18

Lydia Greyson’s face appears somewhere above me. “Abby? Abby, can you hear me?”

My mouth won’t work, so there’s nothing I can tell her. I slip back into the darkness, grateful for the oblivion.

Next I hear Ben’s voice. “How could something like this happen?” he is saying. “You weren’t supposed to—”

“Shh, she’ll hear you,” Lydia whispers. “I think she’s awake.”

Ben disappears into silence. I drift off again, only to hear someone else say, “I demand to talk to that nun.”

It’s Agent Mauro, and from the sound of him, I don’t envy whoever “that nun” is.

On my cloud, I formulate a few things in my mind. One is that the cloud is salmon pink with streaks of gold. Secondly, angels are singing a Gregorian chant. I am in heaven, no doubt. Or on a bad drug trip.

Do I do drugs?

I can’t remember.

I do have a vision of fighting off someone in the choir loft, with an elbow to the ribs. I tried to twist around enough to chop at the groin, but whoever had hold of me knew—I think—what I was trying to do. He blocked me, and I wasn’t in a good position to react with another defensive move. That’s when I saw the chapel floor below my face.

I’d forgotten the first rule of self-defense—always be on your guard.

But the chapel in a nunnery is hardly the place to remember that.

One thing, this person wasn’t from The Prayer House. And it wasn’t a woman. At least, not one of the women from here. He was stronger than I, and I’m no weakling.

Unless—

My eyes fly open. Ben’s worried face is inches from mine. “You okay?” he is saying.

“Abbey,” I tell him.

“Yes, I know.” He smiles. “I know you’re Abby.”

He turns to someone beside him. Lydia Greyson comes into view.

“She knows who she is,” Ben says. “She’s okay.”

“No,” I say, trying to shout, though my voice is no more than a hoarse whisper. “That’s what she meant. She just didn’t spell it right. Abbey. Abbeys of yesteryear. Not me.”

Ben stares at me as if I’ve lost my mind. Then his face clears. “You mean the word Marti wrote in the dirt before she was killed? You think she meant an abbey? Like here at The Prayer House?”

I try to nod, but the pain in my head prevents any movement. “That’s what it used to be. That’s what Sister Pauline called it—‘Like the abbeys of yesteryear.’ Marti must have meant…” I lick my lips. “Ben, I think she meant to send us here.”

This is all I can manage. But before I slip into unconsciousness again, I see Lydia Greyson’s eyes turn hard.

“She can’t be thinking straight,” Lydia says stiffly. “It’s the fall.”

When I come off my cloud, I find I’m actually in a bed in what turns out to be the Infirmary of The Prayer House. There’s a nun in a white habit fussing over me, taking my pulse and inspecting the tender lump on my forehead.

Ben sits in a chair next to the bed, watching. “Welcome back,” he says, taking my hand. “How do you feel?”

“Sore as hell. All over.”

“You must be incredibly flexible,” the nun says, smiling. “Only yogis, drunks and cats can take a fall like that and not be hurt any more than you were.”

“Kenpo,” I say, remembering that as I went over I managed to twist myself into a diagonal position from right shoulder to left waist, bend my knees, land on my feet and roll.

“Like jumping with a parachute,” I say. “What’s the damage?”

“So far, no sign of concussion,” the sister says. “This lump should go down in a few days, and, so far as I can tell, you haven’t any broken bones. It’s nothing short of a miracle.” She smiles. “But then, we do have a few of them here. I’m Sister Anne, by the way. I was a P.A. before I came here.”

“Physician’s assistant?”

She nods. “We tried to get an ambulance out here when we found you, but Carmel Valley Road is washed out near Mid-Valley.”

I look at Ben. “How did you get here?”

“You might say I was in the neighborhood.”

“Is that right? Arnie, too?”

He shakes his head. “Just me. I was on a case.”

I fasten my slightly blurry vision on him. “Are you going to tell me what case, or will you be taking it to your grave?”

“Not my grave,” he says, sighing. “Local Realtor’s—Rick Stone. Found dead behind his office a few hours ago.”

“Dead?” I try to sit up, but my head hurts when I move. Sister Anne gently pushes me back down.

“You know him?” Ben asks.

“Met him. How did he die?” I’m thinking some local feminist whacked him.

“Bullet to the back of the head,” Ben says. “Execution style.”

