Nun After the Other

by Alice Loweecey

  Dorothy slammed on the brake. Kathryn whipped around and put her face nose to nose with Eugenie.

  “I have every right.” Her low, intense voice stopped Eugenie’s diatribe. “I am your Superior. You took a vow of obedience and you will obey me.”

  She nodded to Dorothy, who unlocked the brake. Together they pushed the chair into Eugenie’s room. Dorothy grabbed a thermometer and a blood pressure cuff and closed herself in with Eugenie.

  Kathryn walked over to Beech, who had left the wall and turned her back to the camera. “I apologize for Sister Eugenie’s outburst. She had no excuse. Please don’t think we’re all of her opinion.”

  Eugenie’s shout penetrated her closed door. “She sold it?”

  Beech produced a smile. “I’ve encountered her attitude many times. Some people resist change. Nothing could be as bad as the unforgettable moment two years ago when a hoarder poured a bucketful of human waste on me from a second-floor window.”

  Kanning snickered. Beech rose to the moment. “Mr. Kanning, it’s a pleasure to meet you. I don’t watch your show myself, but I understand many people enjoy it.”

  But Kanning was a match for her. “Ms. Beech, please accept my condolences for the loss of your former CEO. Are congratulations in order as well?”

  The polite smiles on both sides should’ve illustrated the dictionary entry.

  “Thank you, Mr. Kanning. Everyone at Eagle Developers is saddened by the sudden loss of our founder. The company will carry on his vision to make Cottonwood the showplace of Pennsylvania. As a matter of fact, Sister Kathryn has accepted our buyout offer, clearing the way for Victor Eagle’s landmark forward-thinking redevelopment project for this neighborhood. I’m sure your viewers would be interested in the plan. I have the artist’s renderings on my phone.”

  Giulia edged away from the camera group. A few quiet steps down the L-shaped hall and she closed herself into the chapel.

  “Florence?” she whispered.

  “Who gave permission for a wild party in my house?”

  The ghost’s loud voice came from behind Giulia. She started, and kicked herself for it.

  “Hah. Got you. The living are so predictable.”

  “At least you’re not smoking.”

  “Oh, you miss it? I won’t disappoint you then.” A stink of tobacco and burnt paper invaded the room.

  Giulia turned on her. “What is in those things?”

  For the first time, the ghost looked taken aback. “I rolled my own when I was alive. I liked them simple, so these have dried bright leaf tobacco.”

  “That’s it? How much nicotine is in one?”

  The ghost tipped her head sideways and the misty ostrich feather in her hat bobbed to her shoulder. “I don’t know.” She laughed. “I’m dead. They can’t hurt me.”

  “Well, I’m pregnant and they can hurt the baby.” Giulia kicked herself again the second the words came out. “Never give a ghost ammunition,” Rowan said. Now look what she’d done.

  Giulia braced herself for a blinding fog of smoke from Miss Attitude, but nothing happened. Instead, the cigarette hung limp in Florence’s hand.

  They stayed face to face for a long moment. Then without warning Florence disappeared from the chapel and reappeared inside Giulia.

  Seventy-Two

  Giulia felt the ghost’s force? Presence? Aura? Ectoplasm? No, ectoplasm was something tangible excreted from a medium during a séance. Whatever the term, Florence Gosnall had invaded Giulia’s body.

  She shook her brain clear of panic. “Get out of me.” She didn’t yell, at least not out loud. She thought the words in her Teacher Voice of Imminent Doom. The last thing she needed was The Scoop scenting a scoop.

  For the longest moment in her life, she fought Florence for her own personal space in the most intimate sense of the phrase.

  Giulia pulled on her arms, picturing herself dragging off a shirt with too-tight sleeves.

  Rowan had been confident Giulia would find her strength.

  She was in a chapel, but nothing overtly Catholic spoke to her.

  She reached over her head and yanked her hands from the base of her neck to her chin as though peeling off a wig.

  What was her center? Think. God? Family?

  Family. She’d do anything to protect her adrenaline-junkie son.

  Desperate, panic rising, she spoke within herself. “Zlatan, you and me. Now.”

