John Saul - The Devil's Labyrinth

Detective North’s questions about drugs came back to his mind.

Was it possible that Kip really had been using drugs?

If he had, he’d been lying for as long as Clay had known him. But if Kip had been using drugs, Clay knew where he would have kept them.

The one place the two detectives hadn’t found, and that Clay hadn’t told them about. He got up, walked around the far side of Kip’s bed, and carefully removed the panel of wainscoting he and Kip had discovered no more than a month after they’d moved into the room, when Kip had become certain that the wall behind the panel was hollow. Sure enough, once they worked the panel loose they found a hole in the plaster behind the wainscoting that some previous occupant of the room must have cut in order to make a secret compartment where all the things no one would want Brother Francis — or anyone else — to find during dorm inspections could be safely stored.

Clay reached in, and his fingers found what he expected: two large plastic ziplock bags.

In his ziplock bag, Clay had five old copies of Playboy, half a pack of cigarettes, and an unopened pack of condoms, at least one of which he was still hoping to get to use before the end of school this year. There should have been six copies of Playboy, but the one Kip had borrowed was now forever gone.

The other bag was Kip’s.

Clay pulled it out and dumped the contents on Kip’s bare mattress.

Basically the same stuff, except that Kip’s cigarettes were almost gone.

But no drugs.

For a moment Clay considered transferring the contents of Kip’s bag to his own, but then changed his mind; even though Kip was gone, it didn’t feel right.

It felt like stealing.

Putting both bags back into the wall, he carefully replaced the wainscoting, then went back to his bed and flopped down.

So he’d been right — Kip hadn’t been doing drugs. Then what had he been doing?

What the hell had happened to him?

† † †

Ryan McIntyre lay on his bed, propped up on pillows, watching his mother pack clothes into a duffel bag. But she wasn’t packing nearly enough — it looked like she was packing for a weekend camping trip or something. “I’m gonna need a lot more than—” he began, but Teri didn’t let him finish.

“St. Isaac’s uses uniforms,” she said, folding another pair of jeans and doing her best to fit them into the duffel bag without wrinkling them.

“Uniforms?” Ryan echoed. Nobody had said anything about uniforms. His jaw ached, his side hurt whenever he moved, he was getting a headache from trying to figure out what to take to St. Isaac’s, and now he had to wear a uniform ? Maybe he should just go back to Dickinson. But even as the idea formed in his mind, the memory of the beating in the boys’ restroom flooded back. Whatever happened at St. Isaac’s couldn’t be as bad as that, so he watched silently as his mother continued folding clothes, wondering now when he was going to wear the stuff she was packing.

What about the rest of the stuff he was planning to take? Would he even be allowed to put posters on the walls in his room? Probably not. Now all kinds of questions were tumbling through his mind. Was he going to have a roommate? Were the nuns as mean as Father Sebastian said? How strict was everything going to be? And was he going to have to go to Mass all the time? Even worse, what if he couldn’t even do the work? Private schools were supposed to be way harder than public ones, and St. Isaac’s—

He cut the thought short; it was all just too much to deal with.

His eyes fell on the photograph of his father on his desk. That should have been the first thing he packed. Pain stabbed him as he got awkwardly off the bed, but he took a deep breath and pressed his side until it passed. Then he picked up the photograph. His father seemed to be looking not exactly at him, but deep into him. Ryan instantly felt the familiar pang of loneliness that always shot through him when he thought about his father, and the way his father had always been able to provide answers for his questions. Now, as he gazed at the photograph, he could almost hear his father’s voice. Grow up, it seemed to be whispering. Act like a man, and do the right thing. He wrapped the photograph in a towel and handed it to his mom, who put it into the duffel.

“You don’t have to take everything with you tomorrow,” she said. “I can bring over anything you need.”

Ryan gingerly sat back down on the bed, holding his side.

Teri looked at him anxiously. “Do you need a pain pill?”

Ryan shook his head. “I’m okay. Just nervous about tomorrow, I guess.”

Teri sat next to him and smoothed his hair, then touched his swollen eye and gently traced the edge of a big bruise. As Ryan was about to brush her hand away she suddenly stood up. “There’s something I want you to have,” she said. “You’re not as old as you’re supposed to be, but I think it’s time.”

Intrigued, Ryan followed her through his bedroom door and down the hall to the little door that opened into the attic. They ducked in the doorway and stood up in a spacious area with a plywood floor below them and bare rafters above. Teri groped for the chain and a single hanging bulb lit the room, throwing harsh shadows across the storage space. Ryan followed her between containers of Christmas decorations, cartons of his baby clothes, and boxes of photographs, many of them so old no one even knew who they were anymore. A couple of old lamps with missing shades sat on a bent chaise lounge, and the ceramic chicken he’d painted red when he was in kindergarten sat, headless, next to the chaise on the little table that used to be in his room when he was small.

Ignoring it all, his mother crouched next to an old green trunk with a combination lock on its hasp.

A trunk Ryan couldn’t remember seeing before.

His curiosity increasing, he knelt next to his mother and watched as she worked the combination, removed the lock and opened the lid.

On the top lay a sheet of tissue paper, which she pulled away to reveal his father’s class-A dress uniform.

Ryan’s breath caught. The last time he’d seen his father dressed in that uniform was when he received a Silver Star for Gallantry in Action, during his first tour in Iraq. It was the same uniform he wore in the photo Ryan kept on his desk. Could this be the gift?

But even before he could voice the question, his mother had lifted out the tray holding the uniform, set it aside, then removed everything below it. Finally she pried open a false bottom that was so perfectly fitted that Ryan hadn’t even seen it, and took a small rosewood box from the compartment the panel had hidden. “This was with your father’s things when they came back from Iraq,” she told him. She turned the box so it faced Ryan and opened its hinged lid.

Inside was his father’s crucifix, the one he’d worn around his neck almost as long as Ryan could remember. He picked it up gently, almost reverently. It was heavy — heavier than he’d expected. And it wasn’t flat like most crucifixes. This one was thick, the body of Christ in full relief, the cross itself covered with intricately detailed carvings, each delicate etching darkened with time and tarnish.

“He was going to give it to you when you were grown,” Teri said as Ryan gazed at the object in his hands. “But I think maybe you need to have it right now. He said it always helped him do the right thing.”

The silver felt warm and familiar to Ryan’s fingers. Despite the etching, the metal was smooth, as if it were very old, and had been worn by generations of fathers and sons. And he could almost hear his father’s voice again, repeating the words he’d heard inside his head a few minutes ago. The same words his mother had just spoken.