Rueful Death (13 page)

' 'What did you make of the rue leaf in the letter?''

"I didn't know what to think. Was I supposed to feel

rueful? Repentant? But I didn't do anything wrong!"

"No one knows about the letters but Miriam and Mother Winifred?"

"And Margaret Mary. I wrote and told her." She looked down at the toes of her shoes-gold plastic slippers-peeping under her robe. "It might not seem like much to you, being accused of having a woman lover. But I was very hurt. I felt… violated, as if the letter-writer had stolen something from me."

I felt her pain. It was her reputation that had been damaged, perhaps, but more than that. Her estimation of herself. Her peace of mind.

"I was glad I could tell Margaret Mary," Dominica said simply. "She knows my deepest heart."

"Has one of the sisters given you a clue-a word; a look, even-that she knows about the letter?''

She gave her head a sad shake.

"Has anyone referred to you and Sister Miriam as particular friends?"

Another headshake, sadder.

"Have you been threatened, or has anything happened to your belongings?"

"You mean, like Sister Anne's swimsuit? No, thank God." Then she paused, pulling her brows together. "Except for…" Her eyes went to the guitar in the corner.

"Except for what?"

''I really don't think it can have anything to do with-''

"Tell me, Dominica," I said firmly.

"That guitar belongs to my cousin. I borrowed it because mine got burned up in the fire."

"The Thanksgiving fire?" No, that was a grease fire in the kitchen. "It must have been the Christmas Eve fire."

She nodded. "I'd left it inside the sacristy, you see. Miriam and I-she plays the flute-were going to play Christmas carols for the congregation at the end of the service. We'd been practicing for a month, and we sounded pretty

good. But then the fire happened, and my guitar burned, and we never got to perform."

"How about Miriam's flute?" I asked. "Was it destroyed as well?"

"No, she'd kept it with her. It was just my guitar. I didn't really think much about it at the time. We were all so frightened by the fire, you see. But afterward I began to wonder about it. How my guitar got burned."

"What do you mean?"

There was a crease between her eyes and her voice was troubled. "I'm almost a hundred percent positive that I left it just inside the door of the sacristy, where it would be handy when I needed it. But when the fire was out, there it was at the back of the room-what was left of it. It had been leaning against the curtains. The only thing I could think of was that somebody had moved it."

"Did you ask?"

"No. I mean, I wasn't absolutely sure where I left it, and it didn't seem all that important-in comparison to the fire itself, I mean." Her voice faltered. "Do you think that the person who wrote the letter also set the fire?"

"No," I said. Dwight was many things, but he wasn't literate enough to be the poison pen. Dominica might have forgotten where she put the guitar. Or someone else might have thought it was in the way and moved it to the back of the room. Or the letter-writer, chancing on the fire, had seized an opportunity to exact a penance-a fitting penance, she might have reasoned, since Dominica was about to perform with Miriam.

"How about Miriam?" I asked. "Has she experienced anything of the sort since the two of you received the letters?"

"You mean, like what happened to my guitar? I don't think so, but you could ask." Dominica frowned. "You're thinking that my guitar was burned because I wouldn't do what the letter-writer told me to do?''

"Maybe," I said. The whole thing was setting much

more complicated. "Back to the fire-where were you when it occurred?"

"In the choir with the other sisters. Father Steven had started saying Mass. I smelled smoke, and then John Roberta-she was sitting at the end of the choir next to the sacristy-got up and slipped into the sacristy to see what was happening. Then she ran out and whispered something to Father Steven. He told us all to leave."

John Roberta had been in the sacristy, alone, with the fire and the guitar? "Did the sisters leave the choir area immediately?"

"We couldn't. Father Steven got fuddled-he really doesn't think very clearly sometimes-and told everybody to go out the main doors at the back of the church. Which meant mat the congregation had to leave first. There was a lot of confusion. Dwight ran up with the big fire extinguisher from the front of the church, and he and Father went into the sacristy. And Gabriella and Rosaline went to get the hose. And of course the men of the congregation were milling around, trying to be helpful. Carl Townsend was telling them to carry the statues out and a couple were trying to lift the stone font, and John Roberta was having one of her asthma attacks, which she does whenever she gets anxious."