It’s his turn to fasten me with a look.

“Like Marti?” I say.

“Could be.”

“Any suspects?”

“One. You’ll never guess who.”

“Don’t bet on it. Jeffrey?”

“One and only. Spotted by a neighbor, hanging around the office earlier in the day.”

This time I do sit up, despite the pain. “Somebody saw him there?”

“Mauro and Hillars, actually.”

“No kidding. Why didn’t they pick him up?”

“They decided to follow him, instead. See where he went and who he met up with.”

“And?”

He shrugs. “They lost him.”

“No way! Jeffrey managed to elude the Secret Service?”

“I guess he’s better at eluding the law, in general, than any of us thought.”

Ben looks embarrassed, and I fall silent, thinking.

“What were you doing out here at this hour?” Ben asks after a moment.

“I don’t know, what hour is it?”

He glances at his watch. “After five in the morning now.”

“God, what a night. I came out here to talk to Sister Helen.”

“And did you?”

“A bit.”

“Are you feeling up to telling me what happened?”

“I think so,” I say, touching the lump and wincing. “I talked to Sister Helen, then I decided to stay over because of the storm. In the middle of the night I went to the chapel to think. Somebody came up behind me. I tried to fight him off. I wasn’t ready for it, and he caught me off balance.”

Ben’s face darkens with anger. “You think it was a man, then?”

“Or a very strong woman.”

I am remembering Sister Helen’s almost abnormal strength at my house earlier. But that was in anger. Surely she wouldn’t have pushed me over a railing in cold blood.

“What were you doing at Rick Stone’s office yesterday?” Ben asks, obviously hoping to take me by surprise with his knowledge of my whereabouts.

“You mean yesterday when you were following me?” I say.

He has the grace to turn pink. “You saw me?”

“Hard not to spot the Brown Turd.”

“Oh. That.” He recovers, and his chin goes up. “So what were you doing at End-of-the-Trail Realty?”

“Asking directions,” I say.

“That’s all?”

“You mean, did I go there to kill Rick Stone?”

“No, that is not what I mean. Mauro and Hillars think you were taking a message to him from Jeffrey.”

“Mauro and Hillars can go to hell.”

For that, I get a mild glance from Sister Anne. “You must be feeling better,” she comments in a dry tone.

“I am.”

Despite her protestations, I sling my legs over the side of the bed. “I want to go home.”

“You can’t,” Ben says firmly, reaching for my legs. He lifts them and shoves them under the covers.

“The road is still out,” he says. “Besides, I’ve already arranged with Lydia Greyson for you to stay here today.”

“You’ve arranged?” I say, annoyed. “And since when do you arrange my life for me?”

“Since Jeffrey’s on the loose,” he says calmly. “He still has a key to the house, and I don’t want you there alone if he shows up.”

“You know, I don’t particularly care what you want.” My head is splitting now, and I’m in too much pain not to be annoyed.

“In addition,” he says, “we can’t overlook the possibility that Jeffrey might be the one who pushed you over that railing.”

Jeffrey?

I wonder. Do I remember anything that would give me a clue? Something seen out of the corner of my eye, or a scent? It seems there was something…A sound?

“Besides, like I said,” Ben continues, “the road is still out. They won’t have it fixed till late today.”

“So where does that leave you? Are you staying out here, too?”

“No, I’m hitching a ride into town on the KION ’copter. They’ll be out here looking at the floods.”

“Well, they can take me, too, then,” I argue.

“Can’t. Not enough room—it’s a small ’copter.”

“I’ll hire one, then.”

He makes a grimace and stands, throwing up his hands. “Will you please stop arguing? God, Abby! You take a fifteen-foot fall and you’re worse than ever. Anybody else would have had some of the piss and vinegar knocked out of them.”

Sister Anne puts in her two cents’ worth. “I’d really like to see you stay here in bed a few more hours, Abby. Just to make sure there’s nothing I’ve overlooked. I do feel responsible for you.”

She looks tired. For that matter, Ben does, too. And I’m only giving them more grief.

“All right, fine,” I say without much grace. “Ben—do me a favor? When you get back to town, call Sol, my lawyer, and tell him I can’t make that appointment today. Tell him I’ll be in touch.”

“I’ll think about it,” he says, still annoyed. “What’s up with Sol?”

