Devious - Lisa Jackson [172]
“Thanks!” Val said, though she had no plans to bid on any of the items.
With Slade’s hand steadfastly at her back, they moved inside, along with a rush of other guests, through a foyer of mirrors, marble, and potted palms. In the center stood a massive table, upon which an ornate display of tropical flowers—anthuriums, birds-of-paradise, and torch lilies—bloomed in bursts of vibrant color.
A string quartet played soft music at the foot of a grand staircase. Wide steps with a deep floral runner wound upward before splitting to the second floor. With gleaming mahogany rails and white balusters, the staircase was reminiscent of the most beautiful of plantation homes.
In the foyer were black-and-white photographs of St. Elsinore’s, propped up on easels, a veritable history of the buildings, showing how the church, orphanage, and grounds had changed with the years. Hundreds of children and scores of teachers, nuns, and nurses and a few priests were caught in long-ago fragments, tiny instants of time.
So many of the people had passed on, Val thought, eyeing the displays and noting the change of fashion in the children, the addition of electrical and telephone wires in the shots, the growth of trees, the morphing of the vehicles in the street from carriages and wagons to Model Ts, the big boats with fins of the cars of the fifties, then increasingly sleeker vehicles.
In one of the more recent pictures, the 1960s or ’70s, judging from the vintage of the cars, Val caught a glimpse of the spire of the cathedral and an oak tree. A solitary nun, dressed in a dark habit, her sleeves voluminous, was reaching for the hand of a small child.
Val froze, her eyes on the image of the nun’s face, young and unlined, yet still harsh, her dark eyes glinting. In her other hand she held the links of a rosary, a silver cross dangling through her slim fingers.
“What?” Slade asked.
Val’s heart hammered wildly at the sight of the black-and-white photograph.
In her mind’s eye, pictures of her youth flashed in painful, sharp fragments. She remembered entering the stark, glistening hallways of St. Elsinore’s. Losing sight of Baby Camille. Crying at night for her parents. Wishing Mrs. O’Malley would return and save her.
From what?
Val blinked hard and smelled, for just a second, the same scents she had as a child:
Floor wax.
Ammonia.
Pine cleaner.
Fear.
A tremor passed through her.
“Are you all right?” Slade’s voice brought her back to the present just as he was taking hold of the crook of her arm and herding her away from the stark, mind-jarring picture.
“Y-yes,” Val said, though she was lying as she tried desperately to pull herself together, back to this bustling hotel, back to a night in the twenty-first century.
She took one final glance at the easel but stopped. Her heart nearly dropped through the floor. “Wait!” she said, and stared at the young nun in the still shot. If she layered on the years, weathering the nun’s skin, adding wrinkles and the harshness that decades of disappointment can etch upon the skin, she recognized the nun as a young Sister Ignatia.
Val’s nerves stretched thin. Her heart raced. Not just a nun, not just the woman who had grasped her five-year-old arm in her strong fingers with their sharp nails, whose rosary reminded a child of a silvery snake, but also the monster who haunted her dreams—the demon that besieged her subconscious, a being that had, over the years, transformed from a cruel witch of a woman to a creature with her tiny teeth, slithering silver rosary, and talonlike hands.
“Oh, God,” she whispered, a chill that brought a rash of goose bumps to her skin running through her. All these years, the terror she’d felt was because of a nun who yelled, a nun who slapped at her fingers with a ruler, a nun who seemed to enjoy inflicting pain.
Val shuddered, told herself it was silly, when so many of the people at the orphanage had been kind.
“Valerie?” Slade asked, his eyes darkening with concern, his fingers still strong around her elbow.
“I’m .