Somebody was inside. Corso could feel it. He pulled the iron handle again. Kept pulling until a full foot of rusty chain emerged from the bricks, then let it go. Inside the rectory, the dull clank of clapper on bell echoed in the darkness.
“Place looks deserted to me,” Dougherty said. “I’m bettin’ they just leave the lights on for security.”
“There’s somebody in there,” Corso insisted. “I can tell.”
“X-ray vision, huh?”
“I come from a long line of folks who don’t answer their doors. Trust me, there’s somebody inside.”
The wind was stronger here. Overhead, the trees circling Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow’s driveway swayed like ghostly dancers. The circular drive hadn’t seen a car in ages. The bricks were littered with dead leaves, acorns, and small shards of broken branches. The untended flower beds, grown tall in the summer sun, were bent double now, their brown stalks cracked and frozen in place. The wind carried the fecund odor of mold and decay and death.
The rectory’s ancient front door consisted of half a dozen maple planks held together by ornate wrought-iron hinges. The arched entrance had a little built-in sliding speakeasy window. Corso used his thumb, trying to slide the metal plate aside, but it wouldn’t budge. As he tried again, the window suddenly slid open, pinching his thumb between the metal and the wood. Instinctively, he brought his thumb to his mouth.
His thumb was still in his mouth as he bent at the waist and peered through the opening. Whoever was on the other side was standing right up against the door. All he could see were a pair of rimless glasses and two sparkling blue eyes.
“We weren’t expecting you until morning,” a woman’s voice said.
“Excuse me?” Corso said.
“You’re the movers, aren’t you?”
“No, ma’am. We’re not. I wanted to ask someone about the cemetery.”
He heard a sigh. “We’re no longer accepting internments,” the voice said.
“No, I wanted to ask about one of the graves that’s already there.”
Corso thought he heard whispering but wasn’t sure.
“Which grave was that?” the voice asked.
“Over on the east side of the cemetery. Sissy Marie Warwick.”
This time, he was positive. The whispering took on a more urgent cadence, and then, without warning, the little window slid shut with a bang.
“Having your usual effect on women, I see,” Dougherty sneered.
As Corso raised his fist to the door, a series of metallic clicks and scrapes filled the air, and the door swung inward, until it stopped on a thick black chain. A nun. Hard to tell how old. Seventy-something at least. Wearing the basic nun’s headdress over a plain gray dress and black stockings. A black metal cross hung from her neck like an albatross. She looked Corso up and down. Her eyes came to rest on his bruised brow. “What happened to your head?” she wanted to know.
“Car accident,” he told her. “Banged myself up pretty good.”
She was momentarily startled when Dougherty stepped into the light. “Oh,” she stammered, “I thought…I didn’t realize…a young lady…”
The door closed for a moment. The sound of urgent voices seeped through the maple planks. Corso couldn’t make out the words, but the rhythm of the phrases suggested a heated debate. The chain rattled, and then the door eased open again.
Corso was momentarily taken aback. Something was different. Same face, same glasses, same everything, except that this time she wore a black cardigan sweater over her dress.
“Won’t you come in,” she said.
Corso stepped aside, but when Dougherty hesitated, he stepped in first. The air was thick and warm and smelled of brewing tea. Dougherty followed. The door swung shut on its own, leaving them standing in a narrow flagstone hallway.
There were two of them. Identical in every way except for the sweater.
“We’re sisters,” Sweater said.
Before Corso could respond, the other one piped in, “Really sisters. Not just Sisters in Christ.”
“Twins,” said the other.
“Ah,” Corso said.
“This is Sister Agnes. I’m Sister Veronica,” Sweater said.
Dougherty started to speak, but Corso cut her off. “I’m Frank Falco. This is Meg Dolan.” Dougherty cast Corso a quick look that said she didn’t require any help remembering her alias. She put on her canned smile and began to rub the warmth into her red hands.
“Can we get you some tea?” Sister Veronica inquired.
“That would be great,” Dougherty said.
Corso and Dougherty followed the women down the narrow hall to a small kitchen at the back of the building. A plain wooden table and four chairs held down the center of the room. Every other flat surface was covered with cardboard boxes, taped closed and marked in red. Plates. Utensils. Cookbooks.
