“No matter...” I reassured her.
There was a sudden change in her expression.
“Someone is comin’! Ye must go now!”
She had already turned back, determined to hide herself in the shadows from that sound.
“I canna do this without ye,” I whispered.
“Ye have a gift. I dinna understand, but ye do. It’s in yer touch and the way ye know things. If yer caught, ye will be punished worse than before. Maybe even disappear like the others...”
I had protested even as I knew it was true. A gift, some strange ability to know things before they happened.
The one time I had asked the Reverend Mother about it, she locked me away in a small room with no food for days—to purge the sin from my body, she told me.
Purge. I didn’t understand the word at the time. But there were painful lessons about it afterward.
I understood then, in that way of children when punished, who made certain it didn’t happen again. Except for Abby.
I became her protector. I warned when one of the nuns approached and she had finished only a portion of her chores, then quickly finished them for her, so that she was not punished.
Not that I understood the warning that had whispered more than once. It was simply there.
She had looked back down that darkened hallway with a frightened expression, then back at me.
“If ever ye are me friend, ye must go.”
She left me then, limping as she returned the way we had come, practiced for weeks, and then disappeared down the adjacent hallway that led to the chapel.
It was then that inner voice warned, followed by the sound of footsteps.
I ran down to the pantry, deserted this time of the night, out through that door into the inner courtyard of the Foundling Hospital. Then past the markers at those small graves as I clutched my blanket. That strange whisper there.
‘Do not look back!’
I opened my eyes as I felt the tram lurch around another corner, then stop, passengers pushing down the aisle to those steps as the driver called out the destination.
I smiled at the little girl as she and her mother moved past.
“Ye are a brave one,”I thought and saw her eyes widen. Then a smile appeared as if she understood.
She looked back at me over her shoulder, the smile still there as she left the tram with her mother.
The central station of the police was only a short walk away. I reached it quickly, still struggling with that encounter. The desk constable greeted me a second time, pulling me back from my thoughts.
“Are ye all right, miss?”
I was now, and asked to see Inspector Landry.
“I am aware of the landlady’s death,” he commented when I asked about the woman in the Close, saying how I’d found her flat in disarray.
“The report was handed in this morning. A sad coincidence.”
Was it a coincidence?
“It is not uncommon in the Old Town, but I’ll have a man make sure to search her flat, although it is often difficult to find out anything useful. Still, I appreciate the information.”
They would learn nothing, I was certain of it. Whoever had killed Dory and searched her room, very possibly had searched the old woman’s flat as well.
