The Saint

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Nora

NORA SUTHERLIN WAS BEING FOLLOWED.

She didn’t know she was being followed as she drove through Bavaria and into the heart of the Black Forest. Who would follow her, after all? And why? No one back home knew why she’d left, and no one at all knew where she’d gone. She kept her eyes on the road ahead and didn’t once think to look behind her.

A vague uneasiness, a quiet sort of dread, had burrowed into her mind and made a home there. The sun, which had seen almost as much as she had in her lifetime, chased her car as she raced down a road shrouded in towering pine trees. Dark. Light. Dark. Light. Nora sensed the shadows wanted to catch her and keep her. She pushed the accelerator and fled deeper into the forest.

At last she came to the end of the road and spied a small thatched-roof cottage hidden among the pine and fir trees. Two stories and made all of stone, the little house seemed an exile from a fairy tale. A kindly woodcutter could live in that house—the sort who’d save a little girl from the jaws of a wolf. If the cottage were part of a fairy tale, who was she? The woodcutter? The girl?

Or the wolf?

She gathered her things from the car and strode toward the cottage. The owner had warned her there was no lock on the door but promised she would be safe. This part of the woods was on private land. No one would trouble her. No one at all.

Ivy covered the cottage from the ground to the chimney. She felt as if she’d stepped back four hundred years when she crossed the threshold. Gazing around the interior, she made her day’s plan. She’d build a fire in that great gray stone hearth. She’d drink tea out of ruddy earthenware mugs. She’d sleep under heavy sheets in a rustic bed with posts of rough-hewn wood. In another time and under different circumstances, she would have loved it here. But grief clawed at her heart, and her task lay hard before her.

And it wasn’t in Nora’s nature to relish the prospect of sleeping alone.