The Progeny (18 page)

“Audra,” Claudia says behind me.

“We have to find the priest who did the mass. Where are the monks?”

“Murdered.”

I turn to stare at her. She’s pale.

“The officer told me when she let us through. Three of them, sometime last night. It’s too late.”

I refuse to accept this. I go to the door and begin to pound on it. Claudia hisses at me to stop. I bang on it again.

A few seconds later the door unlocks and a monk comes into the office. He looks startled to see us, and I realize he thought we were police. He’s wearing a brown robe, white belt around his waist, almost exactly like the statue of Saint Francis out front. But my attention is focused on one item: the tao cross dangling from his neck.

He says something with quiet urgency in what sounds more like Italian than Croatian, and I look at Claudia.

“What did he say?” I demand.

“Please,” he says in pained English, “there has been a tragedy. I am sorry, you must leave!”

“Who conducts mass at Lubenice?” I say. “Is he still alive?”

“Pardon?” he says. Desperation rises inside me.

“Who conducts the mass? Did you know Ivan? The man living in Lubenice? Did you take anything from the chapel?”

Tell me!

He lifts his hands, looks to Claudia as though for rescue. “I’m sorry—” he says.

Claudia intervenes. I don’t know what she’s saying, but all I can think is,
It’s here. Ivan wanted me here.

“Is there someone else we can talk to?” I interrupt.

I recognize the cool lilt of Claudia’s voice, the way the sun through the window seems to seek her where she stands. Her skin in that light is flawless, lending her an ethereal quality that causes the monk to gape. But then something else snares my attention. At first I think it’s a sound, some strain of a distant chorus that lifts the hairs on my arms. But no one is singing, of course. The next moment there is nothing in this room—not even the monk himself—as compelling as the door he just emerged from. I stride toward it and yank it open.

I push into the corridor as the room falls away behind me. There are offices to my right and left, but my gaze is fastened on what looks like a narthex farther down the hall. I skirt past an open door and then run the fifty feet to the chapel, heart thudding.

It is, I think, the most serene space I’ve been in since leaving my tiny cabin in Maine. Or would be, under different circumstances. But unlike my cabin, it is austere, imposing. Not meant for the unwashed world. At first glance it is empty . . . until I notice the single form seated near the front.

I pause as a figure rises from the pew. When he turns, I suck in a breath, though not at his appearance. His face is plain, so devoid of furrows, scars, or even dimples as to be nondescript. His eyes are kind, if not memorable, enough gray in his hair to put him in his late thirties. The kind of man who might look equally unremarkable in an office suit, in a T-shirt on a ball field . . .

. . . or in a monk’s robes.

But it is his presence that sends me back a step.

Holy brother of God. It’s a Progeny monk.

He moves toward me, the rope around his waist dangling to his knees. I swear I can practically hear the brush of his hem.

He stops three steps from me, peers intently at my face.

“Ivan said you would come,” he says, as his presence hits me like a wave.

21

“I
am Brother Goran,” he says. His head tilts, hazel eyes rapt. Do I imagine it, or has he sucked in a small breath? “And you . . . are Audra Ellison.”

“Have—have we met?”

“No,” he says strangely. “I have never had the pleasure.”

“How do you know who I am?”

“Because you look like your mother.”

A chill passes down my arms. Just then a door in the outer hallway closes, echoing all the way to the chapel. His glance is sharp. “We can’t speak here,” he says. “Quickly. Come with me.”

My heart drums in my temples as he leads me toward the back of the chapel and down a narrow stair to a subterranean set of rooms. An overhead light flickers to life, illuminating shelves and floor-to-ceiling cabinets—an archive of sorts, complete with a desk and monitor like some underground library.

“How did you know my mother?” I say when he has closed the door behind us.

“That is a story of another life—one I am afraid we do not have time for now,” he says, withdrawing a set of keys from his pocket and unlocking a drawer.

“Is there a short version?” I say. Because at this point, I’ll take anything.

To my relief he pauses, turns to look at me, if sadly. “Poor child.”

I swallow. “Whatever you know about her, I’d really appreciate hearing it.”

He pauses again and seems to consider.

“Your mother was . . . many different things to different people,” he says. “But the things she is remembered for will never fully represent who she was. People have a habit of taking one moment, one facet of a life, and painting an entire portrait based on their own experience. We do it without exception, to everyone. To the world. To God. We assign stories to everyone around us out of our own need to feel that we understand someone or some thing. When the truth is that we don’t—we can’t—know anyone. Because we do not fully know ourselves.” He looks at me.

“We like to think we learn people. We really only learn their stories. So here is one for you: Amerie loved rain. The way it made people huddle together—under umbrellas, beneath awnings. The way it stopped traffic. She loved the smell of it better than sun, and could smell a storm hours before it came. She said she loved that it brought her to the now. Because the moment your plans for anything are ruined, you are forced into the present. And for that one, perfect, ruined moment, she did not worry about the future, and the past was washed away.”

Fat tears roll down my cheeks. He moves toward me, brushes them away with the back of a finger. And though it is the first human portrait I have ever had of my mother, I almost wish I had never heard it. It was far easier to be angry.

“If you want to know Amerie’s story, the short version—which is the only one that matters—it is that she loved you and protected you with her life.”

“But how did you know her? I mean, you’re a monk.”

“I wasn’t always a monk,” he says with a slight smile. “But now, you’ve come for something.”

“You conducted the mass in Lubenice.”

“That man is dead,” he says, opening the drawer, “having given his life along with two others in service to our cause. But he was not one of us. His killer could not steal his memory . . . or know that he gave this to me.”

He presses an envelope into my hand. “This is yours.”

It is far too light. And too small to explain even the first of my questions.

“You were expecting something else.”

“No. Yes. I don’t know what I was expecting.” There’s a ruckus from somewhere in the direction of the staircase. A man’s voice, and another I recognize as Claudia’s. The sound brings me back to the moment as surely as a clap of thunder. Three men have died for the thing in this envelope. Four, counting Ivan.

And possibly hundreds before them.

“The diary,” I say abruptly. “Does it exist?”

“If it does . . . that is the key to finding it.”

But I don’t want what’s in this envelope to be about the diary. What I want is safety for those around me. And answers, for myself.

Footsteps on the stair. The door bursts open. Claudia.

“The police,” she says, breathless. “They’re questioning the brothers. With a picture of you.” Her eyes, which are wild, flick to Goran.

“How is that possible?” I say, feeling the color leave my face.

“They’re saying you were seen boarding the ferry last night,” Claudia says. “With Ivan.”

“But that’s not true!” I say.

“It doesn’t matter what is true,” Goran murmurs, moving swiftly toward a closet. Claudia follows him with a gaze.

“And you cannot
persuade
me, friend of Audra,” he says, back turned. “Nor do you need to.”

“This is Goran,” I say to Claudia. The look on her face is weird. “The mailman.”

The monk pulls two robes from the closet, pushes them toward us. “Quickly.”

I pull the robe over my head, swiftly tie the rope around my waist. “This way,” Goran says, before leading us upstairs.

“Wait here,” he says and crosses the hall into an office.

I turn on Claudia. “You tried to
persuade
him?”

“I didn’t know,” she snaps, tying her rope. “You can’t
feel
them when they’ve been hidden too long, or at all after a certain age. They lose their gifts, like Ivan was beginning to.”

But I had felt him distinctly.

Goran reemerges and gestures for us to follow him.

“Did you come from Rijeka?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say.

“I will take you myself to Merag, I know a fisherman near there. I will call him to meet us.”

He leads us through a small kitchen toward a back door, but pauses before he opens it. “It is twenty meters to the car. You know what to do? I cannot do it myself.”

I glance between them, confused.

“You are a man,” Claudia says to me. “A monk. That is what anyone outside must see.”

Goran opens the door and we step into a day that is far too bright. His stride is crisp as we follow him to the old gray Opel parked in the tiny lot behind the monastery. Ten feet from the car, a policeman steps around the side of the building and hurries after us, shouting for us to stop. I barely refrain from grabbing Claudia’s arm, amped nearly out of my skin. I stop long enough to fix him with what I hope is a monkish gaze.

Feel bad for your sins and walk away, dude. And quit looking at porn.

My heart threatens to fail in the three seconds it takes the policeman to wave a weak greeting and turn back the way he came.

We hunch down in the backseat of the car as Goran pulls out of the lot. I can feel the crinkle of the envelope in my pocket as he talks urgently on the phone. Claudia, meanwhile, is dialing up what I assume to be another fit from Piotrek.

“How did you know Ivan?” I ask when Goran finishes his call.

“I didn’t, personally, though your mother did. And he did not know I was acting in this capacity or you would now be talking to a corpse and that envelope would be in the Historian’s hands. There was a time when no hunter would harm a monk, if only for fear of his soul. Those days are gone, I’m afraid,” he says, stopping at a corner. I shrink down lower, will myself to be small. Claudia drops her voice and hangs up a few seconds later.

“The envelope . . . where did Ivan get it?”

“From you, of course.”

Claudia stares at me from across the seat. The car turns, accelerates down the road.

“You said your brothers were willing to die for our cause. Why? If Bathory was a monster?”

“It was a Franciscan who helped hide her illegitimate first child—a daughter—before Elizabeth’s husband, Ferenc, could have the baby killed. Who ultimately brought her here, to Croatia. The brothers have hidden many of Bathory’s descendants, keeping the secret genealogy of children placed for adoption by parents who could not dare raise them . . . At one time even helping those children learn to coexist with their own gifts and excessive energy in the age before pharmaceuticals.”

The ADHD. I glance at Claudia. She looks like she’s barely holding it together. And I admit, a marathon sprint sounds awfully soothing right about now.

“But you’re Progeny.”

“Yes. And so I have my own reasons for wanting to help you.”

“Because you knew my mother.”

“Helping you aids all the Progeny. But yes. Perhaps selfishly I wanted to see Amerie’s face again.”

A strange, dawning thought. How old is he—nearly forty? “Are you . . .” I’m not sure how to even ask this.

Claudia’s brows lift so high they practically crash into her hairline.

“No,” he says. “I don’t know who your father was. Only that he died nearly ten years ago.”

He turns off the road as his phone rings. A moment later he pulls the car to a stop and twists in the seat.

“The boat is there, the blue and white. Quickly.” We get out, shed the robes. I embrace him with so many unanswered questions.

As the boat pulls away, I look back at him once where he stands beside the dull gray Opel. Somehow I think I will never see those sturdy shoulders and that reassuring demeanor again.

22

A
normal person would appreciate the vivid blue of the Adriatic, the colorful villages nestled on the coast of the even larger Krk island as we skim past, bright houses clustered like pockets of pebbles toppled down a hill. Would be fascinated with the almost perfectly round islet in the bay of that larger island, and the captain’s explanation about the monastery that occupies it.

But as the captain takes it upon himself to chatter at length about the island’s two-thousand-year-old walls and mile-long bridge connecting it to the mainland, all I can think is that, despite hunching against the gunwale, I feel far too exposed.

That, and I didn’t have nearly long enough with Goran—the only living tie to my mother I’m aware of, and the only one capable of even beginning to answer my questions.

I pray he lives long enough for me to find my way back. The minute it’s safe, I’m there.

It occurs to me then that I’m neglecting the one piece of information I do have.

The one Ivan died to get to me.

I tear open the envelope to discover a single item: a key on a loop of string. It’s new and unremarkable except for an engraving on one side:
SOME RISE BY SIN, SOME BY VIRTUE FALL.

I peer inside the envelope, but there is nothing else. I glance at Claudia, who has been watching me. If she’s curious, she hasn’t asked, and for that I’m grateful. She may be intent on punishing me for abandoning her or Katia or the underground as a whole, but she’s no sadist. After being the least informed person in any discussion I’ve had for days, I need this moment.

I consider the engraving, but of course it doesn’t ring a bell, and turn the key over four or five times in my hand.