Mare’s eyes took in her cramped studio apartment. “Sorry for how it looks,” she said.
A dangling naked lightbulb was covered with a Japanese paper lantern to soften its glare. The room held a few sticks of Ikea furniture, a tired mustard yellow sofa handed down from better decades, and a framed poster of a scared kitty dangling from a branch (the ubiquitous one that says, “Hang in There”). On the far wall was a closed door. Frank suspected a Murphy bed was lurking behind it, since there was no bed in sight.
Mare followed Frank’s glance to the poster. “Not mine. I’d take it down, but it was a gift.”
She kept the place tidy, what there was of it. All she could afford was a converted basement in an old triple-decker that started life as an Irish boarding house. Mare’s apologies had started at the curb before she and Frank even entered the yard enclosed by a chain-link fence. Withered junipers did nothing to beautify the sagging wreck of a building. Self-consciously, she led the way down a set of creaky stairs off the side of the house. Their shoes punched through the crusted old snow that no one had shoveled from the walk.
She shouldn’t have bothered with her apologies. At the moment the only thing on Frank’s mind was seeing the miniature church she had hidden in a laundry hamper. Somebody had gone to the expense of gilding it, or even making it out of solid gold. Frank suspected there might be something locked inside that was even more precious to a believer. What do you call the receptacle that holds a saint’s bones? A reliquary. It would border on blasphemy, but he wanted to hold the little church up to his ear and shake it. The sacred bones inside, if that’s what was hiding there, would rattle, unless they had already crumbled to dust.
As long as he was speculating, what about the incidental mysteries that swirled around Mare? Why had her mother put a death notice in the paper? She had no real evidence her sister was dead, just a cryptic phone message from the convent.
Frank had put this question to Mare on the ride across town. All she did was shake her head and say, “You don’t know what she’s like. My mother always assumes the worst.”
“But your aunt is out there somewhere. You told her that, right?”
“Yes. I told her everything I told you, except about the box.”
At every red light, Mare’s car had skidded on the icy streets. Frank was a bad passenger; he held a tight grip on the door handle to keep from grabbing the wheel.
“Maybe the wish is father of the deed,” he suggested.
Mare gave him a puzzled glance. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Another skid zone was coming up at the next corner, where a big furniture truck was sliding halfway through the yellow light.
“Just keep us alive, okay?” Frank said. “I meant that if your mother resented her sister vanishing like that ten years ago, she might not be thrilled to have her back.”
“So she makes her dead?”
“I’m just thinking out loud. Where do you suppose your aunt would go? You should have pumped the nuns for information.”
“Says the man who has so much experience pumping nuns for information. Have you ever tried?”
“Point taken.”
Other questions were on the tip of Frank’s tongue, until he remembered his promise not to act like a reporter. He kept quiet the rest of the way, and so did Mare. He noticed that her knuckles were turning white seizing the steering wheel. One step at a time, he told himself.
Inside her apartment, Mare tossed some shoes aside in the bottom of her closet and brought out a laundry hamper. A dirty sheet was on top, ready to be pulled back like a stage curtain.
“Once you see it, you’re kind of complicit, aren’t you?” Mare asked.
“In a way, I guess. Assuming we don’t turn it over to the police.”
“Yes, assuming that.”
Frank caught a new note in her voice. She had sounded guilty and furtive, but this was something different. Greed, was it? But that would be understandable. The fantasy of finding buried gold was part of growing up, and now it had pretty much come true for her. How far would she go to keep it? Before revealing the treasure to him, she could still change her mind, and the gold’s secret would be safe.
Mare hadn’t turned back, though. She stood over the laundry hamper, and with a whisk she lifted the sheet, revealing the reliquary. It looked exactly like a miniature church. If the naked lightbulb hadn’t had a paper lantern on it, the gleam of pure gold would have hurt their eyes. The object was the size of a loaf of bread. Even hollow, it would be heavy.
“Who’s going to lift it out?” Frank asked.
“I’ll let you, if that’s okay.”
