Killer in the Cloister Read online

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” I told Timothy. “Let me make a call.”

  “You already know somebody here?”

  “Yes, there’s a young man in my department . . .”

  “A young man is it?” he said, faking an Irish brogue, and with a look that sent a crimson rush to my face.

  “He gave everyone his business card, Timothy,” I said, leaving the parlor at the same time as if to lessen the sin of the slight exaggeration I’d come up with, making Sister Ann William and me sound like a crowd.

  Outside the parlor, the only sound I could hear in St. Lucy’s Hall was the ticking of the clock. Unlike the steady stream of cars during daylight hours, traffic on the street was minimal at night, and I felt as though I were breaking a rule merely by being awake at such a late hour. In fact, I was.

  I went upstairs and dug around in the bookstore bag where I’d put Aidan Connors’s number. It was on a small business card advertising his part-time job at Lloyd’s Used Cars.

  “I’m not a salesman,” he’d assured us, as if that would have been grounds for excommunication. “I’m the one under the car making sure it runs, hopefully.” At the time, I thought Aidan’s smile was warm enough to inspire trust in any customer.

  He’d written his home telephone number on the back. In case we ever needed it, he’d said.

  As I walked to the phone in the middle of the hallway, I questioned what I was about to do, calling a lay man I’d just met to ask a favor. I wrestled with conflicting admonitions from our Holy Rule. Was I justified in bending rules for Timothy just because he was my brother?

  I remembered the New Testament gospel story of Jesus refusing to help his own mother because He was busy ministering to someone else. Who is my mother? Jesus had asked, when he was criticized for choosing a stranger over his own flesh and blood.

  In the end, I settled on whatsoever you do for the least of my brethren, you do unto me, and dialed Aidan’s number. I tried to remember the last time I’d handled a telephone. I recalled using it only once in the last six years, when our assigned parent didn’t show up and three of us from my community needed a ride home from teaching Sunday School.

  “Hello.”

  I heard Aidan’s voice, surprisingly soft for such a large man.

  The telephone was on the wall outside the bathrooms, which were empty at that hour. I kept my voice down, afraid of waking the Sisters in the nearby rooms, and worried about someone overhearing my conversation and misinterpreting it.

  “Aidan, this is Sister Francesca. From the Theology Department at St. . . .”

  “I know who you are, Sister.”

  Aidan’s laugh was warm and friendly, putting me at ease and giving me a nervous twinge at the same time.

  “I hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “Not at all. What’s on your mind?”

  “I need a favor. I hope to be able to repay you some time, but at the moment—.”

  “I’d be happy if I can help, Sister. What is it?”

  By this time I was resigned to an evening of incomplete sentences.

  “My brother—Timothy Wickes—dropped in unexpectedly this evening. He’s only nineteen, and he came down from Potterstown to visit me.”

  “Does he need a place to crash?”

  “I’d be so grateful Aidan,” I said, making a mental note about this new meaning of crash that everyone but me seemed to know.

  “It turns out I have more room than I need right now. My roommate left last week. He transferred to NYU and moved downtown. Does your brother have a car?”

  “No. He hitchhiked.”

  My whisper was softer still as I described the unseemly mode of transportation.

  “I’ll come and get him.”

  “We’re at 323—”

  “St. Lucy’s Hall, right?”

  “Right.”

  “I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes.”

  “He’s been on the road, he’s . . . kinda dirty,” I said, adopting Timothy’s self-description.

  “No problem. Really, Sister. I’d be glad to help out.”

  Aidan seemed ready to hang up and jump in his car. But I had one other thing I needed to tell him. I cleared my throat and prepared to hear shock in Aidan’s voice.

  “There’s something else.” I’d rehearsed the next sentence on my way to the phone. “Timothy is on parole. He was in jail for a minor offense, but I thought you should know.”

  Aidan didn’t pause a second. “All the more reason I’m glad to help.”