Sister Veronica apologized for the clutter. “Amazing what people collect over the years,” she said with a wan smile.
Her sister scowled and made a dismissive noise with her lips. “Some people are entirely too worldly for their own good,” she said. Her mouth was pinched and wrinkled around the edges like a snare.
“My sister means Father Jonathan,” Veronica explained. Her hand swept around the room. “He lived here in the rectory for thirty-seven years,” she said. Her eyes crinkled with a smile. “Father did like his comforts.”
“Far too much,” Agnes added. “His habits were the death of him.”
“He died back in February. Heart attack.”
“Sloth and gluttony,” said Agnes. “The perils of the acquisitional life.”
Sister Veronica rolled her eyes. “Please excuse my sister,” she said. “Even after these many years in the service to our Lord, she’s never become resigned to the foibles of human nature.”
“This world could use a little more righteous indignation,” Agnes said.
“Perhaps a little,” her sister chided. “Just a little.”
The lines sounded rehearsed. As if they’d been playing the same parts for so long, they’d become bored with their own banter. Sister Veronica touched Dougherty on the elbow. “We promised you some tea, now didn’t we, dear?” She gave a laugh. “What a space cadet I’m getting to be.”
She was still chuckling at her own forgetfulness as she crossed to the stove and dug a plain white mug out of one of the boxes. She looked at Corso with a question in her eyes. He shook his head. She set the cup in the sink and then filled it from a small porcelain teapot. She returned, holding the cup in both hands, like an offering, and handed the mug of steaming tea to Dougherty. “I’m afraid we’re out of cream and sugar,” she apologized. “We’re leaving in the morning.”
“Would have been a waste,” Agnes said quickly.
“Where are you moving to?” Dougherty asked, sipping from the mug.
“Muncie, Indiana,” Agnes said. “Our order has a facility there.”
“The Archdiocese is closing the church,” Veronica said.
“Selling the property.” Agnes shook her head. “After a hundred and twenty-five years. Like the house of God was a meat market or something.”
“Things change, sister,” Veronica said, her voice weary.
Corso could feel the moment slipping down the well of their personal disagreements. “They sell the cemetery too?” he asked.
Veronica looked offended. “Of course not,” she said. “How could they—”
“If they could have, they would have,” Agnes snapped. “It’s all about money, these days. Nothing but the almighty dollar.”
Veronica sighed. Behind the rimless glasses, her eyes looked inward. “When we first came here, there were forty-two Sisters. Now it’s just us.”
“When was that?” Dougherty asked.
“Nineteen fifty-nine,” they said in unison.
“We were teachers,” Agnes explained.
“Mathematics and literature,” Veronica said, indicating first her sister and then herself. “That was before the school closed, back in eighty-one.”
“You said—” Agnes began.
Her sister cut her off. “We had eighty girls then. Twenty boarders and sixty town girls. We were the largest Catholic girls’ school in…”As she spoke, her voice took on an artificial quality, theatrical and bright, as if she were talking to herself in the dark to keep from being afraid. As if her words, and only her words, could keep the darkness from sinking its claws into her back.
Sister Agnes was having none of it, though. Her face was a mask of determination. She stepped between Corso and Veronica. “You said you were interested in the Warwick grave,” she said in a voice far too loud for polite conversation. While her statement was directed at Corso, her eyes never left Sister Veronica. They passed a long look, so full of avarice and recrimination it could only have been shared by people who’d spent far too much time in one another’s company.
“I seem to have touched a nerve,” Corso said to nobody in particular. Dougherty hiccuped and spilled tea on her hands. Neither nun noticed. They stood, six feet apart, locked in silent combat.
“Sister, please…”Veronica said finally.
“It’s an omen,” Agnes said. “Don’t you see?”
“Don’t you blaspheme,” the other woman warned. “Don’t you dare.”
“Don’t all things come from God?” Agnes demanded, gesturing at Corso and Dougherty. “That’s what you always tell me, isn’t it?”
“Actually, we came from Wisconsin,” Corso said. Dougherty smiled and stepped on his foot.
Sister Veronica blinked first. She sighed and turned away. She walked to the sink. Poured the rest of the tea down the drain. Agnes stared at her sister’s back for a moment and then turned toward Corso and Dougherty.
