her. All his fear, his frustration, the sense of futility he’d been carrying with him washed away.
“I need to know if there is anything at all in the letters about the sisters at St. Rose,” Evangeline
said, disturbing his thoughts.
“I can’t be sure,” Verlaine said, sitting back in his chair. “But I don’t think so.”
“Was there anything at all about a collaborator in Abigail Rockefeller’s work? Anything about the
convent or the church or the nuns?”
Verlaine was perplexed by the direction in which Evangeline was going. “I don’t have the letters
memorized, but from what I recall, there isn’t anything about the nuns at St. Rose.”
“But in Abigail Rockefeller’s letter to Innocenta,” Evangeline said, raising her voice over the
jukebox, her composure slipping, “she specifically mentioned Sister Celestine—‘Celestine Clochette
will be arriving in New York early February.’”
“Celestine Clochette was a nun? I’ve been trying all afternoon to figure out who Celestine was.”
“Is, ” Evangeline said, lowering her voice so that it was barely audible over the music. “Celestine
is a nun. She is very much alive. I went to see her after you left. She is elderly, and not very well, but
she knew about the correspondence between Innocenta and Abigail Rockefeller. She knew about the
expedition mentioned in the letter. She said a number of rather frightening things about—”
“About what?” Verlaine asked, growing more concerned by the second. “What did she say?”
“I don’t understand it exactly,” Evangeline said. “It was as though she were speaking in riddles.
When I tried to puzzle out their meaning, it made even less sense.”
Verlaine was torn between an impulse to embrace Evangeline, whose complexion had gone
completely pale, and wanting to shake her. Instead he ordered two more Coronas and slid his
handwritten copy of the Rocke-feller letter across the table. “Read this again. Maybe Celestine
Clochette was carrying an artifact from the Rhodope Mountains to St. Rose Convent? Did she tell you
anything about this expedition?” Forgetting that he hardly knew Evangeline, he reached across the
table and touched her hand. “I want to help you.”
Evangeline pulled her hand away from his, glanced at him suspiciously, and looked at her watch. “I
can’t stay. I’ve been gone too long already. You obviously don’t know much more about these letters
than I do.”
As the waitress set two beers before them, Verlaine said, “There must be more letters—at least
four more. Innocenta was clearly responding to Abigail Rockefeller. You could look for them. Or
perhaps Celestine Clochette knows where we can find them.”
“Mr. Verlaine,” Evangeline said in an imperious tone that struck Verlaine as forced, “I am
sympathetic to your search and to your desire to fulfill the wishes of your client, but I cannot
participate in something like that.”
“This has nothing to do with my client,” Verlaine said, taking a long drink of his beer. “His name is
Percival Grigori. He’s unbelievably awful; I should have never agreed to work for him. In fact, he
just had some thugs break into my car and take all my research papers. Clearly, he’s after something,
and if this something is the correspondence we’ve found—which I haven’t told him about, by the way
—then we should find the other half before he does.”
“Broke into your car?” Evangeline said, incredulous. “Is that why you’re stranded here?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Verlaine said, hoping to appear unconcerned. “Well, actually, yes, it does
matter. I need to ask you for a ride to a train station. And I need to know what Celestine Clochette
brought with her to America. St. Rose Convent is the only possible place it could be. If you could find
it—or at least look for the letters—we would be on our way to understanding what this is all about”
Evangeline’s expression softened slightly, as if weighing his request with care. Finally she said, “I
can’t promise you anything, but I’ll look.”
Verlaine wanted to hug her, to tell her how happy it made him to have met her, to beg her to come
back to New York with him and begin their work that very night. But seeing how anxious his attention
made her, he decided against it.
“Come on,” Evangeline said, picking up a set of car keys from the table. “I’ll give you a ride to the
train station.”
St. Rose Convent, Milton, New York
Evangeline had missed the communal meal in the cafeteria, just as she had missed lunch, leaving her