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“It sounds like it's going to be quite an event. But with all respect, I didn't volunteer for this or compete with anyone else. Victor asked me because he likes my work and I said yes.”

Ursula blew out a short-fused breath and looked up at the ceiling. “Oh, for God's sake,” she said, focusing on me again. “Do you have any idea how much this wedding has cost me so far? I'm also in the middle of a primary where I'm being outspent by an opponent who's got deep pockets all the way to China, and then there's the election in the fall. When all is said and done, I'm a working single mother, not a millionaire. The expenses for all of this are absolutely crushing. Can you possibly understand what I'm saying?”

Sure I could. I had bills, too. That's why I worked for a living and expected to get paid for it.

“I'm sorry to hear that—”

She cut me off. “I need you to do this, Sophie. I'm not really asking you. I'm telling you. I can't afford to pay you anything beyond what I've already given you. You were well compensated for last night's party, and I trust you'll be sending a link to those photos soon because I'm fending off press queries with a stick until I get them. I'm not asking for charity, you understand, because I assure you what I'm offering will be very much in your financial and professional interest. And I always keep my word.”

Except for the contracts she signed. And it certainly felt like she was asking for charity. Before I could open my mouth, her phone buzzed and she reached for it.

“We're almost through here. Ask him to wait.” She put down the phone and said to me, “If you don't want to do it, I'll find someone else. Any other photographer would kill to be in your position. And I don't want Yasmin to know, either. Or Victor. This conversation needs to stay between us.”

Gloves off. Now I knew why she was so good at her job as her party's whip.

“I'll have to think about it,” I said.

“Fine. You have until five o'clock, when we're supposed to meet at the monastery. If you change your mind between now and then, let me know. I'll need to start looking for another photographer right away.” She paused and gave me a halfhearted smile. “I certainly hope it won't come to that.”

I stood up. “I'll let you know. And I can see myself out. Good afternoon, Senator.”

Before she could reply or buzz her secretary to escort me out and admit her waiting two o'clock, I walked over to her private door, which led directly to the outside corridor.

“You need to use the other door—” she said.

I had no intention of waiting to be escorted out by the secretary and I didn't hear the forbidden door click shut behind me until I passed Ursula's state flag at the entrance to her suite of offices. This time I took the spiral staircase with its winding bronze balustrade. When I reached the first floor, I was as breathless with anger as I'd been a few minutes ago in her office.

By the time I walked outside, it was ten past two. I had fewer than three hours to simmer down and decide what I was going to do.

I reached in my jacket pocket for my phone, ready to call Ursula and tell her she could find another photographer. But it was the wrong pocket and my fingers closed around the little key I'd found this morning by the Japanese lantern. I thought of Victor and the sweet letter he had written me, asking if I would do him and Yasmin the honor of photographing their wedding. Could I really face him and tell him I had changed my mind?

Whatever I decided to do about Ursula's ultimatum, I had to stop by the monastery anyway. I had promised Kevin I would take pictures of the community garden and I needed to ask him if he'd lost this key. It was too early to drive over there now. Kevin was probably still busy with the children from Brookland Elementary. Between the meetings with Olivia and Ursula I had forgotten about lunch, and right now I was famished.

I dropped the key in my pocket and walked down 1st Street past the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress on my left and the Capitol on my right until I got to Pennsylvania Avenue. A few blocks later, I slid into a booth at the Tune Inn, the scruffy, beloved bar that was one of the Avenue's oldest Hill hangouts, ordered a beer and a burger, and tried to forget about Ursula Gilberti. There was a sports program on the television over the bar, alternating between highlights of March Madness and ice hockey, while Willie Nelson, Brad Paisley, and the rest of them sang the old rip-your-heart-out country songs from the jukebox. I ate and drank and listened to them croon about lost love and women who were trouble and the tantalizing freedom of getting in your truck and leaving it all behind.

I thought about ordering another beer and just spending the rest of the afternoon at the Tune until whenever I felt like leaving, but I'm not that kind of girl. I paid the waitress and told her to keep the change, which was almost as much as the bill. Then I walked back to my car and drove to Brookland and the Franciscan Monastery.

