He left Alton at seven on a Friday morning in the first week of July, which gave him three hours for a drive that should have taken two.
He had looked at the route the night before with the attention he brought to things he wanted to understand before they happened. South on Route 3 to I-255, then west across the river into Missouri, then south again on I-44 through the suburbs and out of them, the land opening up gradually as the highway moved away from St. Louis and into the Ozark plateau - the rolling hills, the cedar and oak, the specific quality of Missouri in July which was green and heavy and warm in a way that had nothing of the river's flatness in it. He had driven parts of this road before, for research, for conferences, for the ordinary reasons a person drives through Missouri. He had never driven it toward anything like this.
He had packed carefully. He had been told to bring clothes for three days and nothing else - Ambrose had said this with the particular precision that meant it was information rather than suggestion. The monastery would provide what it provided. Joshua had packed accordingly, and then had stood looking at the small bag for a while before adding his legal pad and two pens, which felt both necessary and slightly beside the point, and then the copy of the decoded cipher sections Daniel had given him the previous Thursday, which felt necessary for different reasons.
He had not packed the compass. He had looked at it on the desk for a moment and then left it there.
Mara had sent him three emails in the six weeks since he had written to her. He had sent four. The correspondence had developed in the way of two careful people establishing the terms of a new relationship - each email slightly more open than the last, the professional register relaxing gradually into something warmer without losing its precision. She was, he had concluded, one of the most careful readers he had encountered in his professional life. She read everything he sent with an attention that was evident in the specificity of her responses - she caught things he had buried in subordinate clauses, asked about the implications of details he had mentioned in passing, remembered three emails back what he had said about something and connected it to what he was saying now.
She had told him, in the second email, what her question was - the one she had been holding since before he wrote to her. It was not the question he had expected. He had expected something about the notation system, the Barcelona collection, the provenance of specific documents. Instead she had asked: what do you think Teodor believed?
He had sat with this for two days before answering. He had written three drafts. In the final version he had said: I think he believed what the record describes - that the ordering was real, that its loss was real, that something needed to be kept. Whether he believed it in the full theological sense I can't say with certainty. What I can say is that he organized his life around it as though he did. And I have been thinking about whether there is a meaningful difference between those two things.
Mara had replied: there is a meaningful difference. But I think you are closer to not seeing one than you were six weeks ago.
He had read this sentence several times and then put the phone down and gone for a walk along the river road, which was what he did when something needed processing that wasn't ready to be processed.
He was thinking about it now, on the highway south of St. Louis, the land beginning its gentle climb into the Ozarks, the sky ahead of him blue and high and cloudless the way Ozark skies were in July. What it meant to be closer to not seeing the difference. What it meant that a Vatican Archive researcher in Rome, who had spent three years following the notation system through six archives in four countries, had watched him approach something he hadn't named yet and had named it for him in a single sentence.
He drove.
The monastery appeared off the highway on a county road, announced by a single wooden sign - OUR LADY OF THE OZARKS, with an arrow pointing left. He had expected something more substantial. He turned left onto the county road, which was paved but narrow, and followed it through two miles of cedar forest before the trees opened and he saw it.
It was not what he had pictured.
He had pictured something medieval - stone, austere, severe in the way of old European monasteries. What he found was a collection of low buildings in native limestone that sat in a clearing in the cedar forest as though they had grown there, which in a sense they had - built in the 1940s by monks who had cut the stone themselves from a quarry on the property, in a style that was neither medieval nor modern but something in between, something that belonged specifically to this place and this hillside and this particular quality of Ozark light in the early afternoon.
A monk in a black habit was pulling weeds in a garden to the left of the main entrance. He looked up when Joshua parked and raised a hand in greeting without stopping what he was doing, which was itself a kind of welcome - unhurried, unperformative, the greeting of a man who was in the middle of something and was glad to see you and would be with you in a moment.
Joshua got out of the car and stood for a moment in the July heat, which was dry here in a way it was never dry in the river bottoms, the cedar smell strong in the warm air. Somewhere inside the main building a bell was ringing. Not urgently - just steadily, the way a bell rings when it is ringing because it is time to ring, for reasons that predate whoever is currently listening.
He counted the strokes without meaning to. Seven.
A door opened and a different monk appeared - older, slight, with the specific quality of stillness that Joshua had come to associate with people who had been practicing stillness for a long time. He introduced himself as Brother Thomas. He said that Father Ambrose had arrived an hour ago and would meet Joshua at Vespers. He said that Joshua's room was ready. He said these things in a voice that was not quiet exactly but that had a quality of not-excess - nothing said beyond what the moment required, nothing performed, nothing rushed.
He picked up Joshua's bag before Joshua could reach for it.
"The bell," Joshua said. "What was that for?"
"None," Brother Thomas said. "The midday office. We'll have Vespers at five-thirty, then supper, then Compline at eight." He said it the way you tell someone the weather - information, offered plainly, not requiring a response.
Joshua followed him inside.
The entrance hall smelled of beeswax and old stone and something he couldn't name immediately and then could - incense, but faint, the residual presence of incense in a building where incense had been burned at the same hours every day for eighty years. The smell of accumulated prayer, if that was what it was. He filed this and then, almost immediately, un-filed it - let it be what it was without categorizing it, which was an action he was getting slightly better at and which still required something that felt like effort.
His room was small and whitewashed, with a single window looking out at the cedar forest and a wooden desk and a narrow bed and a crucifix above the headboard and nothing else. No television. No wireless password on the desk. A carafe of water and a glass.
He put his bag on the bed and stood at the window for a while, looking at the trees.
The bell had rung. He was here. He had no idea what came next, which was, he was beginning to understand, entirely the point.