Page 63 of An Academy for Liars

“That he was murdered. In cold blood.”

“I don’t know.”

“You were the person who found him, right?”

Lennon nodded, wishing they could talk about something, anything, else. She was relieved when she spotted the chapel, the building half swallowed by a grove of blooming magnolia trees and live oaks so large their lower branches rested in the dirt. Here the well-tended lawn of Drayton Square gave way to waist-high grass that moved in the wind. It was so overgrown it looked almost intentionally concealed.

“I’ll leave you to it,” said Nadine.

Lennon nodded and made for the doors.

“Lennon?”

She turned. “Yes?”

“I slept with him.”

Lennon faltered. “Who?”

“Ian.”

“Oh.”

“I—I just thought I should let you know.”

Lennon waited for some feeling—jealousy or possessiveness, insecurity—but there was nothing to that end. Ian wasn’t hers, and she’d never wanted him to be. But she was troubled by this, for an entirely different reason. “I thought you were going to be a nun?”

“So did I,” said Nadine, and her mouth wavered with the effort of holding back tears. “You know, I used to think that God’s greatest gift was His love for us. But I’m not so sure anymore. I think that maybe His greatest gift to us is free will. The ability to choose who and what we are. But if that’s true, then…is it possible that what we do here is evil? Innately?” She looked down at her feet, as if embarrassed.

“I…I don’t like to examine things through the lens of good and evil. It’s reductive.”Christ, Lennon thought to herself, she sounded just like Dante.

Nadine ducked her head, nodded. “I’ll see you around?”

“Sure,” said Lennon, and, a little shaken, she turned to enter the chapel. It was dimly lit, and the air smelled strongly of incense. On a pew in the shadow of the altar sat Dante, legs braced apart, eyes on the cross pinned to the back wall above the altar.

He turned his head when the door opened, stood when he saw her approaching.

“Where the hell have you been?” Lennon demanded, striding down the aisle, and she wasn’t exactly sure how it happened—Dante certainly didn’t initiate it—but before she had the chance to stop herself, she pulled him into a tight and fast hug. After a half beat, they parted, Lennon feeling the strange and sudden need to cry. She swallowed hard. “I was worried.”

Dante pulled away first, motioned for her to sit beside him on the pew.

“Do you think it was a suicide?” she asked.

“That’s what it looked like,” said Dante.

“Claude isn’t taking it well. I thought he’d get better with time…but it seems like he’s only getting worse.”

To this, Dante said nothing at all. But there was something peculiar in his expression. A kind of conflict that put a crease between his eyebrows and pulled at the muscles along his jaw. “Let’s light candles. One for Claude and one for Ben.”

It took Lennon by surprise. She’d never thought of him as sentimental in that way. “What’s a candle going to do?”

“We’re in a chapel,” Dante reminded her, a gentle scolding. “Have some respect.”

He stood and went to a nearby table that was covered in melted candles. Strangely, there were no matches, so Dante fished a cigarette lighter from his back pocket and lit two candles up himself. One for Claude and one for Benedict, and then a third.

“Who’s that one for?”

“One of the rats died,” he said. “Ian’s. I found it chewing off its own leg. He was gone a few hours later.”

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