All of the Lights (16 page)

That's clearly not enough to placate her because the bitterness still hasn't retreated from her eyes.

"Look," Bennett chimes in. "I think it goes without saying that what we're doing here is pretty stupid. That being said, we need to be careful. Rae can't just go walking around Southie with us. People are gonna notice and they're gonna ask questions we don't want to answer."

"You're right," I allow tightly. "We'll cross that bridge when we get there. Besides, the last thing we need is to tip anyone off about what we're doin'."

They both seem to accept that for what it is.

And the last thing
I
need is to tip anyone off I've spent any time with Rae Moretti that didn't involve screaming at her or spitting at her. When this is all over, I have every intention of never seeing either of these two again. I'm not stupid enough to say that out loud though.

"Movin' on," I sigh and grip my coffee mug a little tighter. "I think we can all agree that taking anything we find to the cops is a dead-end? At least not until we have something concrete they can't ignore?"

Both Rae and Bennett nod as if this was already a foregone conclusion. At least I don't have to explain it to them. One of life's little victories, I guess.

"Anything else?" Rae cocks an eyebrow at me, but it's more a challenge than a question.

"Nope," I shake my head with a sly grin. "That's all I can think of right now. I guess we'll just have to play the rest of it by ear."

"I guess."

Awkward silence settles over the table and I have to shift in my chair while Rae stares blankly out the window. Finally, Bennett clears his throat dramatically and nudges Rae in the side.

"What?" she whispers hotly.

"Don't what me," he tosses back. "You know what."

They seem to be speaking their own language and I don't have the time or the patience to decode what they're saying. It's bad enough I have to be sitting here with them in the first place and this is just making the whole experience even more miserable.

"So, I think the only logical place to start is by lookin' at your dad. That's where it probably begins and ends anyway."

Bennett nudges her yet again.

"Ow!" She rears back to put some space between them. "That freaking hurt, Benn."

"I don't care," he snaps and then gestures to me. "Why did you even agree to meet with him if you weren't going to show him?"

Now he's got my attention and I lean my elbows on the table so I can hear them better. "Show me what?"

Rae casts him a vicious look that, even I have to admit, scares me a little. Bennett, to his credit, doesn't bat an eye. He's obviously well-versed in her moods and after some nonverbal communication, Rae blows out a harsh breath and dips down to dig into her purse. She unearths her phone and flips through a few screens before passing it to me.

All I see is a bunch of numbers and the word for April in Irish, but that quickly fades when I realize whose name is attached to it. Uneasiness swirls around in the pit of my stomach and she gestures toward her phone with her head, giving me permission to swipe through more of the pictures. Each one is more of the same: postcards of Boston with these vague and obscure messages on them. But I just can't move past the fact that these are addressed to Father Lindsay. Or the fact that he was the one who convinced me to find Rae again in the first place.

"Where did you find these?"

"We already started looking at my dad," Rae just shrugs. "I broke into his home office."

My eyes snap up from her phone. "What?"

She shrugs again and casts Bennett a sly glance, who just grins back at me. "It wasn't that hard. My dad is always out of the house during the day, but my step-mom is there on and off through the week. I just called her and asked if we could meet for lunch."

I'm not sure how that amounts to her breaking into her dad's home office, but she fills in the blanks for me anyway.

"I knew she'd make every excuse in the book to get out of it this week and I cross-checked her excuses with her assistant until I found an opening that would be long enough for us to get in there and snoop around a little."

Huh. Wasn't expecting that. I guess she's smarter than I gave her credit for.

"Anyway," she bats a hand like it's no big deal. "I found all those postcards in the bottom drawer of his desk. It was locked, so I'm pretty sure it means
something.
I'm just not sure what yet."

Right. You don't lock up something if it doesn't have value.

"Any ideas?" she asks softly. "Father Lindsay wasn't much help when we tried to talk to him yesterday."

My whole body stills.

"He wouldn't talk to you?"

Both Rae and Bennett shake their heads.

"He pretty much ran out of there as fast as he could," Bennett explains and he frowns at the memory, as if he can't reconcile Father Lindsay's actions with the man we both know either.

"You know him though, don't you?" Rae leans forward in her seat, that conviction creeping in again. "If we went back there with you, I don't think he'd run away again."

I shake my head. "No, he wouldn't."

Because I wouldn't let him. I'd hunt him down and tie him up if I had to until he explained himself and those postcards. I don't think I'd be sitting here if it weren't for him and I can't tear my eyes away from the screen if I tried.

"That's what I figured," Rae nods softly and now I understand why she agreed to meet me. She finally knows she needs me just as much as I need her.

But before we move forward, we have to figure out what these postcards mean. If we're going to go back to Father Lindsay with this, I want ammunition. I want to know exactly what these messages point to so he can't run away as easily.

"This means April in Irish," I point to the word,
Aibrean,
on her screen. Anyone from Southie worth their salt knows at least a little bit of Irish.

"Yeah, I figured that out already," Rae shrugs and when my eyebrows dip into a frown, she just lifts a shoulder again. "All I had to do was pop it into Google translate. It doesn't take a genius to figure it out, you know."

My hands lift up in the air in defense and Bennett chuckles softly next to her. He's proud of her, that much I can tell. My feelings don't quite round that particular corner, but at the very least, I can appreciate her resourcefulness. That's the kind of thing that got us these postcards in the first place and probably the thing that's going to help us find more like them.

