He Took Me to Catch the Rat, But the Rat Was Him novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Almond Street

On Christmas morning Aisling finds the cellar door painted shut, the pigeons on the roof and two men watching the house, and at three in the morning Cathal tells her to sit down or come here.

The guest room door stuck in its frame when I tried it at six on Christmas morning, and I took it for locked.

I put my shoulder into it, and the swollen wood gave.

Nobody was in the hall.

Every lamp in the Almond Street house was on, though the sun was coming up behind the curtains.

At the end of the hall stood a door with no handle.

Someone had painted over its seams so the white ran smooth into the frame.

I put my palm flat against it.

"That's the cellar," Cathal said behind me.

I had not heard him come up the stairs.

He wore a gray sweater and carried two mugs.

"Why is it painted shut?" I asked.

"Damp," he said.

"When did you last go down?"

"Six years ago."

He held out a mug, and I took it because the coffee was hot and I was cold.

"You leave every light on," I said.

"I sleep better."

He said it flatly, and he did not look at me while he said it.

"Come up on the roof," he said.

"It's the only room in this house with a view."

I followed him up a ladder through a hatch into a gray winter morning.

The roof was flat tar paper, with the whole river-ward skyline of chimneys and church spires around us.

At one end stood a coop built of white pine and chicken wire, and it was full of birds.

Cathal opened the trap, and the pigeons went out in one clatter and rose over Almond Street.

They wheeled toward the river, and they came back around the steeple of St. Anne's.

"They go out to the Delaware and they come home," he said.

"Every one."

"Because you trained them."

"Because it's the only place they get fed," Cathal said.

"And because it's theirs."

"Is that what you tell yourself about me?" I asked.

"You're not a bird, Aisling."

"I'm a woman you took out of a choir loft."

"I know exactly what you are," he said, and drank his coffee.

I went down the ladder alone and walked straight to the front door.

It was not locked.

The knob turned in my hand, and cold air came in off the street.

Two men stood across Almond Street beside a gray Lincoln, with their hands in their coat pockets.

One of them lifted his hat to me.

"Merry Christmas, Miss Mulcahy," he called.

I shut the door.

My hands were not steady, and I wiped them down the front of my dress.

I told myself the men worked for Cathal and the door was only a door.

In the kitchen, Cathal's driver was putting my canvas bag on the table.

It held my work whites, my mother's second rosary and the bread knife I had taken out of my own kitchen drawer.

"I start at four a.m. at the bakery on Allegheny," I said.

"I haven't missed a shift in three years."

"You'll go with him," Cathal said, and nodded at the driver.

"And you'll come straight back."

"I'm not sleeping in this house with you," I said.

"You'll sleep in the guest room."

He took the bread knife out of my bag, looked at it, and put it down on the counter without a word.

"For now," he said.

The driver found something to study on the floor.

"By New Year's you'll sleep in mine," Cathal said, in the same low voice.

"And you won't be sleeping."

"You said that in front of him," I said.

"I said it where nothing can happen," Cathal said.

"It's the only place I get to say it."

The driver left through the back door and took the cold with him.

That night I lay under a quilt that smelled of cedar and could not sleep.

I kept feeling his thumb along my lower lip, and I kept hating that I could feel it.

At three in the morning I went downstairs in my socks, because I told myself I wanted water.

A light shone under the study door.

I pushed it open with two fingers.

Cathal sat at a big oak desk with a glass of whiskey he had not touched.

He did not look up.

"You've been standing in that doorway for a minute, Aisling," he said.

"Sit down, or come here."

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