinary bond.”
“Seems like we all do, sir.”
Sister Angela shook her head. “I can’t cook water.”
Romanovich threw the switch that beetled his hydraulic brow over his eyes. “Does he know of your gift?”
“No, sir.”
“I think you are his Mary Reilly.”
“I hope you aren’t becoming enigmatic again, sir.”
“Mary Reilly was Dr. Jekyll’s housekeeper. For all that he concealed from her, he subconsciously hoped that she would find him out and stop him.”
“Did this Mary Reilly end up killed, sir?”
“I do not recall. But if you have not actually done any dusting for Heineman, you may be safe.”
“What now?” asked Sister Angela.
“Mr. Thomas and I must make it alive into John’s Mew.”
“And out again alive,” I said.
Romanovich nodded. “We can certainly try.”
CHAPTER 47
THE STORM-SUITED MONKS NUMBERED TEN more than seven. Only two or three whistled while they worked. None was unusually short. As they secured the southeast and the northwest stairwells, however, I half expected Snow White to stop by with bottled water and words of encouragement.
In the interest of safety, the stairwell doors could not be locked. At each floor, the landing was a generous space, so the door opened into the stairwell instead of outward.
At the basement level, ground floor, and third floor, the monks drilled four holes in each door frame—two on the left, two right—and fitted them with steel sleeves. Into each sleeve, they inserted a half-inch-diameter bolt.
The bolts protruded an inch from the sleeves, preventing the door from opening. This scheme engaged not merely the strength of the frame but also of the entire wall in support of the door.
Because the sleeves were not threaded and were wider than the shafts inserted into them, the bolts could be plucked out in seconds to facilitate a hasty exit from the stairwell.
At the second floor, the children’s dormitory, the trick was to devise a way to prevent the doors from being pulled open in the unlikely event that something broke into the stairwell, through a bolt-reinforced door, at another level. Already the brothers were debating the merits of three security options.
From the southeast stairs, Romanovich and I enlisted Brother Knuckles, and from the northwest stairs, Brother Maxwell, for the defense of Jacob Calvino. Each of them brought two baseball bats in case the first was cracked in battle.
If the Mr. Hyde part of Brother John Heineman’s personality had an animus against all mentally and physically disabled people, then no child in the school was safe. Every one of them might be slated for destruction.
Common sense suggested, nonetheless, that Jacob—Let him die—remained the primary target. He would most likely either be the only victim or the first of many.
When we returned to Jacob’s room, he was for once not drawing. He sat in a straight-backed chair, and a pillow on his lap served as a hand rest when he needed it. Head bowed, intently focused, he was embroidering flowers with peach-colored thread on white fabric, perhaps a handkerchief.
At first, embroidery seemed to be an unlikely pursuit for him, but his workmanship proved to be exquisite. As I watched him finesse intricate patterns from needle and thread, I realized that this was no more remarkable—and no less—than his ability to summon detailed drawings from pencil lead with these same short broad hands and stubby fingers.
Leaving Jacob to his embroidery, I gathered with Romanovich, Knuckles, and Brother Maxwell at the only window.
Brother Maxwell had graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism. For seven years, he worked as a crime reporter in Los Angeles.
The number of serious crimes was greater than the number of reporters available to cover them. Every week, scores of industrious thugs and motivated maniacs committed outrageous acts of mayhem, and discovered, to their disgruntlement, that they had been denied even so much as two inches of column space in the press.
One morning, Maxwell found himself having to choose between covering a kinky-sex murder, an extremely violent murder committed with an ax and a pick and a shovel, a murder involving cannibalism, and the assault upon and ritual disfigurement of four elderly Jewish women in a group home.
To his surprise as well as to the surprise of his colleagues, he barricaded himself in the coffee room and would not come out. He had vending machines stocked with candy bars and peanut-butter-filled cheese crackers, and he figured he could go at least a month before he might develop scurvy due to severe vitamin C deficiency.
When his editor arrived to negotiate through the barricaded door, Maxwell demanded either to have fresh orange juice delivered weekly by ladder through the third-story coffee-room window—or to be fired. After considering those options for exactly the length of time that the newspaper’s vice president of employee relations deemed necessary to avoid a wrongful-termination lawsuit, the editor fired Maxwell.
Triumphant, Maxwell vacated the coffee room, and only later, at home, with a sudden gale of laughter, realized that he simply could have quit. Journalism had come to seem not like a career but like an incarceration.
By the time he finished laughing, he decided that his petit madness had been a divine gift, a call to leave Los Angeles and to go where he could find a greater sense of community and less gang graffiti. He had become a postulant fifteen years ago, then a novice, and for a decade he had been a monk under full vows.
Now he examined the window in Jacob’s room and said, “When this building was converted from the old abbey, some of the windows on the ground floor were enlarged and replaced. They have wood muntins. But on this level, the old windows remain. They’re smaller, and they’re solid bronze—rails, muntins, everything bronze.”
“Nothin’s gonna chop or chew through those too easy,” Brother Knuckles declared.
“And the panes,” said Romanovich, “are ten-inch squares. That brute we encountered in the storm would not fit through one. Indeed, if it managed to tear out the entire window, it would still be too large to get into the room.”
I said, “The one in the cooling tower was smaller than the one that smacked down the SUV. It couldn’t get through a ten-inch pane, but it’ll fit through an open window this size.”
“Casement window, opens outward,” Brother Maxwell noted, tapping the crank handle. “Even if it
smashed a pane and reached through, it would be blocking the window it was trying to open.”
“While clinging to the side of the building,” said Romanovich.
“In high wind,” Brother Maxwell said.
“Which it might be able to do,” I said, “while also keeping seven plates spinning atop seven bamboo poles.”
“Nah,” Brother Knuckles said. “Maybe three plates but not seven. We’re good here. This is good.”
Squatting beside Jacob, I said, “That’s beautiful embroidery.”
“Keeping busy,” he said, his head remaining bowed, his eyes on his work.
“Busy is good,” I said.
He said, “Busy is happy,” and I suspected that his mother had counseled him about the satisfaction and the peace that come from giving to the world whatever you are capable of contributing.
Besides, his work gave him a reason to avoid eye contact. In his twenty-five years, he had probably seen shock, disgust, contempt, and sick curiosity in too many eyes. Better not to meet any eyes except those of the nuns, and those you drew with a pencil and into which you could shade the love, the tenderness, for which you yearned.
“You’re going to be all right,” I said.
“He wants me dead.”
“What he wants and what he gets are not the same thing. Your mom called him the Neverwas because he was never there for the two of you when you needed him.”
“He’s the Neverwas, and we don’t care.”
“That’s right. He’s the Neverwas, but he’s also the Neverwill. He never will hurt you, never will get at you, not as long as I’m here, not as long as one sister or one brother is here. And they’re all here, Jacob, because you’re special, you’re precious to them, and to me.”
Raising his misshapen head, he met my eyes. He did not at once look shyly away, as always he had done previously.
“You all right?” he asked.
“I’m all right. Are you all right?”
“Yeah. I’m all right. You…you’re in danger?”
Because he would know a lie, I said, “Maybe a little.”