It was time to face my own music.

• • •

The parking lot across the street from the monastery was deserted when I pulled in shortly before four, even though the gardens and the church were still open to the public. The ­Byzantine-style Church of Mount St. Sepulchre, built to resemble the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, always looked to me as if it had been plucked from the midst of the real Holy Land, where it had stood in the shadow of a sacred Catholic shrine, and set down in this working-class neighborhood of Craftsman bungalows and wood-framed houses the way Dorothy's house had landed in Oz. The inlaid gold-and-red Jerusalem Cross, the symbol of the Franciscans since the Crusades, and the gold cupola on top of the dome gleamed in the dull late-afternoon light. I walked through the
arched entrance to the Rosary Portico, the cloistered walkway that surrounded the monastery on three sides.

In a few weeks the formal garden beds on these grounds would be filled with hundreds of blooming roses and flowering annuals. Now they were mostly bare patches of earth except for bright yellow and orange pansies around the statues of St. Francis, St. Christopher, and the monastery's Franciscan founder, Godfrey Schilling.

Kevin was either in his room in the friary or somewhere on the grounds. The quickest way to find out was to ask the guard who sat in the small anteroom connecting the residence and the church. But when I checked with him, he seemed surprised.

“I haven't seen Brother Kevin all afternoon,” he said. “I don't believe he's here.”

“He was supposed to meet the children from Brookland Elementary at the community garden at two o'clock,” I said.

The man shook his head. “That was canceled because it was raining.”

“I saw his car parked on the street just now. He has to be here.”

“Then try the Valley Shrines in the lower garden,” he said. “I just came from the church and he wasn't there. He also might be praying at the outdoor Stations of the Cross since it's Lent.”

I thanked him and walked through the portico with its multicolored columns and small chapels with mosaics commemorating the mysteries of the rosary. A sign marked the entrance to the lower gardens halfway down the walkway, and a series of blacktop ramps zigzagged down to several flights of stairs that ended in what looked like a large park. From down here the monastery was nearly invisible, hidden by towering evergreens and ancient magnolias, a tangle of brush and vines and high stone walls.

The formal part of the garden was dominated by a replica of the grotto at Lourdes, a place where the faithful believed the
Virgin Mary appeared to a young peasant girl named Bernadette Soubirous, and that the waters of a spring located on that spot possessed special healing powers. I called Kevin's name, my voice echoing weirdly off the ivy-covered wall where a statue of Mary looked down from an alcove on the white marble figure of St. Bernadette kneeling with her arms outstretched in the middle of a garden of bare, green-tinged rosebushes.

I made a complete tour, checking all the tucked-away chapels and memorials. Maybe Kevin was still working in the community garden, which was in a clearing on the upper level near the end of the Stations of the Cross. I followed the winding path through the woods until I was at the top of the hill across from the monastery.

The small garden was enclosed by chicken wire nailed to posts, presumably to keep out rabbits, with a gate at one end. Not much was sprouting this early in the year, as Kevin had said, so it was mostly tilled earth. Someone had left a pitchfork with a weathered handle in a pile of mulch near the gate, and a garden hose was coiled on a large hook attached to one of the posts.

Kevin wasn't here, so I finished the path of the Stations until I reached the final one, the laying of Jesus in his tomb. If Kevin's car was at the monastery and he wasn't in his room or the church, where else would he be? Had he returned to the catacombs for something else he'd hidden?

Then I remembered the Grotto of Gethsemane, a replica of the garden where Jesus prayed the night before his crucifixion. The entrance was on the hill opposite where I was standing, halfway between the upper and lower gardens and so well hidden you couldn't see it from either the monastery or the lower garden. I ran back through the woods and sprinted up the stairs, slipping on a slick patch of moss and mud. I grabbed a vine as thick as a small tree trunk that ran along the wall, but I still landed hard on one knee. The momentum knocked my camera bag off my shoulder and it bumped on the ground.

