Grief Street

what’s your hurry?” Monaghan pulled at the fingertips of a glove, as if by habit to remove it, then stopped. He took up the Glenlivit bottle and poured himself a finger of thick gold. “Won’t you join me?”
    “But the coppers?” How she wanted to stay, alone, with her fine gentleman friend. She crossed herself.
    “Please—don’t go.”
    “I must, I must.”
    He could have stopped her again, of course. But instead he put back his drink, and poured another.
    Sister scurried through the pantry, crossing herself again, then on through the kitchen. She stopped for a moment at the sink, where she picked up the cool dishrag again and sponged her heated cheeks and forehead. Then she stepped out the back door into a garden patched with carrots and potatoes and peas and peppers and melons. The plants had only begun pushing leaves up through the rows of topsoil, bordered one from the other with rocks and cinders and marked with paper seedling packets speared to sticks. One of the guests had hosed the garden about a half-hour ago. The soil was still black and glistening wet.
    A chill was coming with the early sundown. Sister rubbed her hands together. She looked to the house next door. Boarded windows, crumbled brownstone, and a garden full of urban bramble; a dung heap she often called it, through which her eyes moved uneasily; a morass of weeds and glass and shards and tin cans and odd bits of cloth and broken toys, and stiff dead birds with their eyes plucked out by the hungry things that fed upon the mess.
    Mr. Monaghan—her poor countryman; dear Eoin, as she indeed thought of him in her lonely place—went in and out of his decrepit shelter through the dung heap. Sister Roberta shivered. In and out from this shameful old house of whores’ ghosts, this house that birthed the unholy name of Hell’s Kitchen. Dear God!
    Sister’s ears pricked beneath her veil. A rustling sound from the bramble. Coppers? She thought of Neil Hockaday, and how he might be the one who revealed poor Mr. Monaghan. Oh, what betrayal! And here I was little Neil’s own teacher! Again, the sweetness fled from her face.
    “Hallo!” she called, with a sharp edge to her voice; and God help Neil Hockaday if he answered her call. “Hallo there!”
    No answer.
    Sister lifted her black skirts a few inches off the ground and sallied forth from her garden to the mess next door. Prepared to boot a rat or starving cat to kingdom come if the creature should dare come close enough to her sturdy convent shoes. She walked this way, skirts raised and scowling, clear to the other side of the house full of whores’ ghosts.
    No coppers were there. But they had been, just as Eoin had said. For now Sister saw the second of two officers climbing back into the prowl car up in the street, and the first one sitting at the wheel. She ducked back and watched as the car moved off.
    Sister started back toward her own house, first stopping for a moment at the open door her Eoin used to come and go from this dreadful squat she had never seen herself. It was a Dutch door, well built and intact after more than a hundred years, but ill-sized; with both halves open, a man would have to crouch to get through it. Sister was put in mind of a favorite Irish faerie book of her childhood, a pen-and-ink illustration of a black-hearted poem in which an ogress stands behind the Dutch door of a cottage, bristled arms spread over the half-sill, luring a curious boy in the lane with her singsong: “Cross patch, pull the latch, open my door, come in!”
    Sister peered through the darkness of what she guessed to be a back kitchen, the layout being the same as her own house. There seemed to be light from some source up front, and after a few seconds, when her eyes had grown accustomed, Sister saw the outlines of walls and a corridor beyond the kitchen, and the remains of beautiful plaster mouldings.
    A fine house this had been in its time, she thought. What am I thinking? A fine house indeed!
    “Dear God!” she said aloud. She crossed herself and turned away, shivering. The afternoon was growing as suddenly dark as it was growing cold.
    Sister hustled past the old whorehouse to the comfort and safety and blessedness of her own sheltered quarters. Well now, I might join Eoin in a few jars of whisky.
    At her own back door, she turned at a sound.
    Another rustling from the putrid bramble across the way? A storm rising? A squirrel racing across utility wires?
    Something closed over