Artie was attacked a few days ago.” As they walked, she described how she’d found him, and she tried to give her father a complete account of what the doctors had said. When she told him the chances the doctors had given Artie, and that they’d put him in an induced coma, he stopped and turned to her. All the life she’d seen in his face earlier had vanished.
“But it can’t be the same one,” he said, his voice low again. Ilka had to lean in to hear him. “The man who came after Sister Eileen that night is dead.”
He looked away.
“Dead?”
“Sister Eileen shot him. That’s how she saved my life.”
Ilka had a firm hold on his arm. She gave him a moment before starting again. Neither of them spoke as they slowly approached the milling crowd on Duval Street.
He was limping, and he seemed tired, but his voice picked up as he told her about the night Javi Rodriguez found the nun.
“It was almost midnight, I’d just gone to bed when I heard her scream. At first, I thought it was someone out on the street, but then I spotted them through my upstairs window. He’d dragged her out of her apartment and was hauling her over to the car. I ran down for the baseball bat I keep in my office.”
He closed his eyes a moment. “I thought someone had broken into the apartment to rob her. I doubt he suspected anyone was in the funeral home, and either he didn’t hear me, or else he just let me get close before he turned around. He held a rifle under one arm and was towing Sister Eileen with the other. He’d wrapped a thin nylon cord around her throat, I saw. She was fighting him, but he was a lot bigger. He swung at me with the rifle, but it must have surprised him I was so quick, because I managed to smack him in the head with the bat. He fell, and I hit him again, but then he rolled away and got to his feet.”
Every step seemed to be an effort for her father, so she helped him as best she could. “What did he look like?”
He described the man as strong, stocky, and completely unaffected by being clobbered by a bat.
She nodded. “So it was his brothers who attacked Artie. What happened then?”
“He hit me with the rifle stock. I remember getting hit the first time, and I remember falling, but then I halfway blacked out. I heard shots; at first I thought he’d shot Sister Eileen. I tried to pull myself up, but there was no way—I might not even have been fully conscious, not really. I lost all sense of time, but when I came to, he was lying there a few feet away, under a blanket. We’d killed him.”
“Sister Eileen killed him, you mean.”
Her father shook his head. “We both did.”
They stopped. He gazed at her a few moments.
“She’d never told me much about her past. But I’ve always known she was putting something behind her when she came to me. And that night she finally told me about what happened down in Texas. I’m the one who said we should keep the police out of it. She may be the one who pulled the trigger, but I’m just as guilty. If we’d called the police, they would have found out who she was. And she would have spent the rest of her days on death row. She saved my life. Javi Rodriguez would have killed me without batting an eye to get hold of her.”
Ilka could barely grasp that her father and Sister Eileen had killed a man. She listened in near-disbelief as he described getting rid of the body.
“I wasn’t much help, but Sister Eil—Lydia—is a lot stronger than you’d think. She managed to stuff him into the coffin, and she also drove his car out of the parking lot. But then his brother showed up before she could leave with the coffin. She was wearing her nun’s habit, and she got out to talk to him. Apparently Javi hadn’t told him about her disguise, and he didn’t recognize her, he just asked about his brother.”
Which, Ilka remembered, was also what had happened when the other Rodriguez brother showed up at the funeral home during a memorial service.
“It turned out that Javi had sent him a message, telling him he’d found Lydia Rogers, and she was staying at the funeral home. I was lying in bed upstairs, in bad shape after the attack, but I heard the sister say it had to be some misunderstanding. That we didn’t know any Lydia Rogers. And that I hadn’t even been around lately, that I was at some coffin showcase in Massachusetts. It sounded like the man believed her, but after he left she said I had to get out of there. She was sure they’d be back looking for her, and it was way too dangerous for me.”
“But what about your family? They think you’re dead! They’re grieving for you. We’re grieving for you.”
He held the gate open for her, and Ilka ducked to avoid the palm leaves.
“No one is proud of a man in rehab, but they know I’ll be getting out,” he said.
“Rehab?” She looked questioningly at him.
“I’ve been fighting a gambling addiction since I left Denmark. A vice, you could say.”
Ilka closed the gate behind her. “I know.”
“After I left Racine, Sister Eileen told my family I’d checked into a clinic in North Carolina. I’ve been in treatment there before, so we thought it would sound plausible. That way I could be gone for three months without my family starting to wonder about not hearing from me. I don’t know how much you know about that kind of clinic, but once I was in one where you have a contact person outside the family, and that person is the only connection you have to the outside world. And my contact person was Sister Eileen.”
“But you didn’t go to that clinic!”
“No, but it was the only explanation we could think of, so I left without telling the family what had happened. And really, I did it to protect them.”
Ilka gaped at him. “They haven’t heard a word from Sister Eileen in all the time you’ve been gone.”
He didn’t seem to hear her. “Have you met my wife, Mary Ann?”
Ilka nodded.
“It hasn’t always been easy, so she’s in on this, the story that I left to go through rehab, and that Artie is taking care of the business while I’m gone.”
They were in the backyard now; the bicycle still lay on the ground and the clothes still hung on the line.
Ilka sank down into one of the lawn chairs. “You really don’t have a clue.”