I found Kevin in the grotto, lying on his side at the bottom of a small staircase. The wrought-iron grillwork door to the underground chapel was padlocked and looked like it had been that way for a while. In the viscous gloomy light, the small room hewn out of rock like a cave seemed more like a prison than a place to pray. I knelt beside my dear, beloved friend and touched my finger to the pulse point on his neck.

But I already knew I was too late. Brother Kevin Boyle was dead.

5

A
gust of wind blew through the trees above my head, a low, keening sound almost like a child crying. Had Kevin fallen, or had he been pushed? I whipped around in case I'd missed seeing someone come up behind me, trapping me in this dead-end place. But no one was there, only Kevin and me.

I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and got out my phone to call 911, turning away because I couldn't bear to look at him while I did this. A female dispatcher answered after three rings and thought I was calling to report the death of my brother.

“He's a Franciscan friar,” I said. “He belongs to a Catholic religious order.
Brother
Kevin Boyle.”

“Okay, I'm with you now. Sorry about that, hon. Spell the name, please.”

I did.

“Address?”

I gave it to her and explained that Kevin was in the Gethsemane Grotto of the monastery garden, spelling Gethsemane before she asked. She took down my name and number, con
firmed the monastery's address, and told me someone would be here shortly.

“Do you know how long?”

“As soon as possible. Please stay on the scene and meet the officer.” She disconnected.

As soon as possible. Fifteen minutes? Twenty? Longer? Kevin was dead, gone, so no police cruisers and ambulances with their flashing lights and wailing sirens were going to come racing up 14th Street.

I turned back to him. He was lying on his right side in a contorted angle in the cramped space. His left hand was thrown up over his face as though shielding himself from something or someone, and his outstretched right hand was clenched in a fist. His eyes were wide open, as though he'd been surprised, and judging by his position, he had fallen forward. Somehow he must have hit his head, maybe on the steps or the sharp corner of the stone wall or the padlocked wrought-iron gate, which had stopped his momentum, because a pool of blood underneath his right shoulder had oozed onto the stone floor and seeped into his habit. Both his feet rested on the last step, and dried mud embedded with bits of mulch was stuck to the bottom of his sandals.

Kevin was a good man, a holy man of grace and erudition and scholarship, fierce in his beliefs, loyal to his friends, devoted in his faith. I didn't want to remember him stripped of his dignity like this, blood spattered, his kind, intelligent blue eyes now staring blindly, his habit rucked up to reveal worn, threadbare trousers and pale flesh, a sense of death already permeating this place like a bad stink.

Fading daylight poured in through a fretted skylight inside the locked chapel. The wind rustled the trees, the shifting shadows rippling like the lashings of a whip on the walls and floor. The spine-tingling feeling that something was crawling on my skin made me wonder if I was being watched. A replica of the
tomb where Jesus had been laid after he was crucified was only a few steps from the grotto. I couldn't remember if that gate was locked as well. The air fizzed with a low-pitched vibrating whine. I scrambled up the stairs, needing to get away from this closed-in space with its prisonlike entrance, to the open space of the upper garden and the sanctuary of the church.

Halfway back to the main garden path I skidded on the muddy spot where I'd slipped before, and a branch from one of the vines brushed against me like fingers raking my skin. I whisked it away and ran, the crazy idea flitting through my mind that the spirits of the dead haunted this alcove and the vines and branches that ran along the walls had begun magically weaving together to form a barrier that would imprison me in the Gethsemane Grotto.

I raced up the ramp to the Rosary Portico, colliding with a friar who was striding toward me. He was tall and sturdy, with ruddy cheeks and a mop of dark brown hair, and wore a heavy dark plaid flannel shirt over his habit.

He grabbed my arms. “Hey, what's wrong? Hold on there. Why are you running?”

“Where's your guardian?” I said. “Where's Father Xavier? I just found Brother Kevin Boyle in the Gethsemane Grotto. I'm so sorry . . . he's dead.”

The words tumbled out and the friar flinched. He was young, in his early twenties. “What are you talking about? Dead? Are you sure?”

“He's lying at the bottom of the stairs and there's blood. He's . . . believe me, he's dead. I called 911 and the police are on their way.”

