“Someone threatened him.”
Leo sneers. “Coward.”
Hearing a distant sound on the staircase, I drift back to my apartment door and unlock it. Then a thought comes to me. Someone still has our key, which means someone may have been coming and going from this apartment for two days. Or may even be inside.
“Your neighbors have been guarding the building,” Leo reassures me when I tell him as much. “Whoever broke in wouldn’t come back.”
“Right.”
Inside, nothing has changed. Leo reaches for the lights, but I nudge his hand away and point to the windows. “In case someone’s watching.”
Not liking the sound of that, he says, “Then what’s the plan?”
The moon gives the furniture an eerie glow. Without touching anything, I try to visualize what Sister Helena told me about the chronology of that night. She was sitting at the table when she heard a banging at the door. A voice calling for Simon and me. With my eyes I follow the path she took, carrying Peter toward the bedroom. The door opened before she got inside. That distance is less than twenty feet.
A breath slips out of me.
“Leo . . .”
He turns his eyes to the staircase, thinking I must’ve heard something. He doesn’t understand.
“Peter saw him,” I say.
“What?”
“Last night he woke up from a nightmare. He was screaming, I can see his face, I can see his face.”
“No. He would’ve said something, Al.”
“Sister Helena carried him. That’s what she told me: she carried him to the bedroom.”
She has always carried him the same way: pressed against her, with his head looking back over her shoulder.
“You really think?” Leo asks.
The telephone begins to ring, but I say, “When the gendarmes were here, he was too upset to talk. I didn’t bring it up after that. I didn’t want to worry him.”
I won’t wake him tonight. But I will have to find pictures for him to look at. Faces he might recognize.
The answering machine plays its message, but there’s no voice on the other end. Only a strange sound that resembles a door closing.
“Come on,” I say. “Let’s go.”
But suddenly I feel Leo’s hand on me. Pushing me back. He’s staring at something in the apartment doorway. The hulking silhouette of a man.
“Who are you? ” Leo demands. “Identify yourself! ”
I back up.
The shape doesn’t make a sound. It only extends an arm.
The lights go on.
An old man shuffles into the room. The pupils of his eyes flex. He has raised an arm in the air to shield himself from the light, or perhaps to stop Leo from attacking. It’s Brother Samuel, one of the pharmacists from next door.
“Father Alex,” he says. “You’re back.”
“What are you doing here, Brother?”
“I tried calling.”
“What’s wrong?”
He’s tense. His voice has a queer note of rehearsal. Of delivering a message that isn’t his own.