Virgin (29 page)

Vincenzo
shouted out as he saw her step off the bulkhead, but the cry died in his throat
when he saw her continue walking with an unbroken stride . . . upon the fog. He
stood gaping on the edge as she canted her path to the right and continued
walking downstream. He watched until the fog swallowed her, then he lurched
about, searching for someone, anybody to confirm what he had just seen.

But the quay
was deserted. The only witnesses were the fog and the River Lee.

Vincenzo rubbed
his eyes and stumbled back toward the pub. The doctors had told him to stay
away from alcohol, that his liver couldn't handle it. He should have listened.
He must be drunk. That was the only explanation.

Otherwise he
would have sworn he'd just seen the Virgin Mary.

The Judean Wilderness

Kesev sobbed.
He was still alive.
When will this END?

He'd tried
numerous times before to kill himself but had not been allowed to die. He'd
hoped that this time it would work, that his miserable failure to guard the
Resting Place would cause the Lord to finally despair of him and let him die.
But that was not to be. So here was yet another failure. One more in a too-long
list of failures.

The jolt from
the sudden shortening of the rope had knocked him unconscious but had left his
vertebrae and spinal cord intact. Its constriction around his throat had failed
to strangle him. So now he'd regained consciousness to find himself swinging
gently in
Sharav
a dozen feet above the ground.

For a few
moments he let tears of frustration run the desert dust that coated his cheeks,
then he reached into his pocket for his knife and began sawing at the rope
above his head.

Moments later
he was slumped on the ground, pounding his fists into the unyielding earth.

"Is it not
over, Lord?" he rasped. "Is that what this means? Do You have more
plans for me? Do You want me to search out the Mother and return her to the
Resting Place? Is that what You wish?"

Kesev struggled
to his feet and staggered to his Jeep. He slumped over the hood.
That had to be it. The Lord was not through with him yet.
Perhaps He would never be through with him. But clearly He wanted more from him
now. He wanted the Mother back where she belonged and was not about to allow
Kesev to stop searching for her.

But where else
could he look? She'd been smuggled out of Israel and now could be hidden
anywhere in the world. There were no clues, no trail to follow . . .

Except the
Ferris woman. Who was she? Had that strange, unsettling nun on the plane been
her, or someone pretending to be her? And did it matter? All he knew was that
the Explorer he'd seen in the desert that day had been rented on her card.
There might be no connection at all. The Mother could have been stolen days
before then.

He gazed up
into the cold, unblinking eye of the night.

"All right, Lord. I'll continue looking. But I search now on
my
terms,
my
way. I'll find the Mother for You and bring her back where
she belongs. But you may not like what I do to the ones who've caused me this
trouble."

P
art III

Miracles

16

Manhattan

Dan finished
tightening the last screw in the swivel plate. He flipped the latch back and
forth, watching with inordinate satisfaction how easily its slot slipped over
the swivel eye. He fitted the shackle of the brand-new combination padlock
through the eye.

"We're in
business, Carrie."

She didn't
answer. She was busy inside the coal room with the Virgin. Or maybe
busy
wasn't
the right word. Carrie was engrossed, preoccupied, fascinated,
enraptured
with
the Virgin.

The Virgin .
. . Dan had heard Carrie refer to the body
or statue or whatever it was so often as "the Virgin" that he'd begun
thinking of it that way himself. Certainly easier than referring to it as the
Whatever.

After an
uneventful trans-Atlantic trip, the Virgin had arrived in New York late last
night. He and Carrie were on the docks first thing this morning to pick her up.
She breezed through customs and together they spirited her crate through the
front door to St. Joe's basement, through the Loaves and Fishes kitchen, and down
here to the subcellar. The old coal furnace that used to rule this nether realm
had been dismantled and carted off when the diocese switched the church to gas
heat. That left a wide open central space and a separate coal room that used to
be fed by a chute from the alley. Carrie had chosen the old coal room as the
perfect hiding place. It was ten by ten, the chute had
been sealed up long ago, and it had a door, although the
door had no lock. Until now.

Dan opened the
door and stuck his face inside. He experienced an instant of disorientation, as
if he were peering into the past, intruding upon an ancient scene from the
Roman catacombs. A functioning light fixture was set in the ceiling, but it was
off. Instead, flickering candlelight filled the old coal room, casting wavering
shadows against the walls and ceiling. Dan had lugged one of the folding tables
from the mission down here a couple of days ago and placed it where Carrie had
directed, and that had been just about the last he'd seen of her until this
morning. She'd spent every spare moment of the interval feverishly dusting,
scrubbing, and dressing up the room, draping the table with a blanket, setting
up wall sconces for the candles, appropriating flowers left behind in the
church after weddings or funerals, making a veritable shrine out of the coal
room.

A short while
ago they'd opened the crate and he'd helped her place the Virgin's board-stiff
body on the table. Carrie had been fussing with her ever since.

"I said,
the latch is in place, Carrie. Want to come see?"

She was bending
over the body where it rested on the blanket-draped table, straightening her
robe. She didn't look up.

"That's
all right. I know you did a great job."

"I
wouldn't say it's a great job," Dan said, leaning back and surveying his
work. "Adequate's more like it. Won't keep out anybody really determined
to get in, but it should deter the idly curious."