"Alright, alright, you win," I allow easily and blow out an exasperated breath. "So, this is all we've got right now, right?"

Bennett nods empathically from across the table and Rae, to her credit, nods instead of firing off some smart-ass comment.

"There was a safe in his office too," she adds softly. "I didn't get a chance to really try to open it, but it can't be any different than that locked drawer in his desk. Whatever he's got in there is obviously something he doesn't want anyone to see."

"Maybe we just take it one step at a time? Figure out why your dad has those postcards and see where that takes us."

Common sense tells me that getting into that safe is what we need to focus on. Pure, unadulterated curiosity, confusion, and frustration are pointing me in another direction. Rae and Bennett might be able to move on to that safe now, but I doubt I'm even going to sleep until I know why Father Lindsay sent me hurtling back toward Rae and these postcards. I'm not the only one who's been acting out of character lately...running away from Rae? Turning around and telling me to find her? That's some serious two-faced bullshit and I expected better of him.

"There's something else, too," Rae sighs and for the first time I see something other than hostility and frustration in her eyes. "He didn't admit it, but...I think Father Lindsay knew my mom."

Once I've gotten a handle on that particular bomb, my mind sifts through everything I've ever heard about Jillian Moretti. I don't remember any of it, but I do know the press had a field day with the story—the boozy, pill-popping wife of the budding mayor/mobster who succumbed to her both addiction and postpartum, leaving an infant daughter behind. A juicy story by any definition.

Never once did Father Lindsay ever utter a word about Rae's mom or anyone else in her family. No indications that they were anything to him at all.  And that thought has my stomach swimming in uneasiness and jittery alarm.

"Yeah," Bennett nods soberly like he read my mind. "Shit just got real."

And so, my shaky alliance with the devil began.

Rae

PR6037T617D7

241

Aibrean 8

PR6037T617D7

448

Fiedfath 22

PR5818L2

15

Marta 13

And so on and so on...

Each postcard is addressed to the same person and the message has the same structure: a series of nonsensical letters and numbers followed by a month in Irish and yet another number. Some of the top sequences are exactly the same, others have a similar variation, and I just want to bang my head into the counter until something starts to make sense.

At least I've got the last lines mostly figured out.
Aibrean
8 has to mean April 8th.
Fiedfath
22 is May 22nd.
Marta
13, March 13th. Thank you, Google.

But that's it. That's all I've got.

After almost two hours of attempting to decode these enigmas, the three of us had to part ways at the coffeehouse because I had to get to the store, but that wasn't before breaking out that list-creation app on my iPad, much to Bennett's delight. All that had gotten us was dead-end after dead-end and frustration after frustration. Conspiracy theories revolving around nuclear codes, the Freedom Trail, the security passwords for Fenway Park, and how to steal tickets to see
Hamilton
—
any
ticket, according to Bennett—just aren't going to help us.

I'm finished eating, but still have a good 15 minutes left of my break before I have to head back out to the floor. Nobody will notice if I get a little work done and start a new, more plausible list of possible postcard explanations. My fingers grope inside the folds of my purse, but come up empty.

"Shit," I mutter under my breath.

I know I didn't forget it at the coffeehouse. The problem is that my purse is too spacious and I've got way too much junk in it. Finally, I give in and start taking all those unnecessary items out of my bag as I find them. My sunglasses find the break table first, then my overstuffed makeup bag. Next I toss
The Age of Innocence
on the table and lean down again to dig in my purse, but my movements still.

My gaze locks on the barcode taped into the corner of my library book. Right above it, lies the following sequence: PS3545.H16 A7.

I can't move. My entire body is on pause, frozen in disbelief and an awareness that still doesn't make sense.

Now I lunge for my phone, flipping through picture after picture and it's all right there. Right in front of my face. Even at the coffeehouse, this stupid library book sat facedown the entire time we sat at the table trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

I want to laugh, but I don't have time for that.

Now that the clutter is cleared from my purse, my iPad easily slips into my hand and I open up a web search to get me to the Boston Public Library's homepage. The first code I type in is the one written on the first postcard, PR6037T617D7. And sure enough, it takes me to exactly what I didn't know I was looking for.

It's actually PR6037.T617 D7, but that particular detail doesn't seem too important right now. What has me riveted is the title attached to it.

Dracula.

The next one, PR5818L2, takes me to
Lady Windermere's Fan
by Oscar Wilde. Some of them aren't in circulation anymore, but before long, I have the rest all sorted out by their respective call numbers:
The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome,
a collection of poems by W.B. Yeats,
Ulysses, Little Women, Walden, The Scarlet Letter,
a book of poetry by Edna St. Vincent Millay, some short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, a few plays by George Bernard Shaw,
The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe,
and some essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson—and every single one of them is housed at the central library in Back Bay.

One mystery gives way to another.

My hands tremble and I have to set the iPad down. What else am I supposed to do but sit here and stare at the screen, fixated on yet another riddle...this doesn't exactly point to Sean's ticket out of prison and what any of these books in the Boston Public Library have to do with one another is just another piece to unravel.

And there's a sense of foreboding settling over my shoulders that doesn't sit well. These postcards were no accident and no coincidence. They were addressed to Father Lindsay, who stared at me with such horror, such disbelief, that no amount of justification will ever be enough to explain away. He knew my mom and judging by the postmarked dates on each postcard, he knew her long before she died.