A scowl crossed his face. “The police? Why did you call them?”

“Because that's what you do when someone dies, that's why.” He was staring at me like I was speaking in tongues. “You need to get Father Xavier.”

“Who are you?”

“Sophie Medina. A friend of Kevin's. Who are you?”

“Paul Zarin.” He let go of my arms and pulled his phone out of his shirt pocket. “Don't go anywhere. Stay right here.”

He sprinted away and slipped into the church through a side door. Kevin had mentioned a Franciscan named Paul the other night. He had been walking through the monastery when Kevin thought someone was following him in the cloisters. According to Kevin, Paul had heard nothing.

He was back in less than a minute, accompanied by two knights of St. Sepulchre in white ice-cream suits. They split up, the knights heading toward the entrance to the lower garden and Paul Zarin returning to where I waited.

“I want to thank you for finding our brother,” he said. “You're free to go. We'll take care of him. Our guardian will talk to the police if it's necessary.”

“Take care of Kevin?”

“He belongs to God now,” he said as the two knights disappeared down the ramp.

“What are you talking about? What are they going to do?”

“Bring Kevin to the church to lay him to rest there. It's what he would want. It's where he should be.”

I caught my breath. “You can't move him. No one should touch anything in that grotto. Kevin could have fallen down the stairs, but he also could have been pushed. It could be a crime scene.”

Paul Zarin's head snapped back as if I had just uttered something that defiled this holy place. “That's not possible. No one here would do such a thing.”

“You have visitors, people who come and go as they please. And Kevin was a controversial public figure, you know that. People heckled him at talks all the time. Maybe someone showed up today and went too far.”

Paul Zarin gave me another dark look. “Or maybe nothing
like that happened and it was merely God's plan to call Kevin home. Thank you again for finding our brother, but now I must ask you to leave. Please. Go in peace.”

I folded my arms across my chest. “I'm not leaving. I can't leave. I'm the one who found him. The police will want to question me.”

I thought when he had taken out his phone he'd called his superior, a quick, discreet conversation with Father Xavier Navarro to let him know something was seriously wrong, that this was an emergency. Instead it seemed like he'd alerted the entire monastery. I heard male voices as about a dozen men in Franciscan habits and a few in street clothes ran toward us, some emerging from the church, but most coming from the friary.

He pointed to the entrance to the lower garden and shouted to the others. “Down there. He's in the Gethsemane Grotto with two of the knights. We must pray for him and then bring him to the church.”

“Are you crazy?” I said. “You can't send them down there. They'll trample everything. They could destroy evidence before the police get a chance to search the area. Don't do this. You need to get Father Xavier here right now.”

“Father Xavier is on his way back to the monastery. He should be here any minute.” His clear gray eyes were cool and he pointed to my khaki trousers. “Did you fall or trip on something? That mud stain on your knee is fresh. You never told me what you are doing here or how you knew where to find Kevin.”

It took a moment before I realized he was implying I had something to do with Kevin's death. I said, stunned, “I didn't know where to find him. And I came here to return something to him, plus Kevin asked me to take photos of the community garden. Ask the security guard at the residence. I checked with him when I got here.”

But Paul Zarin had stopped listening. “Did you bring a friend?” he asked.

“Pardon?”

He pointed over my shoulder. “Her.”

Yasmin Gilberti, stylishly dressed in jeans, leather boots, and a Burberry rain jacket with a pashmina scarf knotted around her neck, walked toward us down the middle of the driveway. Her vivid red hair was even more startling against the grayness of the afternoon. Paul Zarin didn't take his eyes off her.

I had forgotten all about our meeting. Ursula would be here at any moment as well.

“Sophie,” Yasmin said when she reached Paul and me. “What are you doing here?”

It was an odd question. Maybe Ursula had decided to fire me after all and I just hadn't found out yet. Maybe Yasmin was expecting someone else.

“Kevin's dead, Yasmin,” I said. “I found his body . . . found him . . . in the garden a few minutes ago. I'm sorry.”

