Ghost Image (3 page)

And then maybe afterward I could corner him and ask what was going on between him and Edward Jaine.

“No need. Speak of the devil,” Ursula said as Kevin walked into the room. “We were just talking about you, Brother Kevin. I presume it won't be a problem if Sophie, Yasmin, and I drop by the monastery tomorrow at five after it closes to go over a few things?”

“You'll need to talk to our guardian. I'm sure Father Navarro can accommodate you.” Kevin's smile was strained. “Yasmin, Senator Gilberti, thank you for a lovely evening. Sophie, I'll see you tomorrow morning at ten thirty at the Tidal Basin, right?” I nodded, and he added, “Good night, everyone.”

After he left, Ursula raised an eyebrow at me, and I said, “Kevin's helping me with a photography project.”

“If we're done here, I'm going to get another glass of wine,” Yasmin said in a hard, flat voice. “Excuse me.”

She nearly walked into the doorframe, and Ursula, who had watched her daughter leave, pressed her hands together and said, “I'd better have a word with her. We'll see you tomorrow, Sophie.”

I gathered up my equipment and left. When I got home, I downloaded the photos from the party and began editing them, but after an hour I quit and looked up the Scripture passage from St. Matthew that Kevin had used to end his blessing this evening—
the two shall be one—
because something had bothered me about it all evening.

He'd used only half of it. The rest was language from the marriage ceremony:
Therefore what God has joined, let no man separate.

I wondered why Kevin had chosen it tonight and if no man was David Arista or possibly Edward Jaine. And then there was this: Why would a peaceful man of God who often quoted St. Francis of Assisi, that no one is to be called an enemy and no one does you harm, be arguing with one of the richest men in America?

Tomorrow at the Tidal Basin we'd have a lot to talk about.

2

“S
omeone followed me after I left Victor and Yasmin's party last night.” A gust of wind caught the folds of Kevin's habit, blowing his scapular and hood so they billowed like a dark sail. “Halfway down Wyoming Avenue, I ran into a man walking one of those enormous dogs, a Great Pyrenees, and that scared him off. The guy was nice enough to walk me to my car.”

“Good Lord, Kevin. In that part of town?” I said. In the Kalorama neighborhood of upper northwest Washington, there were at least half a dozen embassies within a few blocks of the Austrian ambassador's residence, and the area was, or should have been, regularly patrolled. “Did you get a look at him?”

He shook his head. “I had just started walking down the street when I heard footsteps behind me. He was moving quickly and it kind of bothered me, so I sped up. So did he. Then I ran, and he did, too.”

We had been walking through the winding Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial next to the Tidal Basin. Now the two of us stood in front of an enormous statue of FDR draped in a bronze
cape weathered to verdigris and sitting next to his beloved Scottish terrier. Roosevelt, who had shepherded America through the Great Depression and World War II by this point in his presidency, looked worn down and weary.

“Could it have been Edward Jaine who was following you?” I asked.

Kevin shot me a startled look. “No,” he said in a firm voice. “It couldn't.”

I shrugged and knelt to take photos of Fala, Roosevelt's little dog. “Okay.”

“It's the third time it's happened in the past few days, Sophie. I think someone's stalking me.”

I stood and stared at him. “Are you serious?”

He nodded. “For all I know, whoever it is could be here right now.”

I shuddered and looked around. Washington in late March can be temperamental and unpredictable. Some days the weather is glorious and the warm, silky breeze makes you believe it's finally spring. Or it can be like today, when the wind slices like a knife and the damp chill settles into your bones. There was no one at this memorial except the two of us.

No one.

“Kevin,” I said, “we're alone.”

“What made you bring up Edward?” he asked.

“Last night when he walked into the room with Ursula Gilberti, you didn't shake hands with him. I didn't know you knew him. And you obviously don't like him.”

“I didn't realize you saw that.”

I tapped my camera. “I'm a trained observer, remember? I get paid to notice people's expressions and body language.”

He gave me a rueful look. “It's a long story, but Edward doesn't need to chase me down a street late at night if he wants to talk to me.”

I thought about the darkened corridor where I'd overheard
them arguing. “Maybe he wanted to finish the conversation you two were having right before you left.”

“We did finish it. And I can't talk about it, Soph.”

Maybe not, but it still bothered him. “The sanctity of the confessional?”

“If I were a priest, yes, something like that. Come on, let's get out of here and go over to the Tidal Basin. It will be easier to spot anyone who looks like he's hanging around watching us with all that water and open space.”