I shake my head. “Nothing for you to worry about. By the way, how did I get up here from the chapel?”

“For some reason I’ll never understand,” Ben says, frowning, “I cared enough about you to carry you.”

“I did check you out first to make sure it was all right to move you,” Sister Anne assures me.

“So you’ve both been here with me for what—two hours, three?”

Ben shrugs.

“Your friend here,” Sister Anne says, “is a very stubborn man. He wouldn’t leave your side.”

“I’m a cop,” Ben argues. “It’s my job not to leave victims of violent crimes unprotected.”

Sister Anne rolls her eyes. “That’s it,” she says. “He was just doing his job.”

When Ben leaves, Lydia Greyson takes his place. I am still fuming at my condition and the accompanying lack of freedom to move about, but Lydia sits beside me, seemingly unmoved by my grumblings. She doesn’t talk, but is leafing through what look like legal papers, making notes on them. Small reading glasses perch midway along the bridge of her nose.

I remember Ben’s and Lydia’s words when they thought I was still out.

“What did Ben mean,” I ask, “when he said, ‘You weren’t supposed to,’ and you told him to hush, because I was awake and might hear him?”

She hesitates, then removes the reading glasses and says, “I don’t suppose it would hurt to tell you. He called earlier to ask if you were here. I told him you were staying the night, and he told me your husband had been seen in the area. He said Jeffrey was suspected of killing a local Realtor. I told Detective Schaeffer you were sleeping soundly, and he asked me not to let anything happen to you.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s it,” she says. “You’re a lucky woman, Abby, to have someone care that much about you.”

“But how did you know I was sleeping soundly? I wasn’t, in fact. I was awake for hours before I went to the chapel.”

“I suppose I thought you wouldn’t want to be disturbed,” she says, putting the glasses back on and turning back to her papers. “Did I overstep my bounds in wanting to look after you?”

“No…” I say, though reluctantly. I wonder: Am I really being protected here? Or am I a prisoner? How much can Lydia Greyson be trusted?

This is only a fleeting thought as I drift in and out. Sister Anne has told me I will probably sleep more than usual; a reaction to the emotional as well as physical trauma of the fall. She wakes me now and then to check for a concussion. Once satisfied I’m all right, she lets me slip back into the Land of Nod.

When I wake again, sunlight streams through the infirmary windows. Birds sing, and I almost expect a dove with an olive branch to perch on a sill. The rains, apparently, are over. The floods will go down.

There is a tray on the table beside the bed, loaded with orange juice, eggs, bacon and muffins overflowing with butter and jam. I would never eat all this at home, but this morning I am ravenous and wolf down every bite. My head no longer hurts so much, and the muscle pain in various parts of my body has eased up somewhat. Lydia is gone, and Sister Anne is with an elderly nun, who—she told me earlier—is confined to bed in the infirmary now. A condition has left her bones so brittle, they would break at the slightest movement.

I watch Sister Anne lovingly tend to this slight skeleton of a woman and see in her eyes and touch the kindness I remember from certain nuns at J&M, who had given their lives to God.

I remember seeing it in Sister Helen, as well, when she talked to students in high school who had a hard time making friends, or who had trouble at home.

I can’t hold back a rush of pity for my old teacher, who began her religious life with nothing but a desire to serve God—only to fall on such hard times. When Sister Anne comes back to check on me, I ask her, “How did you end up here? Can you tell me? Did your motherhouse close?”

She takes a seat beside me and releases a tired sigh. “It did. And many of us were fine with that. After Vatican II we wanted to live in apartments, on our own. We felt we could support ourselves and work even better for God in the world.”

“What happened?” I ask.

“Well, it was and still is perfect for many of the sisters in my order. For others of us…I don’t know, perhaps we just march to a different drummer. I began to miss religious life as I knew it. I missed wearing the habit and living in a community. For me, that was one of the most important aspects of religious life.” She smiles. “I guess I didn’t really want to be in the world. That’s why I entered to begin with.”

“What about Sister Helen?” I ask. “I thought she’d never give up her habit, much less leave her order.”

“You know Helen?”

“She was my teacher and my sponsor into Joseph and Mary twenty years ago.”

“Really? No one told me that.”

“I didn’t last long there,” I say. “I had a bit of a problem following the rules.”