Frank wrapped his hands around the miniature church, and as the object emerged from its hiding place, he could see how beautiful it was, carefully wrought on all sides with etched flourishes, tiny flowers, and a border of summer grass fringing the bottom. The conceit was of a chapel sitting in a meadow. The peaked roof was adorned with gothic steeples at the corners, each one topped with a cross. Delicate enamel medallions were embedded on the four walls, painted with scenes from the life of Jesus.
Frank was too astonished to do anything but make light of it. “As the world’s leading art experts would say, ‘Wow.’”
They gazed at the treasure. Frank had been raised as a Christmas-Easter churchgoer by his lax Methodist parents (in the vernacular, their kind are called “Chreasters” by the regular congregation), but at that moment he felt what a devout believer must feel: reverence, wonder, awe. That’s the trick of great art, he thought, and he hadn’t the slightest doubt that they were in the presence of great art.
“It must have a home somewhere. Somebody knows it’s missing,” he murmured, finding it hard not to whisper, as if they were in church. “They would have reported it stolen to the local authorities or the FBI.”
He’d read about the thousands of paintings stolen from museums every year and the special agencies that track them down. Not to mention the Nazis and their wholesale looting. They had boosted millions of dollars’ worth of artworks from all over Europe to haul back to Hitler’s Berlin.
Heavy as it was, the miniature chapel didn’t have the weight of a solid object. But Frank was too spellbound to rattle it, even though he still suspected that something precious was locked inside. To true believers, that was the whole point. The gold exterior was just a distraction to dazzle the eyes.
For pilgrims in the Middle Ages, traveling immense distances across Europe in search of relics was a costly and dangerous business. After all the trials and dangers of their journey, when they reached a shrine, they expected to be awed before a holy relic—apiece of the True Cross, the jawbone of John the Baptist, the spear that pierced Jesus’s side. There had to be a payoff, and if there weren’t enough true relics to go around, well, what better way to convince pilgrims that a dubious relic was authentic than to strike awe with shining gold?
Frank’s own sense of awe was quickly yielding to more practical thoughts. “I don’t think it’s empty,” he said. “Did you shake it?”
“No, I couldn’t.”
“Because it’s sacrilege?”
“Isn’t it?”
“We need to get inside,” Frank declared firmly.
But how? It would draw heavy suspicion to try and get the object X-rayed at a museum laboratory, not to mention the expense. There couldn’t be many machines that can see through gold. And what would the faint ghostly image of some old bones really tell them? Frank’s impatience grew. He was about to shake the reliquary without her permission when Mare touched his hand.
“I suddenly had the strangest feeling. There’s someone sleeping inside it. I can feel it.”
“And you don’t think we should wake them up?”
“Something like that.”
Frank shook his head. “Let’s assume for the moment that your idea isn’t crazy. We don’t know if waking them up is good or bad.”
“It wouldn’t matter. Not if they are meant to sleep.”
Before he could respond, the gate in the chain-link fence clinked, and a shadow passed across the room’s only window, which was small and high up, letting in a feeble light from the outside. Someone was approaching. If they burst in, the first thing they’d see would be a man kneeling on the floor surrounded by five pairs of women’s shoes and a woman turning red, her hand clapped over her mouth with embarrassment. It wasn’t the time to wake the sleeping or the dead.
“Hurry!” Mare exclaimed.
Frank dropped the reliquary back into the hamper, and she threw the sheet back over it. Was she about to be arrested for having it in her possession?
“Wait, don’t talk. Listen,” said Frank.
Click, click, click. A woman’s light, tapping step. It was unmistakable. The police wouldn’t be storming the place in high heels. Frank had no time to wonder what kind of woman wears stilettos in the snow.
A very irritated woman, it turned out. There was a sharp rap at the door. Mare opened it nervously. The intruder on their privacy was tall and in her sixties, her graying hair pulled back tightly from her face, which at that moment wore an impatient grimace.
“I won’t ask if you have come into possession of a package,” she said. “You’d probably just lie.” Her voice was clipped and efficient, the kind of voice that meant business.
