Cradle of Solitude (8 page)

It was a beautiful day for driving. The sun was shining in a bright blue sky, and for a time Annja forgot about the morning's events and simply enjoyed the scenery. The farther she got from Paris, the more the landscape changed. The rolling green hills gradually gave way to the foothills of the mountains and by the time she reached the final hour of her drive she was winding her way through narrow mountain passes and verdant pine valleys. As she neared her destination, her thoughts turned to the meeting ahead of her. She decided the best plan of action was to simply lay it all out there for the abbot, letting him know what had happened so far. Whoever had broken into the museum had gotten the scrap of paper with the monastery name on it, along with the rest of their discoveries. They might not be able to put the puzzle pieces together as swiftly as she and Bernard had, but there wasn't any reason to believe that they couldn't do it. That meant the thieves could very well be on their way to the monastery at any time. The abbot deserved to know if the people under his care
were in danger and she had no intention of keeping that information from him.

She glanced out the window, taking in a nearby river as she drove on past, and then, as she came around a bend in the road, she got a glimpse of the monastery for the first time.

It sat on the edge of a high promontory, like a castle guarding the mountain approach. In fact, it looked sort of like a castle, fashioned of stone that shone in the bright sunshine, with high crenellated towers and several balconies that jutted out from the protective walls.

More twists and turns in the road kept the monastery from view, until about fifteen minutes later when she found the way forward blocked by a locked set of wrought-iron gates. They were twice her height and barred entrance to the property. A small bell hung off to one side and with no better idea of how to get the attention of those she had come to see, she drove up next to the bell, grasped the rope and gave it a solid yank.

The bell rang crisp and clear. Several minutes passed, long enough that Annja was thinking about giving it another pull, when the front door of a small shack on the other side of the gates that she hadn't noticed before opened and a man dressed in the brown robes and sandals of a Benedictine monk stepped out. He came down the walk and stood on the other side of the gate from her, a questioning expression on his face.

When he didn't say anything after a moment, Annja volunteered through the gate, “I have an appointment to see the abbott.”

The monk raised his eyebrows and then mimed seeing some ID, still without saying anything.

The monk was under a vow of silence, she realized. Annja dug her driver's license out of her backpack and
then got out of the car so she could hand it over to him. He glanced at it, compared the picture on it to her face and then triggered a switch that opened the gates electronically. He handed her a photocopy of a hand-drawn map to follow.

She drove through the gates and continued onward through the trees for a few hundred yards until she emerged into an open space, a parking area roped off on her right with the bulk of the monastery rising up on her left.

She parked the car and got out, surveying the massive structure in front of her. She'd expected something small, innocuous, not this sprawling behemoth of a monastery that seemed to occupy every square inch of the promontory on which it was built.

Some kind of warning must have passed from the guard shack to the monastery itself, for another brown-robed monk was waiting for her on the front steps.

He watched her without saying anything as she got out of the car and approached along the walk. It was only when she actually reached the top of the steps that he let a smile settle on his face and stepped forward with his hand out.

“Good morning, Miss Creed. I'm Brother Samuel.”

Annja shook the offered hand, a relieved smile on her face. For a minute there she'd thought he, too, was under a vow of silence. “Pleased to meet you,” she told him.

“The abbot has asked me to escort you to his office in the chapterhouse.”

He turned and entered the complex, Annja at his heels. Just inside the front door was a long central hall with offices on either side. Typical office sounds reached her ears even through the closed doors—the
ringing of phones, the clack of computer keyboards, muffled voices, even the sound of a kettle whistling away somewhere.

They passed through a set of double doors at the end of the hall and found themselves outside once more in the cloister, a large square area of ground open to the sky and surrounded by covered walkways on each side split repeatedly by arched openings known as arcades. The soaring heights of the cathedral rose up over the walkway directly opposite them and Annja was struck with the desire to wander through the interior and see what the centuries-old church looked like. Brother Samuel, however, turned right and Annja had to hurry along to catch up with him.

He noticed her interest in the church, and began pointing out some of the details around her. “This part of the claustral complex contains several of the most highly trafficked areas—the cathedral, the administrative offices, the chapterhouse and, of course, the living quarters.”

They came to the end of the walkways and he pointed out across the grounds to another set of buildings. “Over there we have the kitchens, the storehouses, the infirmary and the guest quarters.”

He turned left this time, so that they were headed toward the cathedral once more, but they had only gone a few yards before they found themselves standing at a plain, unadorned door.

The monk knocked and then led her inside.

The room she entered was a simple office that contained only a desk, two chairs and a kneeler for prayer. A cross hung on the wall behind the desk, over the head of the wizened old man seated at the desk.

Smiling, he rose and extended his hand. “Good af
ternoon, Miss Creed. I'm Abbot Deschanel. It's a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

“Thank you. And thank you for seeing me on such short notice.”

“Happy to help. Tell me, how is Professor Reinhardt?”

“As impetuous as ever,” she replied, correctly sensing that Abbott Deschanel was looking for confirmation that she did, indeed, know Bernard Reinhardt personally. She couldn't imagine what anyone would gain by faking such a relationship, but that didn't mean someone wouldn't try to do it, she supposed. Bernard came across in casual meetings as a steady-as-a-rock type of personality. It was only once you'd worked with him a bit that you began to realize just how impulsive he really was. The business with the spray-on packing foam was just one example.

Her answer must have satisfied the abbot, for he gestured for her to take the seat before his desk as he sank back into his own.

“So how can I help you?”