She smiles. “As did many of us, back in the old days. As for Helen, well, she’s a special case. Joseph and Mary closed just as she was getting ready to retire. At one time she’d have gone back there to live and been taken care of the rest of her life. But the order couldn’t afford to keep up the motherhouse, and the sisters were sent to various places for housing—some to a convent here or there, some to apartments or group houses. To make a long story short, Helen ended up having a hard time with this. She went over the edge and hasn’t fully come back since.”

“You mean she was having emotional problems even before she ended up on the streets?”

“I don’t know if you’d call them emotional problems, but she did have difficulty coping.” Sister Anne breaks off and looks as me curiously. “Did you know that Helen entered when she was eighteen, and her parents disowned her from that day on?”

“No…no, I didn’t know that. I heard a few things about her parents in high school, but I certainly never heard that her parents disowned her.”

“Well, they did. Both parents wanted more for her, as they put it, and were greatly disappointed that she decided to ‘throw her future away’ on a religious life. Her parents never once visited her as other parents did on visiting day, and she never had a single letter from home. Joseph and Mary became Helen’s home, and the sisters there were her family. You may remember that the teaching sisters went home every summer—to the motherhouse, that is—for a month-long vacation and retreat?”

“Yes. It was a beautiful time, and they all seemed to look forward to it.”

“Well, that was Helen’s version of a family reunion, the only kind she’d ever known. It’s understandable, I think, that when the one place she’d called home for more than forty years closed down, it felt as if her parents were disowning her all over again.”

“But you say the sisters were relocated?”

“To a variety of places, yes. I think that was the problem for Helen—the fact that they weren’t kept together. It must have been similar to growing up in an orphanage with all your brothers and sisters, then being split up for adoption. Helen lost not only her home, but her entire extended family. They sent her to a convent in Eureka, while some of her closest friends went to Southern California and even Arizona.”

“How sad.”

“I agree. Helen went where she was told to go, of course. She’s always been a great one for following the rules. At some point, however, she had a bad automobile accident, and following that she became clinically depressed. One day she disappeared, and months later she was discovered living in San Francisco, homeless. The people who found her brought her here.”

“I just don’t understand how that happened. Isn’t there some kind of fund to help retired sisters with food and housing?”

“There is now, but some orders have more money in that fund than others. A lot depends on the wealth of the parish, and how much people are willing to donate. At any rate, I don’t think that’s why Helen ended up the way she did. My guess is she just wrote everyone off—her order, the Church, her entire past life as a religious. She wrote them off and disappeared.”

“She must have been incredibly angry to do that.”

“Angry, yes, but proud, too. I think, because of the experience with her own parents, Helen has very definite ideas about the way families should treat each other. Her families—both of them—had let her down. I don’t mean this in an unkind way, but it strikes me that Helen has nothing but contempt for the religious life now.”

“Yet she came here to live. And she’s stayed.”

“That’s true, and she’s nothing but kind to everyone. Makes her soups, grows her vegetables, keeps to herself. For the most part, she seems contented. Or did, until recently.”

“You’re not the first person who’s mentioned that. Do you know what’s bothering her now?”

“Truthfully, I haven’t a clue. Some of the women here think it’s because a friend of hers—and ours, too, for that matter—recently died. Marti Bright. Did you know her?”

“Very well.”

“I’m just not so sure that’s all that’s wrong with Helen. I think she’s been going through something rather difficult for a few months now.”

Since the time Justin disappeared, would be my guess.

“You know,” I say, looking at the clock on an opposite wall, “I’d like to go talk to Helen. Maybe just sit with her in the kitchen. That’s where she’d be now, right? It’s almost noon.”

“Oh, I don’t know…” Sister Anne says.

“I really am feeling better. I don’t even hurt anymore.”

Her look tells me she’s not buying that. “Abby, I promised Detective Schaeffer that I wouldn’t let you out of my sight until I was sure you were well.”

“And I am,” I insist.

Just to prove it, I slide my legs over the side of the bed and stand, trying hard not to wince when pain shoots up from my ankles. That was one hell of a landing, and in truth I feel like I jumped from a 300-foot-high bridge without a bungee cord.

“Look at me,” I say firmly. “I’m fine now.”

Sister Anne raises a brow. “I can certainly see that.”

