Sister Eve scrambled from her seat, turning to the chapel doors behind her. Brother Anthony was standing at the last pew. His head was in his hands, and he stumbled forward in the aisle, falling to his knees. Eve ran to him.
“What’s happened?” she asked her friend, dropping beside him. “What do you mean, she’s dead? Have you called 911?”
The monk leaned into Eve and began to cry. She held him as they both sat on the chapel floor.
“Hail Mary, full of grace—” she began to recite as he sobbed into her shoulder.
“It’s too late,” he said, interrupting her. “It’s too late for that.”
“Anthony, what’s wrong?” Eve faced her friend, trying to look him in the eye. “What happened to Kelly?”
He held up his face, his eyes filled with tears, and shook his head. “She’s dead,” he said again.
“How do you know this?” Eve asked. “Did she fall? Was there some accident?” She began trying to think of all the ways the young woman might have died. “Is she sick?” she asked, still not believing that his sister was dead.
Brother Anthony kept shaking his head. “I did it. I’ve done this,” he said, his voice breaking.
“What have you done? You couldn’t have killed Kelly,” Eve responded. She clasped his chin, stopping him from shaking his head back and forth. “Anthony, look at me; tell me what has happened.”
He didn’t answer.
“Is she in her room?” Eve asked, prompting her friend. “Did you see her in her room?”
He nodded.
Eve started to stand. “Let’s go there,” she said. “Maybe she’s not dead. Maybe I can help.”
Anthony pulled on the sleeve of her jacket, yanking her back down beside him. “No,” he answered forcefully. “Not yet. Not until I tell you.”
Eve nodded and waited. She had never seen her friend in such distress. She knew she needed to hear what he had to tell her, even though she wanted to run to the guest room to check on the young woman.
The two sat in silence. There were only a few candles still burning at the prayer station, and it had grown darker in the chapel than it had been when Eve first arrived. She was having a difficult time seeing the monk who sat beside her.
“We argued,” he said, and Eve nodded in agreement. She had, after all, witnessed the exchange at dinner.
“I . . . I found something.”
Eve didn’t respond.
“I made her promise that she wouldn’t tell anyone. I needed to show it to Father Oliver first, and she promised.”
Eve felt him slump a bit. She was leaning against the side of the pew, resting her back but still keeping one arm around him.
He was shaking his head. “Only, she told. I don’t know who or how many people she told, but she told, and now someone’s killed her.”
Eve couldn’t believe the news. Not only was his sister dead, the young, beautiful, smart Kelly Middlesworth, but now he was saying that she had been murdered.
“How do you know this?” she asked, her head reeling with the information.
“I just came from there. I was just in her room. The pages are gone and she’s dead.” He slid farther down, dropping his face into his hands. “It’s my fault. I never should have given them to her. It’s all my fault and now she’s dead.”
Eve reached over and pulled his hands away from his face. “Anthony, how do you know for sure? I need to go to her. I need to check to see if she’s really dead.”
He grabbed her hands. “She’s dead. There’s no pulse. There’s no breath. I checked. I checked over and over. She’s dead.”
Eve looked at her watch as he held on to her hands. She could tell the time because the hours on the face of her watch stayed lit in the dark. It was after midnight. She pulled her hands away from his and touched his face, studying his eyes. She didn’t ask, but she wondered where Anthony had been all evening, wondered why he had gone to his sister’s room so late, wondered how Kelly had been killed and why, if indeed she had been murdered. This was all just too much to believe.
“Tell me what happened,” she said. “Tell me why you went there.”
“I wanted to tell her that I forgave her, that I understood why she did what she did and that I forgave her.”
“Why? What did she do?” Eve wanted to know. “Why did you need to forgive her?”
Anthony shook his head. “I can’t tell . . . It’s something I found and shouldn’t have taken in the first place. I was wrong to take them. I know that now. Father Oliver said not to tell anyone else and that we’d just take them back, and that’s what I was going to tell her. I was going to tell her that I needed the pages back and that she was just going to have to wait until we went through the proper channels and that she’d be the first to have access to them later if we got them again, but that we had to take them back.”
He was rambling, and Eve was having difficulty following what he was saying. “So, this thing, these pages, Kelly had them in her possession?”
He nodded. “I gave them to her when she first arrived.
“Last week,” he added and then smiled. “She was so happy.” He looked at Eve. “I really made her happy.”
Eve smiled in return. “But she wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about them?”
He nodded again. “I just wanted to give her some time with them alone, let her enjoy this revelation all by herself, as one of the first people to know about it.” He reached up and pounded his forehead with his fist. “But I was wrong to do it, and Father Oliver said I was and that I needed to get them so that we could take them back. But she had already told people and she was going to tell everybody at the presentation tomorrow.” He stopped and looked at Eve. “The conference,” he said. “What will we do about the conference? I don’t know what to do.”
“Anthony . . .”
He was rocking back and forth, both hands now clenched and pushed against his forehead. “What have I done? What have I done?” he kept asking as he continued to rock.
“Anthony.” Eve tried to get his attention once again. She pulled at his arms, but he was too strong. “Anthony, listen to me!” she shouted.
“I’ve killed her . . . I made this happen . . . It’s my fault . . . I’ve killed Kelly,” he repeated over and over.
“Anthony, you didn’t kill her. Let’s go to her room and let me see what has happened. We’ll make this right, I promise,” Eve said, her hands still on his arms. “Let’s just go to her room.”
“I can’t go back there.” He was shaking his head. “I can’t go back.”
“Okay, you stay here,” Eve instructed him. “I’ll go to her room and see for myself. I’ll call an ambulance and the police. I’ll help make this right.”
He stopped rocking and dropped his hands from his face, looking Eve in the eye. “It’s too late. You can’t make this right. It’s too late.”