  I hung up even more impressed with my new classmate.

  <><><>

  A half hour later I stood on St. Lucy’s concrete steps and waved good-bye to Timothy and Aidan, who’d arrived wearing faded jeans and a wrinkled sweatshirt with holes in the sleeves. He didn’t look much better than Timothy, I mused. Since I’d declined Aidan’s invitation to breakfast in his apartment the next morning—there was no confusion in my mind about that rule—we’d made plans to meet at the campus cafeteria.

  “How dumb is that?” Timothy had asked. “She can’t go to a private home with friends and family, but she can go to a lousy cafeteria and eat in front of zillions of strangers.”

  Aidan smiled and ushered Timothy to his car.

  “Not everything is perfectly logical in this life, Timothy,” Aidan said, taking the words right out of my mouth.

  I turned to go back into St. Lucy’s, confident my brother was in good hands. In the back of my mind was the hope that Timothy might be impressed by Aidan Connors, who looked more like a football player than a theology graduate student. I was sure Timothy thought religion and theology were for old men like his father or ninety-eight pound weaklings like his sister. I imagined Aidan’s pale blue rosary in plain view on his coffee table.

  Halfway up the steps to the building, I heard someone call my name. I’d seen a car pull up behind Aidan’s, the occupants remaining inside. The sound came from that direction.

  “Francesca, hold the door.”

  I saw Sister Teresa leaving the car, a black Ford Fairlane, like the fleet of vehicles I’d seen behind the priests’ campus residence. The driver looked to me like Father Malbert, but I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t my overactive imagination that led me to that conclusion.

  Sister Teresa came running toward me, up the stairs.

  “Thanks Francesca. Lucky you’re here,” she said. “I tried to reach Veronique to get her to open the door for me, but couldn’t get through on the phone. I didn’t know what I was going to do next. Throw rocks at the window, I guess.” She laughed. “Thank God you propped the door open.”

  Sister Teresa, who seemed to have given up on religious titles, was somewhat out of breath, and in the dim light over the front door, I could see her face was flushed.

  “Sister Felix is having keys made, so this won’t be a problem much longer,” she said.

  I rolled my eyes. “How handy for you, Sister.”

  <><><>

  Inside the building, Sister Teresa and I went separate ways. As I headed for the stairs up to my room, she went downstairs where there was a laundry room, a ping pong table, and a telephone booth. I wondered which equipment she needed at nearly eleven o’clock at night.

  Thanks to my late evening visit with my brother, I’d been privy to nighttime activities I wouldn’t have dreamed of—Jake Driscoll’s meeting with Sister Felix, Sister Teresa’s return from what looked suspiciously like a date, and Aidan Connors in his casual clothes.

  I marveled at the night life at St. Lucy’s Hall.

  CHAPTER 8

  I was on the third step up to my room when a bright flash caught my eye—headlights from a passing car reflecting off the brass plate on Mother Ignatius’s office door. I paused for a moment, sur
prised that her name was still there, considering how quickly her adversaries had moved in on her territory.

  A sudden, strong force pulled me in that direction, as if the shiny metal had become a powerful magnet attracting the chain links on the rosary around my waist. At that moment, I was ready to admit what had been nagging at me since Mother Ignatius’s death. Life at St. Lucy’s had already changed drastically with her out of the way. What if she hadn’t died of natural causes, or even stress? What if she’d been murdered?

  Here’s where I should stop, I told myself, and find some other wild fantasy to chase before my classes provided me with enough to do. But even as I had that thought, I approached the door to Mother Ignatius’s office.

  My ears alert for sounds from upstairs and down, I pretended to be casually walking by, and brushed my wide sleeve against the knob. The protruding sides of my bonnet were a distinct handicap as I tried to determine if there was anyone else in the hallway.

  I spun around and approached again from the opposite direction. I stood with my back to the door, facing the foyer. With a rapid-fire prayer—Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!—I turned the knob and opened the door.

