There was a clock in the window of the newsstand across the street from the small restaurant where Sister Scholastica had had an early dinner, and it startled her, when she saw it, that it was only six oâclock. Like most nuns in traditional orders, she was used to having dinner early, just as she was used to having breakfast early. When you woke up at four and went
to bed at nine, you did almost everything early. The one great exception, for the Sisters of Divine Grace, was lunch. Lunch had to be provided at the times most convenient for the students at St. Anselm's school. Because of that, Scholastica sometimes found herself dizzy with hunger at eleven o'clock, because it had been so long since she'd eaten and because she had never been able to choke down more than a piece of toast when she first woke up. Of course, they prayed the Office and went to Mass before they actually sat down to breakfast, but that didn't seem to matter. Scholastica's internal clock did not adjust. Early morning was early morning. She didn't want to eat in the early morning.
The friends who had taken Scholastica to dinner were really only one friend and a husbandâa woman who had been in Scholastica's high-school graduating class, and who had suddenly decided, five years ago, that it was time to have children. Scholastica had done the math a couple of timesâGenevra would have been forty when the first baby came along, and forty-three when she had the second oneâbut the age question didn't bother her as much as the way Genevra responded to having children in her life. Maybe there was some truth to the things some people said about women waiting too long to have children. Genevra was wound tight as a drum, so hyperactive that the smallest noise seemed to make her jump out of her skin. She was never satisfied with the children, who were, in their turn, unruly and sullen. Scholastica had spent the whole meal not saying the things she wanted to say. Even the parents of her own students didn't want to hear her ideas on child rearing, on the rather strange assumption that a woman who spent all day with people under the age of twelve couldn't possibly know what they were like because she'd never given birth to one from her own personal womb. They had gone to an Arabic restaurant, and the children had refused to eat anything that could be had from the menu. They wanted Mc-Donald's. If they couldn't have that, they wanted to tell everyone in the room how gross the food here was, and how if they even touched it with their little fingers, it would make them puke. The little one had perfected a high-pitched whine that could have cut through glass. By the time they had reached the small cups of mud-thick coffee, Scholastica was
wishing she had begged off this evening even if it meant appearing to be rude.
Out on the sidewalk, the children tugged at Genevra's arms. The older one, the boy, sat down on the sidewalk and would not let himself be pulled up.
“I'm sure everything will be all right,” Genevra's husband Tom was saying. “It's not like the scandals. It doesn't have anything to do with the Church. It isn't the fault of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia that some kid murdered his wife and walked into a parish church to commit suicide.”
“I'm not going
anywhere
,” the older child said. “And you can't
make
me.”
“Well,” Scholastica said.
“You really don't have to take the bus,” Genevra said. “We can afford to put you in a taxi. Even without my working full-time.”
“I keep telling you,” Tom said. “I don't need you to work full-time.”
“I don't want to go in a taxi,” Scholastica said. “Really. I've been riding in taxis all day.”
“With something like this, the trick is to make sure the police are efficient,” Tom said. “That's the biggest danger. That they're going to screw it up, you know, and drag it out. I mean, it ought to be obvious to anybody what happened. The wife was so sick she got too much for him. The kid killed her, then he felt guilty about it. It happens all the time.”
“You can't make me
either
,” the younger child said, but she didn't sit down on the sidewalk. She had that odd fastidiousness some girls did even from infancy. She didn't want anything near her to have anything to do with dirt.
Scholastica looked up the street and thought she saw a bus far in the distance. A little flag went up at the back of her mind that said: see? prayer can be very effective. She put her arms under her cape and wrapped them around her body. The wind was cold and stiff and made the hem of her habit whip around her legs.
“Well,” she said again.
“I keep telling Tom it's not a question of if he needs me to work full-time,” Genevra said. “It's the future. We're going to want to send them to private schools. We're going to want
to send them to college. What am I going to be making, if I take too much time off?”
“You're not taking any time off,” Tom said. “You've just got a reduced schedule.”
This time, Scholastica was sure of it. There was a bus. Her cape had a collar. She flipped it up against what would have been her neck, if the folds of her veil weren't hanging in front of it. Sometimes she regretted choosing a life that did not allow her to have children of her own. She never regretted choosing one that did not allow her to marry. The bus stopped three blocks up. Scholastica moved closer to the bus stop sign and leaned a little into the street, to make sure the driver would see her.
“T'hink of it,” Tom said. “You'll get to meet Gregor Demarkian. The Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.”
“I met him years ago,” Sister Scholastica wanted to say, but that would have taken explanations, so she didn't. The bus pulled to a stop in front of her, and she leaned over to give Genevra a standard nonpeck on the cheek.
“I'll call you next week,” she promised. Then she smiled at Tom and hurried up the steps into the bus, her token in her hand. The other nuns at St. Anselm's had told her that there were drivers who would not take fares from nuns in habits, but the idea of accepting that kind of favor made Scholastica extremely uncomfortable. She had the token in the stile before the driver could say anything at all. Then she smiled at him, with more warmth than she had managed for Tom, and went to the back of the bus.