“Come on, Sister. I just want to sit in the kitchen instead of up here in bed. Maybe I can even sneak a bowl of soup out from under Sister Helen’s nose.”

She smiles. “I’d be surprised if she didn’t force it on you. Despite her gruff attitude, she’s quite the little nurturer, you know.”

Taking her thin penlight from her pocket, she flashes it into my pupils. “Let me take one more look.”

Finally she nods and makes a satisfied sound. Standing upright she says, “Still no sign of concussion. I think you’re pretty much out of the woods. I wouldn’t do too much for the rest of the day, though. And promise to come back up here and let me check you out once more before you leave?”

“Absolutely,” I say.

“Another thing. Get Helen to fix you some soothing chamomile tea. It’ll help relax those leg muscles and keep them from tensing up.”

“Okay. And thanks. I mean that—really. I appreciate the way you’ve looked after me.”

“It’s what we do here,” she says. “The first rule of The Prayer House, from the time it was founded— ‘Inasmuch as you do this for the least of My brethren, you do it for Me.’”

In a bathroom next to the infirmary I wash my face and brush my teeth, thinking about Sister Anne’s last words to me. Inasmuch as you do this for the least of My brethren…

My mind has begun to clear from the fall, and I am remembering thoughts I had in the chapel just before that, putting clues together that have been all around me, but that for one reason or another I haven’t been clear enough to see.

I am now even more anxious to talk to my old teacher.

My clothes have been left for me on a chest of drawers in the bathroom, and moving with agonizing slowness, I manage to sit on the commode and slide first one leg then the other into my jeans. My back still hurts, and I can’t seem to get my legs raised as much as I’d like without jabbing pains in my calves, hips and thighs.

Once dressed, I make my way down to the kitchen on the first floor—still a bit wobbly, but gaining.

Sister Helen is at a table cutting vegetables. She looks up with surprise to see me. Without asking, I take a chair from along the wall and painfully drag it over, sitting down and leaning on the table before I fall down. Behind Sister Helen I note a large refrigerator with a glass door. It is full of cleaned vegetables, some neatly wrapped in Baggies or Saran Wrap.

“That’s some larder you have there,” I say conversationally.

“Our gardens do well,” she answers shortly.

“So what do you do, keep a good supply of them in there so you don’t have to pick and clean them every day?”

“Something like that.”

“You must have had your work cut out for you this morning, then,” I say.

She just looks at me.

“Well, there aren’t any that are still muddy from the storm. You must have been scrubbing all morning.”

She doesn’t answer that directly, but says instead, “You don’t look well. I heard what happened to you.”

“Sister Anne thought I was well enough to come down here, though. She said to ask you for some chamomile tea.”

Sister Helen shrugs. “There’s always a kettle of hot water on. Tea doesn’t take much work, I guess.”

I stifle a smile. “Do you want me to fix it myself? I will.”

“No,” she says grudgingly. “I’ll get it.”

This is more like the Sister Helen I remember. Everything is always “trouble,” but she never really means it.

“Thank you, Sister,” I say out of habit.

“Don’t call me that!” she grumps as she takes a teabag from a box and puts it in a cup, pouring boiling water over it. “Here.”

She thumps the cup down in front of me, leaving the teabag in.

“Sorry, it’s a difficult habit to break,” I say. “I don’t suppose you have a spoon?”

“Little Miss Helpless now, are you? Or just used to being waited on?”

I can’t help grinning at that. “I very seldom get waited on. I cook for myself, and believe it or not, I make my own tea.”

“Huh.”

She takes a teaspoon from a drawer and hands it to me. Taking up a potato, she begins to peel it. Her lips tug at the corners—not quite a smile.

“You’re really happy here, aren’t you?” I ask, warming my hands around my cup as the chamomile steeps. “You were smiling—even humming—the other day when Sister Pauline and I walked in.”

“I suppose it’s all right here.”

“Hah. More than all right would be my guess. Right now, anyway. Helen, I’ve been thinking. You’ve been acting angry with me ever since you saw me at Marti’s funeral. And you raged at me the other night. I’ve been trying to figure out why. At first I thought maybe it was because I’d had a fairly easy life, compared to the difficult time you’ve had. Then I thought maybe you were angry because my husband is trying to get his hands on The Prayer House and you thought I was in cahoots with him.”

She doesn’t respond.