  My breath came in short, rapid pulses. What did I think I was doing? Trespassing, for one thing. Did I expect to uncover proof of murder by finding a gun or a bloody knife? As if Mother Ignatius’s body had been found with gunshot or stab wounds. More likely poison would have the weapon. I sniffed the air. As if I knew what poison smelled like, if it had an odor in the first place.

  And who was this new person I’d become? A talker, a rule-breaker, a snoop. At least I’m not invading a crime scene, I told myself, since no one else thinks there’s been a crime.

  My belief in Mother Ignatius’s murder grew as I remembered her note to me and her troubled look, hours before her death. Just this one bit of investigation, and I’d be ready to declare either a grand coincidence, or a sin against the fifth commandment.

  Thou shalt not kill. I shivered as I entered the room.

  Moonlight from a small window behind Mother Ignatius’s desk illuminated its surface, almost bare except for a blotter and a few accessories. For the first time I found myself wishing a flashlight were standard SMI equipment.

  The office was about ten feet square, approximately the same size as our dormitory rooms. A door on the side wall opened to a small bathroom, connected in turn to a bedroom. The entire suite was probably not more than a ten by twenty rectangle. I walked the length of it, aided only by the Marian Avenue street lights.

  Besides a narrow cot wrapped tight as a mummy in white sheets, Mother Ignatius’s bedroom held only a chair and a light oak armoire, slightly larger than the one in my room.

  At the foot of the bed was a chenille bed spread, folded to a narrow rectangle. I was surprised at its frayed condition, marked by tears and pulls in the fabric, the only flaw in an otherwise perfectly ordered room. I suspected Mother Ignatius had a hard time asking for anything new for herself.

  I walked up to the armoire, leaning so close that the edge of my bib touched the handle that held its doors together. Somewhere in my consciousness I hoped they would fall open at the touch so I might be judged innocent of breaking and entering a closet.

  No such miracle occurred, however. I held my breath and turned the knob. The doors swung open. I let out my breath, and looked at the empty space. My eyes wandered over the entire cabinet as if it were possible for me to miss something in the small volume. A shelf along the top was bare, a rod just below it held nothing, not even empty hangers.

  I closed the doors, tempted to wipe my fingerprints off the handle, until I reminded myself that no one but me considered this a crime scene.

  I walked back through the bathroom. A loud noise startled me. I pressed my back against the wall.

  False alarm.

  I’d inadvertently brushed against the switch that turned on the fan. I turned it off quickly and blew out a heavy sigh. I screwed up my mouth in annoyance. Agitation, I thought, the wages of sin.

  I left the bathroom, which was empty of everything but standard fixtures, disappointed that there was no medicine cabinet, the better to hold poisons.

  The office held the best opportunity for information about its recently deceased occupant, I decided, rummaging in the desk. But either it wasn’t used much or had already been stripped of interesting material, I thought with displeasure.

  Until my fingers bumped into a small packet of letters stuck in a crevice at the back of the center drawer. Another moral dilemma. I solved it quickly, stuffing the bundle into my pocket, and willing myself not to examine my conduct.

  I was about to walk away from the desk when I noticed an object that seemed out of place in the small glass dish that held paper clips. I picked it up and turned it over in my hand. A cuff link. A single onyx cuff link with an elaborate silver letter D.

  That’s enough, I decided. I have two things to work with. But then a third presented itself with no effort on my part. Against the wall, behind the door to the corridor was a credenza, and on it a tea set. In a leap of logic that would surely have rattled my hero, Saint Thomas Aquinas, I was able to jump from the lovely blue and white china pot with matching cups, to a nighttime habit that got Mother Ignatius killed—someone poisoned her tea.

  I had only a moment of exultation at this striking discovery when I was discovered myself. Before I ever heard him enter the dark office, I stood face to face with Father Malbert. Nearly knocking me over as he opened the door, he seemed as surprised as I was.