I shouldn't have blurted it out like that, but I was still dealing with my own grief. Yasmin turned pale, a horrified expression on her face. When she finally spoke, she sounded as though she were gasping for breath.

“Oh, my God. That's not possible. He can't be.”

Paul Zarin spoke up. “Here comes Father Xavier.”

A small black car sped through the main gate and stopped in the driveway across from the three of us. A slight, white-haired man in a Franciscan habit got out.

Father Xavier and Paul Zarin exchanged glances, and a look passed between them that I didn't understand. “Where is Kevin?” Xavier asked him.

“The Gethsemane Grotto. Our brothers are praying for him, and then two of the knights are bringing him to the church. It's where he would want to be. In God's house.”

The old priest turned to Yasmin and me. “I understand a woman found him,” he said in his gentle voice. “I am Father Navarro and I am in charge of this monastery. Was it one of you?”

“I found him, Father,” I said. “I'm a friend of Kevin's. My
name is Sophie Medina and this is Yasmin Gilberti. She and her fiancé are going to be married here in June.”

Xavier nodded, apparently recognizing Yasmin's name and possibly mine, but before he could speak, I said, “With all respect, you can't move Kevin. I mean, you shouldn't. All those people who are down there now are leaving footprints everywhere . . . if it's a crime scene they could destroy evidence.”

Father Xavier shot me a startled look as the full meaning of what I was saying seemed to dawn on him. “You are right,” he said. He turned to Paul. “Go and tell whoever is in the grotto not to disturb anything and that they must leave at once. I will call the police and we will cooperate with them.”

Yasmin's face was still as white as bleached bone. I took her arm and said, “You don't look well. There's a bench over there in the courtyard. Maybe you should sit down.”

She shook her head. “I'm okay.”

She didn't look okay. She looked scared. To Xavier, I said, “I called the police as soon as I found Kevin.”

Two blue-and-white Metropolitan Police Department cruisers pulled into the monastery driveway. “So you did,” he said. “It looks as though they're here.”

• • •

The 911 dispatcher was right that the police wanted to talk to me since I was the one who had found Kevin. I caught a glimpse of Ursula's black Mercedes with its blue, yellow, and white West Virginia “USS” license plate pull into the parking lot as a petite African American officer whose name tag said her last name was Carroll walked me into the visitors' lobby of the church.

She pointed to one of the benches in front of a screen where a video usually played before the tour started.

“Please have a seat,” she said. “I'll be right back.”

I glanced up at the clock behind the reception desk where the knights usually sat. It showed exactly five o'clock.

Officer Carroll didn't return for half an hour. She sat next to me and apologized for keeping me waiting before she asked all the usual questions, how I'd found Kevin, what my business was at the monastery, and eventually, my relationship with the deceased.

I flinched at that word and she looked up. Her short, glossy jet-black hair framed her face in a cap of loose pin curls that reminded me of a cherub.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I know this is difficult.”

I told her about my friendship with Kevin as she made notes in a spiral notebook.

“You came here for a meeting with Senator Gilberti and her daughter,” she said. “Why were you also looking for Brother Kevin?”

I fished the little gray key out of my pocket. “To ask if this belonged to him. I found it on the ground at the Tidal Basin this morning and I wondered if he had dropped it.”

Officer Carroll took the key and turned it over. “You think it's his?”

“I don't know. Like I said, I found it on the ground. Maybe he dropped it or maybe someone else did.”

“Do you know what it opens?”

“No idea.”

“You can keep it for now.” She handed it back to me. “Did Brother Kevin have any enemies that you know of?”

“A lot of people didn't like him because of his views on the environment and climate change, especially after he wrote
Reaping What We Have Sown
,” I said. “He told me once someone called him ‘a tree-hugging kook in a robe.'”

“Did he mention any names?”

I shook my head. “But this morning at the Tidal Basin he told me he thought someone had begun following him. Last night after the party at the Austrian ambassador's residence and two other times, here at the monastery.”

She gave me a sharp look. “Did he know who it was, or why someone would be following him?”

“No to your first question. But he thought it might have to do with a new book he's working on, something he came across in his research.”