not completely insane. Evangeline was about to turn around and return to St. Rose when she saw him.
Across the street, framed by a large, frosty picture window, was Verlaine.
Milton Bar and Grill, Milton, New York
HOW Evangeline had known that he needed her—that he was bloodied and stranded and, by now,
significantly drunk on Mexican beer—was an act Verlaine considered both miraculous and intuitive,
perhaps even a trick she’d learned in her years in the cloister, something altogether beyond his
powers of understanding. Nevertheless, there she was, walking slowly toward the tavern door, her
posture too perfect, her bobbed hair tucked behind her ears, her black clothes resembling, if he
stretched his imagination, the moody attire of the girls he’d dated in college, those dark, artistic,
mysterious girls he made laugh but could never convince to sleep with him. In a matter of seconds,
she’d walked through the barroom and taken a seat across from him, an elfin woman with large green
eyes who had clearly never been in a place like the Milton Bar and Grill before.
He watched as she gazed over his shoulder, taking in the scene, glancing at the pool table and
jukebox and dartboard. Evangeline didn’t appear to notice or to care that she appeared significantly
out of place among the crowd. Looking him over in the way one examines an injured bird, she
furrowed her eyebrows and waited for Verlaine to tell her what had happened to him in the hours
since their meeting.
“There was a problem with my car,” Verlaine said, avoiding the more complicated version of his
plight. “I walked here.”
Genuinely astonished, Evangeline said, “In this storm?”
“I followed the highway for the most part but got a little lost.”
“That is a long way to walk,” she said, a hint of skepticism in her voice. “I’m surprised you didn’t
get frostbitten.”
“I got a lift about halfway here. It’s a good thing, too, or I’d still be out there, freezing my ass off.”
Evangeline scrutinized him a bit too long, and he wondered if she objected to his language. She
was a nun, after all, and he should try to behave with a certain restraint, but he found it impossible to
read her. She was too different from his—admittedly stereotypical—vision of what a nun should be.
She was young and wry and too pretty to fit into the profile he had drawn in his mind of the severe
and humorless Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. He didn’t know how she did it, but there was
something about Evangeline that made him feel as if he could say anything at all.
“And why are you here?” he asked her, hoping his humor would come off the right way. “Aren’t
you supposed to be praying or doing good works or something?”
Smiling at his joke, she said, “As a matter of fact, I came to Milton to call you.”
It was his turn to be astonished. He wouldn’t have guessed that she would want to see him again.
“You’re kidding.”
“Not at all,” Evangeline replied, brushing a strand of dark hair from her eyes. Her manner had
turned serious. “There is no privacy at St. Rose. I couldn’t risk calling you from there. And I knew I
needed to ask you something that must remain between us. It is a very delicate matter, a matter upon
which I hope you can give me guidance. It is about the correspondence you’ve found.”
Verlaine took a drink of his Corona, struck by how vulnerable she looked, perched at the edge of
her bar chair, her eyes reddening from the thick cigarette smoke, her long, thin, ringless fingers
chapped from the winter cold. “There’s nothing I’d like to talk about more,” he said.
“Then you won’t mind,” she said, leaning forward against the table, “telling me where you found
these letters?”
“In an archive of Abigail Aldrich Rockefeller’s personal papers,” Verlaine said. “The letters were
not cataloged. They had been overlooked entirely.”
“You stole them?” Evangeline asked.
Verlaine felt his cheeks flush at Evangeline’s reprimand. “Borrowed. I will return them once I
understand their meaning.”
“And how many do you have?”
“Five. They were written over a period of five weeks in 1943.”
“All of them from Innocenta?”
“Not a Rockefeller in the bunch.”
Evangeline held Verlaine’s eyes, waiting for him to say more. The intensity of her gaze startled
him. Perhaps it was the interest she showed in his work—his research had been underappreciated,
even by Grigon—or maybe it was the sincerity of her manner, but he found himself anxious to please