  We said “Sister” and “Father” at the same time, stepping back from each other, like an odd couple in an old-time family comedy routine.

  “I came to pick up some altar linens and candelabra that Mother Ignatius was keeping for me,” Father Malbert said, in a tone that had an undercurrent of, it’s your turn to explain.

  “I needed information to send to my Mother Superior,” I said, hardly proud of how quickly a lie came to lips that were only a few hours from receiving Holy Communion. On the other hand, I hadn’t seen any altar linens or candles in Mother Ignatius’s suite either.

  We nodded to each other, and parted, as if our meeting had happened under the most normal of circumstances, instead of in the late Mother Ignatius’s office during the midnight peals of the clock down the hall.

  On my way upstairs, I said an act of contrition and forced all secular matters to the back of my mind.

  As I undressed for bed, I came upon the letters and cuff link I’d confiscated. Overcome with disgust for myself, I put both in the back of my desk drawer, determined to find a way to return them without giving them further thought.

  In my dreams that night, my desk burst into flames that followed me out the door, up Marian Avenue, all the way to Potterstown where Mother Julia tied me to a stake.

  <><><>

  Walking to campus for the first day of classes on Tuesday, I was only briefly tempted to tell Sister Ann William about my adventures in the late hours of the night before. I decided it wouldn’t be prudent, especially since I didn’t know what any of it meant. If I’d learned nothing else in my brief graduate school career, I’d come to understand the wisdom of a rule of silence. As Mother Ignatius had admonished, it was indeed a slippery slope from simple “flexibility” to a complete relaxation of religious discipline.

  I was guilty of a string of transgressions, more serious than any I’d ever reported at a Saturday night Chapter of Faults. In my calmed-down state I judged that the lie I’d told Father Malbert was only a venial sin, not of the more grievous, mortal variety. Even so, I resolved to go to confession at the first opportunity.

  If I’d been following the rules of my order, I wouldn’t have received a visitor, even my brother, after hours. And I certainly wouldn’t have invaded Mother Ignatius’s suite. If I’d been guarding my eyes as I was tau
ght the first day in the Novitiate I wouldn’t have seen Jake Driscoll leave Sister Felix’s office and Sister Teresa’s late night return. My soul seemed as weighed down as Saint Christopher carrying the Christ Child across the river.

  Thinking of Mother Ignatius made me sad, and I said as much to Sister Ann William.

  “I wonder what’s going to happen at St. Lucy’s now that Mother Ignatius is gone.”

  She shrugged her shoulders and raised her eyebrows. “Did you see the notice about the meeting tonight? Not something she would have approved of.”

  “A meeting?”

  “There’s a memo tacked to the bulletin board by the mailboxes. A meeting after dinner to discuss new house rules.”

  “We haven’t even had Mother Ignatius’ memorial services yet.”

  “I know,” she said. From Sister Ann William’s lips, it sounded like “ah now.”

  For some reason, I reached my limit of self-control at that moment. Perhaps I was reacting to the Bronx Botanical Gardens across the street. Its countless varieties of plants, trees, flowers, and shrubs reminded me of Sister Ann William’s plant pathology class and the poisons we’d talked about. My resolve to give no more thought to the mystery of Mother Ignatius’s death vanished on a light breeze that ruffled my long skirt.

  “How hard would it be to poison someone and not have it be obvious?” I asked the pharmacist-to-be at my side.

  “Well, of course, I’ll know more after I’ve had this class, but it’s not that difficult if you know what you’re doing. For example . . . “

  Sister Ann William stopped mid-sentence. “Sister Francesca, what ever are you thinking?” She let out a long breath and shook her head from side to side, then lifted her briefcase and clutched it to her bosom, as if to shield herself from frightening thoughts. Her pale skin turned even whiter, giving her the look of the young St. Maria Goretti, martyred at an early age.