“Why are you interested in that particular grave, Mr….”
“Falco.”
“We have over three thousand souls in our cemetery. Why that one?”
“I think someone may have stolen Sissy Marie Warwick’s identity.” He measured his words carefully. “I think someone may have used her identity for criminal purposes.”
“What criminal purposes might that be?” Agnes asked. It was as if the oxygen had been sucked from the room and replaced with the electric, anticipatory air that precedes a thunderstorm. Corso looked from one sister to another.
“Maybe murder,” Dougherty said.
A crash sounded from across the room. Veronica had dropped the teapot into the sink, where it had shattered. “Oh, look what I’ve done now,” she said. “I can’t believe how clumsy I’ve become.” She used the tips of her fingers to pick the shards from the sink. She began to blather about the ravages of age, but nobody was listening. Agnes stepped over and stood directly in front of Corso. “Perhaps you should tell me about it,” she said.
Corso laid it out for her. Everything he knew. Halfway through Corso’s story, Sister Veronica stopped puttering at the sink. She stood facing them now, tight-lipped, her hands steepled before her. “Had to be somebody just about the girl’s age,” Corso said finally. “That’s the only way it works out.”
“What year was that?” asked Sister Agnes.
“She showed up in Wisconsin in the summer of nineteen seventy-three.”
Agnes turned to her sister. “Well…that’s the capper, now isn’t it?” she said.
Veronica hesitated and then gave a grudging nod. “You were right,” she said in a low voice. “All of you were right.” She looked as if she was going to be sick.
Corso met Agnes’s gaze. “Sounds like you’re the one with the story to tell now.”
“Finally,” Agnes said. She took a deep breath and began to speak. Seems that back when the Sacred Heart School was in its prime, the good Sisters used to occasionally take in girls from the community who had been orphaned or abused or both. That was the way things were handled in those days, before the government got involved and screwed everything up. At least that’s how Sister Agnes saw it. She indulged herself in half a minute of politics before she caught herself rambling. Got right to the point. Just before Christmas, 1970, a young girl showed up on their doorstep, claiming to be an orphan. The girl said her name was Mary Anne Moody. Claimed to be fourteen and without any other place to go.
“Said her whole family had been burned up in a fire,” Veronica added.
Agnes shot her sister an annoyed look and went on. The girl’s arrival had created something of a tempest among the Sisters. Some had been inclined to turn her away. She was not, after all, a local girl. Nor was she even Catholic. Others had been more kindly disposed toward Miss Mary Anne Moody. After a rather spirited debate, it was decided to take the girl in.
“Charity cannot come with strings attached,” Veronica said. “It was our Christian duty.”
Agnes ignored the interruption. Mary Anne Moody had stayed with the Sisters, attending school and living on the premises, for nearly two years. She turned out to be a difficult, headstrong girl, often in conflict with both the Sisters and her fellow students. Occasionally violent. Often subject to discipline. From Agnes’s tone, it sounded as if many of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart had come to rue their decision to take the girl in.
“She was a constant problem,” Agnes said. “The most headstrong and willful child I ever met.” Veronica averted her gaze and offered no rebuttal.
Not only was the girl troublesome, she was also possessed of a number of habits that gave the good Sisters cause to wonder about their charity. The first came to light when a number of drawings were found in her room. The clipped way Sister Agnes dismissed them as “inappropriate” and the red spots that appeared on her cheeks spoke volumes.
“And that wasn’t the worst of it.” Agnes paused. “She had a positively morbid fascination with the graveyard. With death and dead people.”
Seemed that whenever Mary Anne Moody turned up missing, which was a fairly regular occurrence, all one had to do was take a walk out into the graveyard and there she’d be. Standing around. Talking to herself. Copying the information on the headstones into a small secretarial pad she carried.
“What for?” Dougherty asked.
The sisters shook their headpieces in wonder.
“What about the Warwick grave?” Corso prodded.
Veronica couldn’t stand it anymore. “Right before she left—”
“Disappeared,” Agnes corrected.
Seems that in the months immediately preceding her disappearance, Mary Anne Moody had become fixated on the grave of Sissy Warwick. Had been found standing by the graveside on at least a dozen occasions. Veronica and some of the Sisters believed that Mary Anne found the grave fascinating because she felt guilty, as survivors often do, about being the only member of her family to live through the tragedy and in some unhealthy way she identified with this girl of her own age who had found a peace that had to that point eluded her. That was the positive spin.