“But you know,” I say, “I’ve been thinking something else since I woke up from my fall this morning. Funny what a bonk on the head and a nosedive into solid stone can do.”

She makes a snorting sound that’s surprisingly like the one I make myself, the one Jeffrey hates. I can’t help wondering if I got it from her all those years ago.

“I’m guessing,” I continue, “that it’s really only Justin you’re angry with me about. And I have to ask myself why that would be. Helen, you’ve been around Justin for years, so you must know I’ve never done anything to harm him. And I think you know Marti asked me to look after him, in the event something happened to him, that is.”

She frowns. “You didn’t even do a good job at that, did you?”

“As a matter of fact, I think I did, at least until a few months ago—”

“At which time you let your personal life take priority over Justin’s safety,” she snaps. “Oh, don’t think I didn’t hear about that. All of Carmel has been buzzing about your husband having an affair with your sister, and you prancing around with that police detective.”

“We are not prancing around!” I say defensively, warping back to my teenage years.

Helen slams the potato down. “Young lady, Marti didn’t just ask us to watch over her son, as if he were some expensive car parked in an alley somewhere! What she charged us with was nothing less than the safety of her child.” Her voice lowers and breaks. “You failed her. And so did I.”

“I know,” I say just as quietly. “And I regret that—so much, you will never know. I’ve loved Justin as much as you have.”

“Love! What do you know of love? Especially for a child? What do you know of the sacrifices it takes to give one’s time and energies to a child, to be there for him even when you’re not feeling up to it, to never turn your back on him, no matter what? What do you know—”

She breaks off, clamping her lips shut. Picking up the potato again, she begins peeling with sharp jabs, cutting huge chunks out with every slice.

I sip my tea, satisfied I’m on the right track. My thoughts roam back over the last days.

“You know what I think?” I say, setting down my cup. “I think the person you’ve really been angry with is Marti, for giving Justin away.”

That elicits a sharp look.

“And,” I say, “I think that goes back to the way you yourself must have felt when you entered Joseph and Mary, and your parents disowned you.”

Her eyes go wide at this breach of her privacy. “I never told you anything about that!”

“I know. I guess I must have picked it up somewhere.”

“Somewhere! A bunch of old gossips in this place! Old biddies, talking about people behind their backs!”

“No, not gossip. Helen, that’s the thing. They all love you here. As irascible as you may be at times—sorry, but you are—they love you. Some of that may just be their religious spirit kicking in, but I don’t think so. I think they know you aren’t an evil person, that below all the bluster, you are kind and good. Sister Anne even called you ‘quite the little nurturer.’”

She makes the snorting sound again.

“So, anyway, this is the way I’ve got it figured,” I say, “and I think I’ve done a pretty good job at this, at least. You remember how you used to make me think logically, one step at a time, in math? You taught me that there was only one way to arrive at an accurate answer, and that was to take what I knew and build on it—logically, no side roads, no errors along the way, or the entire problem would fall apart. That was a good lesson, one that helped me find the truth in stories I reported on later as a journalist.”

The hand peeling the potato slows. I see I have my teacher’s interest.

“See, what I think now,” I say, “is that it’s all about abandonment. When J&M closed down in the mid-eighties, there were those few months when they parceled all of you out to other convents and orders. That must have been incredibly difficult for you, losing the one home you knew. It wasn’t as if you had the support of your parents during the first months before donations kicked in.”

“As if I wanted donations,” she says angrily, jabbing the poor potato again. “Charity! Nothing but charity, just like before!”

Surprisingly, her eyes tear. But she straightens her back and says stiffly, “The order, you know, never gave postulants a thing. First of all, our parents were supposed to pay the order a dowry when we entered. Then they were supposed to buy everything we needed during our postulant year—uniforms, under-clothes, shoes, stockings, soap, toothpaste…”

“But your parents wouldn’t help you,” I say. “Right? They abandoned you. That’s what it felt like, didn’t it?”

She sits heavily in a chair on her side of the table and studies her raw, gnarled hands. “The cloth for my first habit came from a Saint Vincent de Paul thrift store. It was cheap, heavy material, hot as a blister in summer. Rotted under my arms when I perspired and didn’t clean up right, ever. Believe you me, young lady, by the time I took my vows four years later, I was sick to death of charity!”