John Roberta again. "Do you know her well?"

"Not really." Dominica hesitated. "She's an odd sort of person, very shy and anxious about everything-afraid of her shadow, really. I feel sorry for her. She wants to go to a sister house out in Arizona, where the climate would be better for her. But she can't."

"Why not?"

"Oh, the usual." She made a disgusted noise. "Mother Winifred told her she could go, but Reverend Mother General hasn't approved her request because Olivia thinks she should stay here."

"Why?"

"Because without her, the score would be nineteen to

twenty in St. T's favor, that's why. Poor John Roberta is so paranoid that she sees a devil behind every tree, but this time she's got it right. She's a prisoner here until Olivia is safely installed as abbess." Dominica made a face. "I'm sure John Roberta wasn't glad to hear that Perpetua had died, but if she was, I for one wouldn't blame her. Maybe now she can get to Arizona."

"I see," I said. As I said good-bye, I couldn't help wondering just how badly John Roberta wanted to leave St. T's. And how much she knew about foxglove.

Sister Anne's bedroom was at the other end of Rebecca. Unlike Dominica's cluttered room, it was immaculate and tidy, although it had none of the starkness of Ruth's. The bed was covered by a blue plaid spread and a heap of blue-flowered pillows. Under the window stood a low, cloth-covered table on which were arranged a statue of Mary, another of Kwan-yin, the Japanese goddess of mercy, and an enigmatic jade buddha. Sister Anne did a lot of reading, I noticed. Neatly stacked on her desk was a book on running, one or two on yoga, and several about women and spirituality, including one I had read, Rosemary Reuther's book,
Womanchurch.
My eyebrows went up. When it came out, Reuther's feminist book had raised plenty of controversy, because it suggested that women should establish their own alternative worship, rather than accommodating themselves to the traditional male-dominated worship service.

Anne was dressed in black ankle-length tights and a loose white cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up, which made her look like a teenager. She was barefoot and her long dark hair was fastened at the nape of her neck with a leather thong. I didn't have to introduce myself, and she waved away my use of "Sister." She directed me to sit in an upholstered chair by the window, which looked out onto a sloping lawn bordered by a dense, shrubby mass of mes-quite and cedar.

"I've been expecting you." She sat down on the bed. "I thought you might want to talk about the letter. And die swimsuit too, of course.''

"The whole thing must have been unnerving," I said.

Anne gave a small shrug. Her olive skin was smooth, her small, triangular face closed and private. She looked as if she wouldn't be easily unnerved.

"Do you mind telling me about it?"

She folded her legs into a lotus position and spoke with a quick, active intelligence. "The spot where we swim is secluded. My suit was an ordinary swimsuit, not at all revealing. Actually, the letter struck me as being kind of crazy. Nobody in her right mind would write stuff like that. And there was that little bit of rue." Her chuckle was ironic. ' 'Herb of Grace, Mother Hilaria called it. She said the priests used to use it to sprinkle holy water and drive the devil out of the church. So maybe the rue was supposed to purify me." Her eyes glinted. "Or drive me out, like the devil."

"Your swimsuit was stolen from your room?"

She nodded toward a dresser. "From the second drawer."

Something about Anne's response puzzled me. I had expected her to be offended, even outraged by the theft, but she seemed almost to brush it off. "Was your door locked?" I asked.

"We don't lock doors around here," she said. "There's no need."

Obviously there was a need, considering that Mother Hi-laria's hot plate had also been taken. I persisted. "How did you feel when it happened? Did it bother you that somebody would steal a piece of your clotiiing and trash it?"

She shrugged. "Sure. But it bothered the others a lot more."

"The others?"

"Some of the older sisters went to pieces when they saw it hanging on the cross in the chapel." The corner of her

mouth quirked. "I guess it was the ketchup on the crotch that set them off."

"On the
crotchV

She laughed deep in her throat. "Mother didn't tell you?'' She pulled her thick rope of hair over her shoulder and twisted it around her hand. "They thought it was blood, you see. It reminded them that even though we are nuns, we're real women, with real bodies. Women's bodies. Every month, we shed real blood." A smile flickered briefly and disappeared. "I wanted to leave the bloody thing up there to give us something to think about. But Olivia said it was obscene. Mother Winifred said it was blasphemous. So I took it down."