Mare couldn’t hide her nerves. “Who are you?”
“Miss Marple. Perhaps you’ve heard of me.”
“What?”
“My name is Lilith. That’s enough for now. I’d advise you to let me in.”
Mare gave a weak nod and stepped aside. Lilith looked around the modest apartment with a critical eye.
“You never know where you’ll wind up, do you?” she murmured, addressing no one in particular. For the moment she ignored Frank, who stood in front of the open closet.
“Your Aunt Meg is alive,” she said. “But you’ve probably figured that out already, haven’t you?”
“What do you have to do with her?” asked Mare.
Lilith thought for a moment. “I’m a connection, just as she is. That’s one way to put it.” She plopped herself down on the mustard yellow couch, which gave a tired groan. “When your aunt disappeared from the convent, something precious disappeared with her.”
“Then you’d have to ask her about that,” Mare replied.
“Don’t play coy. The trail leads here and nowhere else.”
Mare lowered her head, and Lilith’s eyes narrowed.
“That’s what I thought,” she said before turning her attention to Frank.
“And you are who? The boyfriend?”
“Imagine what you like,” he replied.
She shrugged. “No. You’re not the boyfriend. She’s clearly nervous, but you didn’t rush in to help her or even put your arm around her. A boyfriend would have.”
“No comment.”
“Why can’t he just be a friend?” Mare asked.
Lilith smiled knowingly. “Because you did something rash. You invited a strange man into your house. For what reason?”
“None of your business,” Frank snapped.
Lilith fixed him with a hard stare. “I’m more likely to figure out your game before this young woman does.”
Frank bristled. “There is no game.”
“Really? You plan to get the goods and the girl at the same time, or will you have to choose?”
Frank turned red, but before he could deny the accusation, Lilith held up her hand.
“You’re right. It’s none of my business what you’re up to. I’m here about the gold shrine. It holds the key to everything.”
Mare had been moving toward the closet, either to guard the treasure or show it to Lilith. Frank couldn’t be sure. He shot her a warning glance. If Lilith noticed, she chose to ignore it.
She said, “The trouble is, whoever has the shrine is meant to have it. That’s the first of the secrets I can tell you.” She gave Mare a smile that was almost friendly. “You’re the rightful owner, I promise you.”
Mare looked so relieved that she would have blurted out everything that had happened since the phone call from the convent, but Frank stopped her. “We’re not giving this shrine or whatever it is, just because you deliver a load of mumbo jumbo.”
Lilith smirked. “There, that’s more like a boyfriend.”
Frank changed tack. As a reporter, he’d learned to handle all kinds of difficult people, and his first rule was, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
“Maybe we can work something out,” he said.
“We? Who gave you the right to say ‘we’?” Mare cried. “I don’t really know either of you.”
She spoke in a loud, anxious voice, and the other two stared at her. Up to this point she’d played the part of the quiet observer, a shaky fawn caught in a room with two bulls.
“I didn’t mean anything,” Frank stammered.
“No?” said Mare. She took a deep breath, trying to regain her composure. But her heart was racing. Her body couldn’t deny the threat it was feeling.
“You pushed too hard,” Lilith said smoothly. “That’s what insensitive people do.”
She turned to Mare. “And you need to calm down. I’m only here to help.”
Lilith brushed stray bits of snow sticking to her high heels. “I appreciate your wariness. We all have to be as sharp-witted as possible from now on. There are invisible forces at work. Do you imagine the gold shrine came to you, or to your Aunt Meg, by accident?”
The atmosphere in the room was still tense, but a subtle shift had taken place. It was now the tenseness of a mystery more than the tenseness of a threat. Lilith took advantage of this. To Frank she said, “You noticed my shoes when I came in. What do they tell you?”
“They tell me that you were doing something else—maybe eating at a fancy restaurant—before you suddenly got the news that brought you here. No time to change.”
“So you’re a rationalist,” Lilith said approvingly. “You reached for a logical explanation. Someone else might assume I was eccentric or out of touch with reality.”
