Rosary girls

24

The main branch of the Free Library was the largest library in the city, located on Vine Street and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

Jessica sat in the fine arts section, poring over a huge collection of Christian art tomes, looking for something, anything, that resembled the tableaux they had uncovered at the two crime scenes, scenes to which they had no witnesses, no fingerprints, as well as two victims who, as far as they knew, were unrelated: Tessa Wells, sitting at the column in that filthy basement on North Eighth Street; Nicole Taylor reposing in the field of spring flowers.

With the assistance of one of the librarians, Jessica did a catalog search using various keywords. The results were overwhelming.

There were books on the iconography of the Virgin Mary, books on mysticism and the Catholic Church, books on relics, the Shroud of Turin, the Oxford Companion to Christian Art. There were countless guides to the Louvre, to the Uffizi, to the Tate. She skimmed books on the stigmata, on Roman history as it applied to crucifixion. There were pictorial Bibles, books on Franciscan, Jesuit, and Cistercian art, sacred heraldry, Byzantine icons. There were color plates of oil paintings, watercolors, acrylics, woodcuts, pen-and-ink drawings, murals, frescoes, sculptures in bronze, marble, wood, stone.

Where to begin?

When she found herself thumbing through a coffee table book on ecclesiastical embroidery, she knew she was getting a little off course. She tried keywords like prayer and rosary, and got hundreds of hits. She learned some basics, including that the rosary is Marian in nature, centered on the Virgin Mary, and is meant to be said while contemplating the face of Christ. She took as many notes as she could.

She checked out a few of the circulating books-many she had looked at were reference-and headed back to the Roundhouse, her mind reeling with religious imagery. Something in these books pointed to the inspiration for the madness of these crimes. She just had no idea how to ferret it out.

For the first time in her life she wished she had paid more attention in religion class.