“Refuge? No one gets out. They just keep adding more and more prisoners.”
“I need you to help me find out about the murders. You can’t do it here. I need you safe, away from Public Security. Then you can tell me about that day. You were there, weren’t you?”
She took so long to answer his question he was not sure she had heard. “I have so many nightmares I don’t want to sleep anymore. The abbess calls to me in the night. Sometimes I wonder which is my nightmare and which is my memory. It’s like I was there and not there.”
“You were there, Cora,” Shan assured her. “And you need to remember. For Rutger’s sake. You saw the one who did it.”
“You mean the monster. The thing.”
“The monster. The killer. Yes.”
Cora seemed to shrink again. Once more she began rocking back and forth. “Rutger says the colors have to be just right. You can’t just paint the old walls red. There’s a special shade like maroon, like good Tibetan soil. The Tibetans have pigments they save for such things. Prayer red, he calls it. I painted a gate with the wrong shade and he wants me to redo it. The abbess will help. She teaches me old rhymes for the rhythm of the brush.”
Shan’s skin crawled. A dry, creaking laugh escaped her throat. “The abbess found a patch of blooming wildflowers above the ruins. We’re going to quit early so we can take a meal there. A picnic, I told them. The abbess repeated the word several times like a mantra. Picnic, picnic, picnic. She laughed.
“She wanted to finish painting the cradle of that old wheel. Rutger was going to help her, though she kept telling him to go to the back of the grounds. Someone was coming, and he might scare the man. I said I would go sketch some of the paintings inside the little chapels.” Cora’s voice trailed away and she began reciting her mantra again.
“A Chinese man named Lung was coming,” Shan said. “Who else?”
But Cora did not hear him. She had gone to a distant, terrifying place. Tears were flowing down her cheeks. “I should never have left. I had decided to carry the food out to the place with flowers. I saw the one come on his bicycle but that couldn’t be the one they were worried about, I thought. I sat in the flowers, waiting. They were taking so long. I went back down. They were praying by the chorten, I thought. That one didn’t see me. He is talking to them now, all angry at them. But they won’t speak back. He was bent over Rutger, I thought to help him somehow. He had a red rag in his hand. I thought they must have spilled the red paint on themselves. Then he turned with Rutger’s head on his knee and I saw what he had done. It was Rutger’s face in his hand. The blood didn’t show on that one because of the color.
“I ran. He called out but I was already at the back wall. I ran. I fell. I ran some more. I didn’t know where I was going. I must have run for hours.”
He did not speak until her tears had dried.
“You have to trust Lokesh and me, Cora. I will get you out. We will take you to a safe place. Not the hermitage, because the nuns are being watched. Perhaps the monks. Lokesh and I will get you to the monastery, to Chegar.”
Cora shrank back. Her eyes filled with fear again. “Don’t you understand? I told you!”
“Told me what?” Shan asked.
“I didn’t see all the blood because it blended with the robe. Take me to the monastery and I will die! The butcher was a monk.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Ani Ama refused to cooperate with Shan’s plan. She raised a hand, cutting him off. “My place is here,” the nun said. “There are the sick. Now wounded are being brought in, from riots somewhere.” It was the middle of the night. She sat beside a dead woman as two other women worked a canvas shroud around the body.
“What if you could do more for them on the outside?” Shan asked. “What if there was a way to make the world see what was going on here? Once there was even a hint that international representatives may visit you know there would be real medical care, real food.”
“No,” she insisted. “Do not pretend that I have such power.”
“The American and German governments have such power. They will show it, when Cora arrives home with stories of the camp, and the story of a murdered German and a murdered abbess.”
The old nun stood up and placed a hand on the dead woman’s brow, murmuring a blessing before the shroud was pulled over her head. “Nothing to do with me,” she said to Shan.
“The abbess has been calling out to Cora,” Shan said to her back. “There is only one way for the abbess to move on to what she deserves.”
Ani Ama halted. “You don’t think I pray for that every night?”
“One of the young monks of Chegar said he hears her moaning, echoing across the hills in the darkest hours. The abbess is wandering lost, unable to understand what has happened to them.” The nun slowly turned toward Shan as he spoke. “A terrible shadow is falling on all those who wear robes in the valley. Help me find the truth. The American was there, at the convent. Leave with us and we will find the killer together.”
“The truth about the murders is with those who died.”
“If we know how to listen we can still hear it. You have part of it already.”
“Nonsense. I wasn’t there.”
“Jamyang died that day too. It was no coincidence. You went with the abbess to prepare the body of the Lung boy. Jamyang was there. What happened? Why was he frightened by the body?”
“I don’t think it was death that frightened him.”
“Then tell me, Ani Ama. Why did he flee that day?”
Ani Ama sighed and looked out over the camp. “I didn’t want to be abbess. I wanted to spend my last years in some quiet place at a loom. My mother was a weaver, and her mother before.” She watched the body as it was carried away, then began explaining. When Lung Tso had arrived to ask the abbess to help, Jamyang had been with her. He had asked questions of Lung Tso, shown great concern that one so young had died. He accepted the invitation of the abbess to join them. “The lama knew about the old ways,” Ani Ama explained, “and knew how to receive deities. As soon as we arrived at that old stable he began cleaning it, murmuring the right words, then lit incense for the gods before turning to the body. He was so reverent, so patient in cleansing the boy,” the nun said. “But then as he got to the neck he gasped, then frantically worked the skin, pushing it one way and another. The abbess asked what was wrong but he seemed not to hear.”
“What was it?” Shan asked. “What was on his neck?”
“Just a mark. A long straight mark like a deep bruise over the throat. The boy had died when his truck went off the road and crashed down a steep hill. His father said the mark was where the steering wheel had smashed against the boy’s neck before crushing his ribs. But Jamyang wouldn’t listen. It was like he was suddenly possessed. He left without another word to us. We didn’t see him for more than a week.”
“When was that?”
“He came back one night and sat with the abbess, alone. There were strong words, which was unlike either of them. Voices were raised. A day later she sent messages to the monastery.”
“Messages? What messages?”
The nun slowly shook her head. “I didn’t understand. She first sent Chenmo, who told me later. Only one word, Dharmasala, to be left on the desk of the monastery office. Later that day she sent another, with a shepherd who was passing through. A day after that she left by herself, saying no one was to follow. But I watched. At the bottom of the stairs the foreigners joined her.”
“To the convent,” Shan suggested.
“To go to die, yes,” Ani Ama said in an anguished voice.
It had begun with the Lung boy, Shan was certain now. But what had happened afterward? What had Jamyang been doing in the days before he returned to the abbess? Why would he have summoned Lung Tso to go to the convent at the same time, but not gone himself?
“That night Jamyang and the abbess spoke,” the nun said, “I dream about it. I understand now. The words they spoke were the ending. They didn’t know then but they were tying off the knots of the tapestry that had been their lives.”