"You can't blame them," I said.

She tossed her hair back and leaned forward, her eyes bright. "Exactly! They're not to blame. For hundreds of years, the church fathers have taught us that women's blood is obscene-that
women
are obscene. The Church is afraid of our bodies, afraid of sex. That's why all this insistence on celibacy. The Church is afraid of
womenV

Anne's face had come passionately alive as she spoke. I studied her for a moment. Her political agenda might be irrelevant to what had happened. On the other hand…

"So the bloody swimsuit didn't bother you," I said quietly. "I suppose you were even glad to see it hanging where everybody had to look at it."

She unfolded her legs and slid off the bed. ' 'Mother Hi-laria was wrong when she told me not to talk about the letter. Every woman here should have been talking about the attitudes that spawn that kind of poison." She walked to the window. "But that bloody swimsuit-it was right there where people
had
to see it. Mother Hilaria couldn't tell people not to talk about it."

"Did they? Talk about it, I mean."

"Not as much as I would have liked." She sighed. "It's hard for women who have grown up in the Church to confront its attitude toward women. But they've got to see how

it can poison everyone. The letter-writer, for instance. Her poison comes from the Church itself."

"But surely someone who writes such letters-"

"Don't you understand?" Anne's dark eyes were flashing, her body tense with the vitality of her argument. "It's not her fault! She's as much a victim as somebody who gets one of her letters. It's the
Church
that's poisoning people's hearts!"

Anne would have made a great trial attorney. She had just delivered the criminal-as-victim defense as passionately as I'd ever heard it. I paused for a moment, letting the energy of her words ring in the quiet room.

"If someone else hadn't hung the bloody swimsuit on the cross," I said at last, "would you have done it?"

She turned toward the window again. Half of her face was in shadow. "Perhaps."

"Perhaps you did," I said.

There was a long silence as she stood, not looking at me. "You're right," she said after a minute. "I hung it there. I wanted it to be part of our liturgy." She paused. "I don't know. Maybe the symbolism was too subtle. People didn't react the way I hoped."

"I take it, though, that the letter was genuine-that you didn't write it yourself?"

She was offended. "Of course the letter was genuine! Other people have gotten letters, too, haven't they?"

They had, and Anne might have written them, as easily as writing one to herself. But somehow I didn't think so. I answered with another question. "Since you received the letter, have any of your possessions been tampered with? I'm not talking about the swimsuit, of course."

She answered immediately. "Yes, actually. Somebody cut the strings on my tennis racket."

"When was this?"

"A few days after I got the letter-three or four, maybe.''

"Where do you keep your racket?"

"There." She pointed to a racket hanging on the bac' of her door. "I thought at the time there might be a con nection."

Dominica's guitar, Anne's racket. I wondered whether any of Perpetua's belongings had suffered a similar fate. Probably not. She had done her penance.

Anne went back to the bed and sat down. ' 'I suppose you know that my letter wasn't the first. But maybe you don't know that Mother had found out who wrote them. She was planning to put a stop to it"

"She knew?" I stared at her. "Did she tell you who it was?"

She shook her head. "She didn't say how she was plan ning to stop it, either. But it had to be something pretty drastic. Removal to another house, maybe, or even expulsion. Whatever it was, she said she had to talk it over with Reverend Mother General. She wouldn't do that unless it was really serious."

"And then she died," I said quietly.

She looked at me for a moment, started to speak and stopped, started again. "I wonder…"

"Wonder what?"

The words came slowly, almost reluctantly. "Do you suppose that the letter-writer… had something to do with Mother Hilaria's death?"

I watched her face. ' 'What makes you ask?''

She moved her hand over the plaid spread, smoothing it. "When it happened, I believed what Mother Winifred told us. About the hot plate and the puddle of milk and Mother Hilaria's bad heart. But now…" She paused and looked up at me. "The thing is, Mother Hilaria
did
know who was writing those letters, and she intended to do something about it. Then she died. Was it a coincidence, do you think, or something else?"