“You really are spooked, aren't you? When did this start? Have you reported the other times to the police?”

I followed him down a small flight of steps to the Tidal Basin promenade, where the long branches of the sweeping ring of bare cherry trees arced over our pathway, sheltering us from the punishing wind. I panned the view with my camera, taking shot after shot until I captured all of it in a panoramic image. The top of the Washington Monument was just visible above the distant tree line, and across the choppy, lead-colored water, the dome of the Jefferson Memorial faded into the gray-white sky.

“It started on Sunday. Three days ago,” Kevin said. “And no, I haven't reported anything.”

“Why not?”

“Because no one else saw or heard anyone.”

Kevin was a man of faith, but he was also a scientist. In the real world he dealt in facts, not speculation or conjecture. If he said someone was following him, I believed him.

“What happened those other times?” I asked.

“I was at the monastery. Both times. On Sunday afternoon I stopped into the church at the end of the day after visiting hours were over. There was something I needed to do in the crypt. You know no one's allowed down there even when the place is open unless one of the knights goes with them, don't you? Except the friars, of course.”

I nodded and knotted my scarf tighter around my neck, turn
ing up the collar of my jacket as the wind blasted us again. “Of course.”

The Franciscan Monastery was a sprawling forty-four-acre compound with a church and magnificent gardens set on a wooded hillside in Brookland, a residential neighborhood in northeast Washington. Unofficially it was known as “the Holy Land in America,” a reference to the Franciscans' mission to serve as guardians of places the Catholic Church held sacred. Tourism sites called the monastery Washington's best-kept secret because of the magnificent gardens. The Franciscans' own website described it as “an oasis of peace.”

The knights Kevin was referring to—the Knights of Mount St. Sepulchre—were a lay order of Catholic men who gave tours of the monastery and its grounds. They dressed entirely in white except for scarlet sashes around their waists and, on special occasions, white capes with blood-colored Jerusalem crosses emblazoned on them, symbolism dating back to the Crusades. They were also fiercely protective of and devoted to the friars.

“I went downstairs to get something in the catacombs,” Kevin was saying. “All of a sudden I heard footsteps, so of course I figured it was one of the other friars. Except as soon as I called out, the footsteps stopped. I went back to the entrance, but no one was there. After that I got what I came for, but as I was leaving I heard them again.”

I had been in those catacombs, underground replicas of the original ones in Rome, the mazelike complex where the early Christians used to hide, open graves in the soft volcanic rock under the ancient city where the dead were buried in secret, and Mass was celebrated in hushed voices. It was one of many shrines scattered throughout the monastery gardens and the crypt—all of them exact reproductions down to every detail of places like the Grotto of Lourdes, the house in Old Cairo that sheltered Jesus, Mary, and Joseph during their exile in Egypt, and the Tomb of Christ—built in the late 1800s for
Americans who could not afford to travel overseas to see the real shrines.

Some people thought that duplicating these sacred sites at a monastery in Washington, D.C., was a bit creepy, and I'd even heard it referred to as “Catholic Disneyland.” Others found genuine peace and a connection to their faith.

“You never ran into anyone down there?” I asked, and almost added
alive
. The bones and relics of saints and martyrs were displayed in tiny chapels and glass cases throughout the crypt, so in a manner of speaking, you were never really alone.

Kevin shook his head. “I felt foolish, but afterward I asked one of the knights to go back downstairs with me. He searched the place and, of course, no one was there. He . . . well, he suggested maybe I'd been working too hard lately and that I might need some rest.”

“So he thought you were imagining it?”

“Not exactly. He hinted that maybe it was someone not of flesh and blood. A spirit.” He twirled a finger next to his ear. “I think he was just trying to humor me.”

“What about the other time?” I asked.

In front of us, a group of teenage girls in bright blue sweatshirts suddenly spilled onto the promenade in front of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, giddy and squealing with high-pitched laughter, snapping pictures of themselves and one another on their phones. A school field trip.

Kevin scanned the faces of the laughing, chattering kids. “Same thing,” he said. “I heard someone, but I never got a look at his face, just the back of a person in dark clothing.”

Except for this school group and two elderly women up ahead of us who were examining the old stone lantern that was lit every year at the opening of the cherry blossom festival, I still hadn't seen anyone who looked remotely interested in Kevin and me.

“Where were you?”