Her chin goes up. “When I started teaching, I bought my own cloth. We didn’t make much, mind you, but I put a little aside every month. I made my new habit with a washable material, and from the moment I put it on, I loved it. It was mine.”

“That’s why you refused to give it up for so long. Sister, I can’t even imagine how hard it must have been for you to go through all that at eighteen.”

She glares at me. “I was strong. Independent. I knew I could take care of myself.”

“I’m sure you were strong, Sister. But it must have hurt. And you probably thought you could take care of yourself, but most eighteen-year-olds think that way. We always believe we can conquer the world. I know Marti and I did. But when we got into religious life, they did their best to strip us of that spirit of independence. Isn’t that the way it was for you?”

“That’s the way it was for all of us then,” she snaps. “They took young women and separated them from everyone they knew and all they believed. Today that’s called brainwashing. At least, by some. The younger sisters, the ones who like the changes, will tell you they turned us into mindless little servants of the Church. If you ask me, it was more like they kidnapped us and held us hostage somewhere.”

Standing, she gathers up her vegetables in a large pan and takes them to the sink, rinsing them under running water. “Then one day they ‘set us free.’ Or so they said. We had no money and no way to take care of ourselves. So yes, I took their donations for a while. But it was still charity to me—and to a lot of the others, though they don’t speak of it now.”

She turns and fixes me with an angry look. “Don’t go thinking we didn’t appreciate what people were doing to help us! But we should have been paid properly in the first place for the teaching we did. We should have been allowed to put money away for our retirement. If things had been run right, we never would have had to take charity at all.”

Dumping the rinsed vegetables into a large kettle, she slams a lid on it and lights a fire beneath it.

“You are quite an enigma, Sister Helen,” I say. “You loved religious life the way it was, and you even loved living by the rules. Yet you were willing to end up homeless to be independent—which is part of the freedom the younger sisters were fighting for.”

“It’s not as if I chose to end up homeless,” she argues. “I worked past my retirement for ten years, and I wanted to go on working, the way a lot of the older sisters have.”

“But then you had a bad car accident, and you had to stop working because the pain was too severe. I know.”

She sits down again and sighs. “No, young lady, you do not know. That might have been the reason I used for retiring, but the truth is—”

“You were tired,” I finish for her. “Tired of all the changes, of your home closing down just when you were getting ready to live out the rest of your life there. You probably even had dreams of dying at J&M with all your old friends and sisters around, the way it used to be.”

“I did love walking in the gardens,” she says, her tone changing abruptly as her eyes look into the past and soften.

“I know,” I say just as softly. “I loved it, too. Remember how we all made the rounds of the statues of Mary on May Day, singing songs to her and laying flowers at her feet?”

Her eyes close against tears, and the old chin wobbles as her mouth shakes. “It was beautiful…so beautiful,” she says.

When she looks at me again there is so much sadness in her eyes, so much grief for a life she will never know again, I almost regret having to do what I’m about to do to her.

I lean forward and cover her hand with my own. “Sister? I was right, wasn’t I? It’s all about feeling abandoned. You felt abandoned, and you can’t bear now to see that happen to anyone else.”

“What are you getting at?” she says sharply, pulling her hand away.

“The primary rule of The Prayer House, Sister. It’s a rule I would expect you, of all people, to follow.”

The old eyes take on a wary light.

“‘Inasmuch as you do this for the least of My brethren,’” I say, “‘you do it for Me.’”

She looks away, avoiding my eyes.

“That’s what you’ve been doing here, isn’t it?” I press. “Caring for the ‘least of His brethren’?”

She doesn’t answer.

“I am so sorry for what happened to you,” I say. “I’m sorry things weren’t different. But they are different now, aren’t they? Really good? See, it was the humming, Sister. That’s what didn’t fit for me, from the first time I saw you in this kitchen looking peaceful, content—and humming.”

She pulls her hand away from mine. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that I couldn’t help wondering. How could you be so happy, even here—when Justin, the boy you’ve loved for years as if he were your own, had been kidnapped and could even be dead?”

A shudder takes her body, as if a burden carried far too long has suddenly been dropped.

“You couldn’t be that happy, could you?” I say. “That’s how I knew.”

Again, I take her hand, holding it firmly in mine. “I want you to take me to Justin, Sister. Take me to him now.”