  She clenched her stomach muscles, made her hands into claws, and yanked outward from her center.

  Giulia’s ears popped as she pulled and Zlatan pushed the ghost out of her. The feather reappeared first. The hat brim followed, then the front of the lacy blouse and the skirt, and last the high button boots, all stretching like taffy on a hot summer day. With an inaudible snap, Florence and Giulia faced each other as complete and separate persons.

  “How dare you?” Giulia said. Were she a ghost with power over the elements, smoke and flames would be spewing from her own ears right now.

  But Florence didn’t give her a sarcastic reply. She placed her free hand on Giulia’s stomach. “He’s beautiful. So small and so perfect.” The next second Florence plopped onto the rug.

  Giulia gave Zlatan a mental hug. He wriggled for the second time. The joy of feeling him move distracted her until Florence’s cigarette relit itself.

  The ghost took a long drag. “You don’t wear corsets, do you?”

  Florence had mastered sarcasm, body invasion, elemental manipulation—and the non sequitur.

  “No. My job requires freedom of movement.”

  Another drag. “I apologize for jumping into you. It was the impulse of the moment.” Her lip curled. “The first time I discovered I could fuse with the living it was totally by accident. One of these withered virgins—not the ones living here now—was complaining about the house’s design. The longer she whined, the angrier I became. I had to get away from her. She was blocking one of the doorways and I meant to barge right past her, except I went through her. Was I moithered! I saw her bones, her blood, her organs. For the first time since I died, I wanted to puke. The silly cow shivered and said a goose was walking over her grave. How cliché.”

  She smoked the cigarette into oblivion and stared at her empty fingers a moment. “Watch this.” She rubbed her right thumb across the tips of her fingers and a hand-rolled cigarette appeared in her palm. Next she snapped her left thumbnail against her left middle nail in the same motion as lighting a match. A single flame hovered over the tip of her thumbnail. She lit the cigarette and shook the flame out. “Vaudeville would have loved me.” She took a drag. “I was apologizing.”

  “I accept your apology.”

  “No. You have to know why. I enjoyed my life and I didn’t care what people thought of me. I was jailed for marching for votes for women. I went to architectural school in France. I took lovers.” She looked around the chapel. “You might think I regret not being alive now, but today I’d be merely one of thousands of talented women. In my time I was daring and clever and exotic. Women were jealous and men were fascinated. When I realized I was with child, I refused to change my lifestyle. I kept dressing to show off my figure and smoked and drank as much as ever. That’s why I asked you about the corsets. The baby came much too early and it was horribly deformed and it was my fault. The doctor who came after the neighbors heard my screams did what he could, but I’d been hemorrhaging for hours. I’d contracted childbed fever as well, and I died from the fever and blood loss.” Her smile for the first time appeared sad. “The poor dead little baby in the basin was the first thing I saw after I died. If that quack of a doctor had had an ounce of otherworld sensitivity he would’ve had nightmares from my screams for the rest of his life.”

  Florence stood and faced Giulia. “Now you’ve heard my story. I’ve never seen my own baby’s ghost. You’ll say he went to heaven, whateve
r that is. I was never one of those Azusa Street fanatics when I was alive and I’m still not. These snotty virgins whine about God day and night, but I haven’t seen a glimpse or heard a peep from their God in the one hundred and six years I’ve been dead.”

  “I didn’t come in here to discuss religion.”

  “I’m staying in my house because it’s mine. No one is ever going to take it from me, even if I have to put up with nuns in my bedroom for the next five hundred years.”

  In the back of her head, Giulia recited Jasper’s rules. Ghosts lie. Words have power. Ghosts are unstable. Believe.

  Florence’s death scene could be one hundred percent true. Death in childbirth was all too common in her era. Such a story still didn’t mean Giulia was going to roll into a sobbing, motherly ball at the ghost’s feet. Giulia’s first ghost—no matter how clever, snarky, and fascinating it had turned out to be—wasn’t going to make her lose all common sense and detective skills.

  “Florence. I came in here to talk to you in private because I have news.”