“Walking through the cloisters on my way back to the resi
dence. It was about nine o'clock at night,” he said. “Same thing, I heard someone following me. This time one of the seminarians showed up, so I said, ‘Come on, let's go after this guy.' Except he said, ‘What guy?' And the next thing I knew, whoever was there took off running toward the lower garden.” He sounded disgusted. “By the time I reached the top of the stairs, he'd vanished into the woods. I'm sure he left the grounds through the path by the outdoor Stations of the Cross. From there it's easy to disappear into the neighborhood on Quincy Street.”

“Kevin, you ought to tell someone about this. I mean, besides me.”

“Come on, Soph. What am I going to say? I have no witnesses.”

“What about the seminarian who was there? He must have heard something.”

“Nope. Paul said he didn't see or hear a thing. Same as the knight who checked out the crypt.” He sighed. “Forget about it. Let's talk about your project.”

“Kevin—”

“The reason we're here freezing our butts off is that you wanted to talk to me about that book of cherry blossom photos you want to put together, right?”

“Yes, but—”

“So tell me.”

He was done talking about his stalker. “It's a fund-raiser for the Adams Morgan Children's Center,” I said. “I could use your help.”

“Cherry blossom photo books have been done already. A lot.”

“This wouldn't be lots of pictures of pink clouds of blossoms wreathing the monuments. I'm talking about photos of the trees like they are today when it's gray and miserable, or in the fall, or covered with snow. And not just the Tidal Basin, but the out-of-the-way places people don't usually think about,
like Meridian Hill Park, Scott Circle, Stanton Park.” He shook his head. “Come on, Kevin, I think it's a good idea. But I need your help identifying all the different varieties of cherry trees and which ones are planted where.”

He pulled down a branch filled with clusters of tightly furled buds from over our heads. “These are Yoshinos, the most common cherry tree in D.C.,
prunus
x
yedoensis
. It's a hybrid. They're the trees with the light pink flowers, very fragrant. When they're in bloom they look like your pink clouds.” He released the branch. “Choose another subject, Soph.”

A pair of ducks landed in the Tidal Basin and swam under the protection of a low-hanging branch in front of us.

“Such as?”

“Photograph Washington's unknown—or little-known—gardens. I can show you where they are and introduce you to the people who care for them. Everyone thinks they know D.C., but there are loads of beautiful gardens in this town that have either been forgotten or people look at them every day but don't see them anymore. Photograph the places that are hiding in plain sight, so to speak.”

I was surprised by the passion in his voice, but maybe he was right: Find the gardens that had become invisible for one reason or another in this city of gardens and show people what was right under their noses.

He reached inside his habit and pulled out a white business envelope as another gust of wind tugged at his long robe. “I brought this for you. It's an article I wrote a few years ago on some of the gardens I think you might want to look at.”

“Thank you.” I opened the envelope and scanned his list. “It's a good idea, Kevin. Maybe I could talk you into collaborating, since you already know so much about these gardens?”

“I'll be glad to help, but if you want to sell books for charity, leave my name out of it. I have a reputation for riling people up.”

I slipped the article into my camera bag. “I'll take my chances.”

“Come on,” he said. “Those ladies have finished examining the stone lantern. Let's walk over there. I'd like to look at the old markings. You know it once belonged to a shogun, don't you? It's one of a pair.”

“No, I didn't know.” I linked my arm through his as we started up the hill. “Do you think whoever is following you might be someone you've riled up? A person who doesn't like your views on climate change or the environment?”

He hesitated a moment too long before he said, “No. I don't think so.”

I knew then that he hadn't told me everything about his stalker. “You have an idea who it is, don't you?”

“That's not true. I don't know who it is.”

He wasn't going to make this easy. “All right, you don't know who, but you do know why someone's following you.” When he didn't reply, I said, “What's going on, Kevin?”

We reached the old lantern. “I don't want to get you in the middle of anything.”

“Nice try. We've known each other too long.”

A muscle flexed in his jaw as he traced the worn outline of a crescent moon on the old stone with his finger. I waited. Logic dictated that he would tell one of his brother friars, men he should trust implicitly to keep secrets. Instead I had a feeling he was going to unburden himself to me.

Finally he said, “Back in February when I was in London to speak at a conference at Kew Gardens, I came across something quite by accident. When I got home I did some more investigating. If I found what I think it is, this whole thing could be pretty big.”

“What thing? And define pretty big.”

“Potentially millions of dollars, maybe a lot more. It's complicated. I can't tell you anything else until I'm sure I'm right. There's one more piece of the puzzle I still need to put together.”