More worldly types, Agnes among them, had seen the girl’s actions as the precursors of a troubled and ungodly life and had demanded that the young woman be exposed to mental health professionals. At the mere mention of one Dr. William Harkens, a psychologist from County Mental Health, both sisters blushed.
“He was a young man and rather good-looking.” While Veronica said the words as if in apology, Agnes was shaking her head. “What he was, sister”—she paused for effect—“what he was…was without his trousers.”
Once again, the facts of the story depended almost entirely upon the disposition of the teller. Some believed that the young psychologist had attempted to sexually compromise the young woman. This theory was borne out by the fact that he had insisted on being alone with Mary Anne during their therapy sessions, and it was permanently compounded when Sister Ellen, hearing odd noises emanating from Father Jonathan’s office, burst in to find both Mary Anne Moody and her therapist in a state of what she later described as “a palpable sexual tension and partial undress.”
Dr. Harkens claimed to have been the victim of a determined sexual assault by the young woman, whom he reckoned to be both wickedly wanton and wise to the particulars of passion in a manner most unseemly for a girl her age. Needless to say, the doctor was summarily removed from his position and the therapy sessions brought to an abrupt end.
“And that was the end of it?” Dougherty asked.
“Events intervened,” Veronica said.
“Miss Mary Anne Moody was what intervened,” her sister corrected.
The way Sister Agnes told it, the story seemed cutand-dried. Back in those days they used to hold Friday night Bingo over in the basement of the Parish House. Used to pack the place to the rafters and turn a substantial profit. The cash was entrusted to one Sister Alice Ignatius, who at that time was well into her eighties and prone to caching the cash in her room until the bank opened on Monday. On several occasions, owing to her advanced age, Sister Alice failed to recall exactly where it was she had stashed the cash. As her room was small and offered limited concealment possibilities, a quick shuffle by younger Sisters always produced both the wayward bundle and tears of thanks from Sister Alice.
“I’m telling you all this,” Agnes said, “because I want you to understand why some of our number were opposed to calling the authorities.”
“She means me,” Veronica added.
“We found her dead,” Agnes said, “one Saturday morning. At the bottom of the basement stairs.” She swallowed heavily. “She broke her neck.”
Corso stiffened. “And the Bingo money?”
“Never found,” said Agnes.
“How much money are we talking about?”
“Fifty-three hundred dollars.”
The sisters passed a look.
“What else?” Corso asked.
Sister Agnes drew in a breath and steeled herself. “Sister Alice Ignatius was found in a very compromising position,” she said finally.
“She could have just landed that way,” Veronica said.
“Never in a million years,” her sister said.
“What did the authorities think about how she was found?”
“Oh…we didn’t leave her like that,” Agnes said. “We couldn’t. We—”
“And the girl?”
“Gone.”
Corso couldn’t help himself. He looked at Veronica. She had removed her glasses and was wiping the lenses with a paper towel.
“Sister Alice was well along in years,” she said. “We thought perhaps Mary Anne had found the body or perhaps had been present when Sister Alice fell. We thought”—she waved a hand—“having lost her family and all…she may have been so traumatized by the event that she ran.”
“My sister looks at the world through rose-colored glasses,” Agnes said.
“Is a little compassion so wrong?” Veronica asked.
“When it’s misplaced, it is…yes.”
Corso interrupted. “So…because the Sister was so old. Because she had a history of misplacing the money.” He hesitated. “Some of your number didn’t believe there was necessarily a connection between Sister Alice’s death, the missing cash, and the sudden disappearance of Mary Anne Moody.”
“Believe it or not,” Agnes said.
Sister Veronica settled the glasses back onto her face. “Hindsight is always twenty-twenty, sister,” she said in a singsong voice. “It may sound silly now, but…” She couldn’t find the words.
“Did she leave anything behind?”
“Sister Alice?” Veronica asked.
Agnes rolled her eyes. “He means the girl, sister.”
Veronica shook her head sadly. “No,” she said.
“Yes,” said Agnes. “As a matter of fact, she did.”