“Well, it's a bit of a complicated story actually,” she began, and then laid it all out for him. How the section of the catacombs had been discovered and what the Metro workers had found lying within. How she and Professor Reinhardt had been asked to manage the excavation and what they had found once they had moved the body to the museum. How she'd been confronted in the tunnels and how the remains had been stolen from the museum the night before.

“Sewn into Captain Parker's shirt was a small scrap of paper. Written on it was the name of this place, Berceau de solitude.”

The abbot sat watching her without any change of expression.

“And so I thought, maybe, I mean it's been a long time, more than a hundreds years, I know, but still…”

Get to the point. You're rambling, she told herself.

She took a deep breath. “I thought maybe you'd have some record of him coming here,” she finished in a rush.

A small smile slipped over the abbot's steady facade.

“Well,” he said, “that's quite a story. Quite a story.”

I can feel a “but” coming on, Annja thought.

“But I'm not sure I understand. We're just a poor community of brother monks. Why would a man like that have come here, of all places?”

Abbot Deschanel's tone was light, the question a relatively innocuous one, but Annja felt goose bumps rising on her arms nonetheless.

He knows something.

Trying to keep the eagerness out of her voice, she replied. “I honestly don't know. I was hoping you could tell me.”

“If I had such information, and I'm not saying I do— I'm just speaking hypothetically at this point—what would you do with it?”

Annja suddenly felt as if she were standing on a precipice. Something about the way the abbot held himself, the slightest change of tension in his frame, betrayed the importance of her answer.

Say the wrong thing now and you can kiss your answers goodbye.

She'd told him the truth about everything so far, and that seemed the wisest course of action.

“I had the body of a man I believe to be Captain Parker back in the laboratory at the museum. He was
the victim of a gunshot wound, his remains previously lost in the depths of the Paris catacombs until their discovery yesterday. And yet a man claiming to be the very same Captain Parker survived the war, held public office and eventually died peacefully in his sleep at the age of seventy. Clearly one of them was not who he claimed to be. I'd like to solve that mystery.”

He watched her carefully for a moment, as if weighing the truth of her words. Apparently her motives must have met his approval for he said, “You are right, Miss Creed. Captain Parker did indeed come here. The abbot at the time, Brother Markum, was actually a distant cousin on his mother's side, you see.”

Annja felt a surge of excitement.

“According to Brother Markum's account, Captain Parker was agitated, perhaps even fearful for his life, and he gave my predecessor specific instructions to watch over a piece of his property until someone came to retrieve it in his name.”

Annja was leaning forward in her chair, full of questions, but Deschanel raised a hand and held her off, at least for a moment.

“There is no indication in Brother Markum's account as to the specific nature of Parker's mission or the source of his fear. Just that he was clearly afraid and that he felt it likely that he might not be back to retrieve the object himself. But I don't know any more than that and, unfortunately, Brother Markum is no longer around for us to ask him ourselves.”

After a century and a half I certainly hope not, Annja thought.

“Do you have any idea what the object was that Captain Parker placed into the abbot's safekeeping?”

Annja was thinking it might be another letter, or
maybe a journal. A journal would be ideal, as it might describe in more detail what was going on.

But Abbot Deschanel's answer surprised her.

“It was a wooden box. About the size of a microwave.”

A box?

“Do you, by chance, still have the box?”

Then, at last, Deschanel showed some of her own excitement.

“I do,” he said, his grin spreading from ear to ear. “And because you have come asking for Captain Parker's legacy in his name, you've allowed us to fulfill our vow to him. This is a blessed day indeed!”

He rose, saying, “I'll just be a moment,” and slipped out the door, leaving Annja waiting anxiously for his return.

It took less than ten minutes. When Deschanel came back through the door, he was carrying a small chest. It was about the size of an old-fashioned bread box and was covered with a thick patina of dirt and dust, as if it had been stored in the back of a closet for some time.

It's probably been sitting in the same place for the past hundred years, Annja thought.

He set it down on top of his desk and gestured for her to open it.

This is it. This is what you came here for.

She could feel her pulse racing, could hear her heart pounding in her ears as she realized that the box in front of her might hold the answers to several questions. What had Parker been doing in Paris? Why the letter of introduction from President Davis? What, exactly, had happened to the missing Confederate treasure?

With hands that only slightly trembled, Annja opened the chest.

Inside was a small lacquered box the size of a jewelry case.

She recognized it immediately.

It was a Japanese puzzle box.

“May I?” she asked.

The abbot nodded. “Be my guest,” he said.

Reaching inside, she drew out the puzzle box and set it down next to the crate. As she did so the slip of paper that had been stuck to the bottom of the box came loose and drifted to the floor.

Picking it up, Annja saw that it was a short note in an unfamiliar hand.

She'd been right! Thanks to her research earlier that morning, she knew that Parker's second in command had been a man named Jonathan Sykes, so there seemed little doubt now that the remains did, indeed, belong to the Confederate captain as she'd suspected.

It was the contents of the rest of the note that really caught her attention, however.

Specie,
she knew, was a term used to describe money in the form of coins, usually gold or silver, that provided the backing for paper money issued by the gov
ernment. Parker had to be referring to the money from the treasury. The wagon train he'd driven out of Danville had been ambushed by brigands; his official report had listed the gold as stolen.

If the note was to be believed, then Parker clearly knew exactly where the treasure was, which made the official report a bold-faced lie.

She didn't have to think about it very long to come up with a handful of reasons for his doing so, either. Perhaps he'd been ordered to fake the treasury's disappearance. Perhaps he'd taken it upon himself to protect it during the hectic days at the end of the war. Or maybe he'd simply taken advantage of the opportunity to secure a future for himself and his family for when the war was over.