“Are you?” Mare asked. She had wandered over to the corner of the studio that served as a kitchen and was holding a battered teakettle under the faucet.
“That’s right,” said Lilith. “Make tea. It will calm your nerves.” Her tone had become less confrontational. “Your mother is still frantic. I apologize, but we can’t let her in on any of this. I hope you understand.”
“Outside attention would be unwelcome,” said Frank.
“Exactly.”
Mare turned on the tap, talking over the knocking sound of old plumbing. “But I don’t understand. Do you know where my aunt is?”
“She’s here in the city.”
“Can I see her?”
“Not yet. After all, you haven’t wanted to see her for a long time. No need to rush.”
Mare went silent, considering what to say next, when her cell phone rang. She went to her purse, pulled it out, and examined the caller ID.
“My sister Charlotte,” she said doubtfully.
“Answer it,” Lilith advised. “She’ll be suspicious if you avoid her.”
Mare took the call, and from across the room Frank could hear the angry buzz of her sister’s voice. Questions were being jabbed at Mare, which she fended off with short replies. But it wasn’t the words that mattered. Frank sensed that they were closing in. He had no idea who “they” were, but his antennae were out, picking up signals. Mare was the innocent; that part wasn’t in doubt. Lilith was a wild card, and behind her seemed to loom hidden figures, hinted at but invisible so far.
Mare closed her outdated cell phone with a click, cutting short the conversation. She looked worried.
“You won’t be able to keep your nosey sister away for long,” Lilith warned.
“But that doesn’t mean we should trust you, does it?” Frank snapped.
Mare let the “we” slip past without comment this time. Her bewilderment outweighed her doubts about Frank.
He crossed the room and held her hand. “Don’t be scared. We’re in the strong position here, just remember that,” he said quietly.
“Touching,” Lilith remarked. “But you’re not allies yet, not by a long shot. The only ally anyone has is tucked away in there.” She pointed toward the closet, which had so obviously been the place Mare was anxious to conceal. “One of you is dazzled by the gold, because that person has a crass mind. But one of you is sensitive, and that person will pierce to the heart of the mystery.”
She saw the dark expression on Frank’s face. “We’ll get nowhere fighting. I propose we get down to business instead. Are we agreed?” she asked.
Lilith sat back, waiting while tea bags were put into chipped blue-and-white china cups and water poured in. When the tea was brewed, she began talking.
“This all goes back ten years ago. Your Aunt Meg woke up one morning from a bad dream. It was an unusually cold winter, like this one. Her sleep had been restless. She crawled out of bed, trying to shake off her dream, but she couldn’t. It wouldn’t let her go. You see, it wasn’t a dream at all. It was a vision. She hadn’t asked for one. It seems rude of God to interrupt a person’s nice, comfortable life with something so inconvenient. But what can you do?”
Frank gave her a disgusted look. “Nobody you can trust hauls in God.”
“You sound very bitter,” said Lilith calmly. “Did someone hurt you, to make you lose your faith? Or is that something you’d rather keep hidden?”
“None of your damn business!”
Frank threw down his teacup, which missed the table and clattered on the floor. “I don’t know who you are. But Mare doesn’t deserve to be played by a manipulative bitch.”
He turned to Mare for support, but she surprised him.
“I want to hear this out.” she said quietly.
“Why? It’s garbage.”
Mare was firm. “You’ve gotten yourself worked up. Maybe you should go.”
“And leave you with her?” Frank was incredulous. “She’ll be on you like a cheap suit.”
Mare didn’t reply, but got up and walked to the door. Frank grabbed his peacoat and followed, fuming.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Mare said, trying to sound reassuring.
Frank shook his head. “You’re going to be sorry. That’s all I can say.”
He trudged up the rickety stairs, and a moment later his shadow went across the grimy window as he tramped through the snow.
Mare closed the door and returned to where Lilith sat, waiting.
“I need to hear the rest of this,” she said. “For my peace of mind.”
Lilith shook her head. “No, you need to hear it because God wants the story to come out.”