"That's
what we want," she said, straightening. She turned toward him and held out
her hand. "Come see."

Dan moved to
her side and laid an arm across her shoulders. A warm tingle spread over his
skin as he felt her arm slip around his back. This was the closest they'd been
since leaving Israel.

"Look at
her," she said. "Isn't she beautiful?"

Dan didn't know
how to answer that. He saw the waxy body of an old woman with wild hair and
mandarin fingernails, surrounded by candles and wilting flowers. He
knew Carrie was seeing something else. Her eyes were wide
with wonder and devotion, like a young mother gazing at her newborn first
child.

"You did a
wonderful job with this place. No one would ever know it was once a coal
room."

"And no
one should ever know otherwise," she said. 'This is our little secret,
right?"

"Right.
Our
little
secret. Our
big
secret is us." Dan turned and
wrapped his other arm around her. "And speaking of us . . ."

Carrie slipped
from his embrace. "No, Dan. Not now. Not here. Not with . . . her."

Dan tried to
hide his hurt. Just being in the same room with Carrie excited him. Touching
her drove him crazy. Used to drive her crazy too. What was wrong?

"When
then? Where? Is your brother--?"

"Let's
talk about it some other time, okay? Right now I've got a lot still left to
do."

"Like what?"

"I have to
cut those nails, and fix her hair."

"She's not
going on display, Carrie."

"I know,
but I want to take care of her."

"She's not
a--" Dan bit off the rest of the sentence.

"Not a
what?"

He'd been about
to say Barbie doll but had cut himself off in time.

"Nothing.
She did fine in that cave with nobody fussing over her."

"But she's
my
responsibility now," Carrie said, staring at the Virgin.

"Okay,"
Dan said, repressing a sigh. "Okay. But not your only responsibility.
We've still got meals to serve upstairs. I'm sure she wouldn't want you to let
the guests down."

"You go
ahead," she said. "I'll be up in a few minutes."

"Good."
Dan wanted out of here. The low ceiling, the dead flowers . . . the atmosphere
was suddenly oppressive. "You remember the lock combination?"

"Twelve,
thirty-six, fourteen."

"Right.
See you upstairs."

He watched
Carrie, waiting for her to look his way, but she had eyes only for the Virgin.

Shaking his head, Dan turned away. This wouldn't last, he told
himself. Carrie would come around soon. Once it seeped into her devotion-fogged
brain that her Virgin was merely an inert lump, she'd return to her old self.

But there was
going to be an aching void in his life until she did.

Carrie listened
to Dan's shoes scuff up the stone steps as she pulled the Ziploc bag from her
pocket and removed the scissors from it.

Poor Dan, she
thought, looking down at the Virgin. He doesn't understand.

Neither did
she, really. All she knew was that everything had changed for her. She could
look back on her fourteen years in the order--fully half of her life--and
understand for the first time what had brought her to the convent, what had
prompted her to take a vow of chastity and then willfully break it.

"It was
you, Mother," she said, whispering to the Virgin as she began to trim the
ragged ends of dry gray hair that protruded from under the wimple. "I came
to the order because of you. You are the Eternal Virgin and I wanted to be like
you. Yet I could never be like you because my virginity was already gone . . .
stolen from me. But you already know the story."

She'd spoken to
the Blessed Virgin countless times in her prayers, trying to explain herself.
She'd always felt that Mother Mary would understand. Now that they were face to
face, she was compelled to tell her once more, out loud, just to be sure she
knew.

"I wanted
a new start, Mother. I wanted to be born anew with that vow. I wanted to be a
spiritual virgin from that day forward. But I couldn't be. No matter how many
showers I took and scrubbed myself raw, no matter how many novenas I made and
plenary indulgences I received, I still felt
dirty."

She slipped the
hair trimmings into the plastic bag. These
cuttings
could not be tossed into a Dumpster or even flushed away. They were sacred.
They had to remain here with the Virgin.

"I hope
you can understand the way I felt, Mother, because I can't imagine you ever
feeling dirty or unworthy. But the dirtiness was not the real problem. It was
the hopelessness that came with it--the inescapable certainty that I could never
be clean again. That's what did me in, Mother. I knew what your Son promised, that
we have but to believe and ask forgiveness and we shall be cleansed. I knew the
words, I understood them in my brain, but in my heart was the conviction that
His forgiveness was meant for everyone but Carolyn Ferris. Because Carolyn
Ferris had done the unspeakable, the unthinkable, the unpardonable."

She kept
cutting, tucking the loose trimmed ends back under the Virgin's wimple.

"I've been
to enough seminars and read enough self-help books to know that I was
sabotaging myself--I didn't feel worthy of being a good nun, so I made damn sure
I never could be one. I regret that. Terribly. And even more, I regret dragging
Dan down with me. He's a good man and a good priest, but because of me he broke
his own vow, and now he's a sinning priest."

Carrie felt
tears welling in her eyes.
Damn, I've got a lot to answer for.

"But all
that's changed now," she said, blinking and sniffing. "Finding you is
a sign, isn't it? It means I'm not a hopeless case. It means He thinks I can
hold to my vows and make myself worthy to guard you and care for you. And if He
thinks it, then it must be so."