There were some favors that were so universal, and automatic, that Scholastica had given up worrying about them. It was the end of the day, and rush hour. The bus was packed. A young man in his twenties got up to give her his seat, and she thanked him and sat down. The old woman she sat down next to patted her arm, and said, “Bless you, Sister.” Scholastica wondered, idly, what it had been like to be a nun in the days when people knew what it was nuns did, and how important it was that they did it. These days, people had the money to write checks for what they wanted. It wasn't the case that if the nuns didn't work for almost nothing, their children wouldn't be able to go to Catholic school.
The bus lumbered, and Scholastica closed her eyes. This
was why she hadn't wanted a taxi. She needed the time to unkink. For some reason, she had the prayer on the Miraculous Medal running through her head: O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to you. It hummed through her brain like bees on telephone wires at the start of the summer. The first time she had ever received a Miraculous Medal had been right before her First Holy Communion. She could still remember the old nun who had taught religion at her elementary school, leading the whole class over to the church where the medals were sitting in a big box near the Communion rail. There were brown scapulars, too, hanging from the hands of the statue of Mary in the little wall niche next to the candles. The nuns in her elementary school had been Sisters of Divine Grace. She wondered if that was usual. Did girls always enter the same orders their elementary school teachers came from? The method was working. She was relaxing. She was at peace for the first time all day.
She was so much at peace, she nearly fell asleep and missed her stop. She saw the lit windows of Cardman's Books at the last minute. She would have jumped to her feet, but in her long habit it was nearly impossible. As it was, she knocked her veil off center, letting her hair, as grey now as it was red, spill out. She smiled sheepishly at everybody around her and tucked it back in. There was something that was good about the old habits with their collars and their wimples. You'd practically have to be decapitated to have your hair spill out. Scholastica went for the back door, pulling the bell cord on her way. When the bus screamed to a stop, she went out by herself, feeling like a black thing in the night. There was something about habits she could get behind. The Sisters of Divine Grace should change theirs from black to something colorful, like the sky-blue that used to be worn by the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Scholastica was tired of looking like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.
She actually had four blocks to walk to get to St. Anselm's. She could have transferred to another bus, going in the right direction, but it hadn't seemed to her worth the effort. The cold was waking her up. Her nerves were no longer on edge. She turned right and hurried along the crowded street toward the floodlights that illuminated the spires of both St. Anselm's and St. Stephen's. When she got to St. Stephen's, she noticed
that something seemed to be going on there, as usual. The notice board at the end of the walk said something about a “reading circle.” Scholastica liked to read, but she had never liked the idea of sitting in a circle and talking about a book. In her early days in the convent, she had resented most the habit of having a Sister read aloud at meals and recreation. To this day, she couldn't stand the sound of audio books on the convent van's radio.
She crossed the street and went down along the side of St. Anselm's, to get to the convent entrance. She let herself in the wrought-iron gate and looked around at the courtyard. The school was dark. It would be, at this time of night. The convent was mostly dark, too. It couldn't be much later than twenty minutes to seven. She went down to the annex where the offices were and tried the door. It was locked. She let herself in with her key.
Whoever had been last to leave this place had not been very careful. There were lights on in the hall, and in at least two of the offices. Scholastica left the lights on in the hall and turned the office lights off automatically. “Let me inform you,” her novice mistress had once said, “of the concept of the kilowatt-hour.” She got to her office and tried her door, but that was locked as well. She got out her keys and opened up, wondering who had bothered with the lock, and why. She had told Thomasetta long ago that there was nothing in her office that needed to be protected like money in a vault.
She knew as soon as she opened her door that there was something out of place, but because of the way the light was coming in from the door she couldn't tell what it was. Her first thought was that there might have been some vandalism. That would explain why her door was locked. Somebody had gotten in and made a mess. She reached for the light switch and flipped it up, wondering if she was about to find graffiti spray painted across her cabinets.
Instead, she found Sister Harriet Garrity, slumped across the top of her desk, her body weighing down manila file folders stuffed thick with papers and stuck all over with colored Post-it notes. Her face was blue. Her neck was raw and caked with brown blood, as if something had torn at it, trying to rip out her throat. There was vomit everywhere, and as soon as she saw it, Scholastica knew what it was she had first noticed
as wrong. It was the smell, that was what it was. The room had been shut up, maybe for hours, with the heat on, and now there was a smell so sweet and intolerable and thick she almost threw up herself.
She reeled backward, out of the room, and dropped to her knees. She was so dizzy, she didn't think she could breathe. She put her head down between her knees and then all the way to the floor. The floor felt cold and good against her skin. She would have to get Father, she thought. She would have to get Gregor Demarkian.
But right now, all she wanted to do was scream.