Chapter 19: A Stranger in God's House

The voice finished, and the echo ran around the stone ceiling and died.

Nobody breathed.

Then Irene threw back her head and laughed, high and shrill.

"That's a trick," she said. "Don't you see? It's a recording. They can make anyone say anything."

She turned in a circle, holding out her bouquet, her eyes sliding from face to face.

"Zii, you've known me since I was born. Would I say that? Would I?"

The capo in the second pew looked down at his hands.

"Mamma," Irene said, and her voice rose into a wail. "Mamma, tell them. Tell them who she is."

I looked at my mother.

She stood very straight in her black dress, with her gloved hand on the pew.

Two hundred people were watching her.

Every capo my father had ever shaken hands with sat within thirty feet, and not one of them was breathing.

She walked out into the aisle.

She walked slowly, as she did everything, and she stopped four feet in front of me.

For a moment her eyes went over my face, the wet hair, the borrowed silk, the old stained satin hanging from my arm.

Her mouth trembled.

Then she turned to the church.

"I don't know this woman," my mother said.

A rustle went through the pews.

"My eldest daughter is dead. She is buried at Holy Sepulchre, and I have stood at her grave every Sunday for six weeks."

"Mamma," I said.

"A stranger has come into the house of God, in a dead girl's face, with a thief's tricks," my mother went on.

Her voice was steady, and it carried to the back of the nave.

"Whoever paid for her will answer to me. Remove her."

She turned her back on me.

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