  The ghost stopped pontificating and her ostrich feather stopped bobbing. “Do I get three guesses?”

  “No.” The more time she sequestered herself in here increased the possibility of Ken Kanning searching for her to ambush a sound bite out of her.

  “You are a real wet blanket. I’m going to guess anyway.” She tapped her chin with her index finger. “Let’s see. Number one.”

  For once, Baby Brain didn’t sabotage Giulia and she remembered something called the rule of three. She wasn’t exactly sure what all it involved, but without Rowan or Jasper on speed dial, she knew she’d better cut Florence off.

  “The Sisters accepted Eagle Developers’ offer tonight.”

  Florence dropped her coquettish stance like The Scoop bailing on an outdated story. “Those miserable hags sold my house?”

  The ostrich feathers stood straight up. Its hundreds of vanes stuck out in all directions like porcupine quills. Florence’s round, handsome face stretched and warped as her pouting lips opened wide, wider, wider. Her skin bubbled and sloughed off in steaming globs. Olive-green mold discolored her teeth. The feather burst into flames. The stench of burned feathers overpowered the stink of mold. Her expanding mouth revealed a seething orange and black vortex deeper than any pit.

  Giulia fumbled for one second with the flap of her messenger bag. Then her fingers gripped the holy water flask and it was out, it was free, and she unscrewed the cap and flung its contents in a cross pattern at the thing that had been Florence, her voice cracking on the Latin coming automatically from her lips. “In nómine Pátris, et Fílii, et Spirítus Sancti.”

  Seventy-Three

  The next instant the Gibson Girl returned. No more flames, no more glorping skin, no more pit of bubbling hell in her throat. Water beaded on the ostrich feather and glistened in the lace on her blouse.

  “What did you do to me?” Florence brushed at her wet clothes. “You got me wet. How did you do that?”

  Giulia wanted to escape. She wanted the security of tough, competent Frank standing at her shoulder. She wanted a shot of Tullamore Dew. She wanted to know if little Zlatan would be born with an Evel Knievel daredevil birthmark. After all they’d been though during this pregnancy, nothing would surprise her.

  Since none of her desires could be granted, Giulia settled for giving herself a quick pat on the back for neither screaming nor fainting nor needing to change her underwear.

  Rule Four: Believe.

  Rule Two: Ghosts are unstable.

  Florence shook herself dry. “I said, how did you manage to get me wet?”

  Not a rule, but a chance to give the ghost back a little of the ribbing she’d been dealing with a heavy hand.

  Giulia said with a smile, “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  So would she, but only a fool would undermine her new drop of power.

  Florence’s clear eyes narrowed. Before Giulia could form worrying theories as to her possible deeper connection with Florence after the whole “let’s share our molecules” incident, the ghost showed off a new talent.

  The crucifix started to wiggle off the wall. Cigarette smoke surrounded both of them like a low-hanging cloud. The floor lamps rattled. The chairs performed the elephant walk from The Jungle Book on their own.

  “I will evict you,” Giulia said.

  The smoke collapsed into the rug. “You’re bluffing.”

  “Try me.” Giulia frantically paged through what she remembered of the exorcism ceremony. If holy water affected Florence, then an exorcism ought to. Florence believed, and apparently didn’t know enough about the differences between demons and ghosts. Two points in Giulia’s favor.

  The chapel door opened. “Giulia, who are you talking to? The Scoop guys want—” Bart stopped in the open doorway. “What happened to the chairs?”

  Ken Kanning and Pit Bull crowded behind Bart. The camera was on.

  Giulia bit her tongue hard. Instead of one of Frank’s Irish curses, a gasp of pain came out of her mouth. Win.

  Lose: Florence went full-on poltergeist. The smoke reappeared. The lamp bulbs exploded. The Bible toppled off its stand. The bronze crucifix launched itself at the group in the door.

  Giulia dived in front of Kanning and snatched the crucifix out of the air six inches from his nose.

  Seventy-Four

  Bart ran downstairs.

  For ten glorious seconds, Ken Kanning was speechless.

  But all glory is short-lived. He snapped his fingers. