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“There’s an old Bible in the chapel, right? The one I saw last time I visited. Is it still in the display case?”
“Yes, it’s always kept inside. We only take it out for special occasions. It’s more like a work of art than a mere book. Recently, a museum reached out—they wanted to include it in an exhibition. An appraiser came by a few weeks ago to assess it.”
“Was that the only time the case was unlocked?” I asked.
“I believe so,” she said. “Why do you ask?”
“Can I see it now?”
“What is bothering you, Doctor West? You look worried.”
“I need to see it. I just have to make sure it is intact.”
“Why won’t it be?”
I rubbed my cheek. The sister hesitated for a moment before she stood up.
She led me toward the chapel, where I once killed Robert Miller and sent him to hell.
My pulse quickened as we walked through the quiet corridors. Everything was finally coming full circle. The chase that had begun with his death was going to end here.
The past and the present. The past swallowing the present, and the present catching up with the past.
This was where Patricia was born. In my blood, in my vengeance.
This was where I would find her.
“Go in,” Sister Mary Elizabeth said, motioning me toward the altar.
When I reached the display case, my hands trembled slightly as I touched the edge of the glass. There it was. The Bible, exactly as I remembered. The brown leather cover looked the same as it always had: slightly warped, slightly crooked, worn at the corners, yet unmistakably beautiful.
It had been a long time since I’d thought about God in any concrete, meaningful way. Still, the sight of it unraveled me. Memories I hadn’t invited in pushed against my chest. Painful.
Sighing, I pulled on a glove and quickly dusted the glass for fingerprints. There were a few, most of them smudged, but better something than nothing. I collected them carefully, feeling the familiar precision of the process calm my racing thoughts.
“Could you open the case?” I asked, my eyes still fixed on the Bible.
“Why?” she asked. “The detectives didn’t mention anything about it.”
“I’m just trying to be thorough,” I said, keeping my voice steady. “Need to rule a few things out.”
Of course, she didn’t know I was doing this investigation on my own. She shouldn’t. If she ever mentioned it to Detective Rosario, even in passing, I would draw attention.
“I’m working on just a hunch. I want to find out who killed Sister Serena, and I have a feeling they might have known her from the orphanage.”
“But the Bible…” Sister Mary Elizabeth trailed off, reaching for the key.
I stared at the altar. The light filtering through the stained glass windows formed an abstract on the floor. Melted candles flickered softly. Someone else’s prayers slowly dying.
Once, I had loved the idea of God. The comfort of believing that someone was always watching, always protecting, and then the world and it’s monsters torn that idea out of my chest.
It was losing myself, all over again.
No one had protected me. Us. Not from the men. Not from those hands that ripped our flesh when they shouldn’t have. If God was real, would he have watched a monster take a little girl inside his own chapel and done nothing? How could he have looked away from such cruelty?
If God were real, would Tany have gone through that kind of soul-breaking pain, and jumped to her death? And then… for that final act of desperation be condemned to the same hell as Robert Miller?
The thoughts made my stomach burn. The tears I swallowed felt like acid down my throat.
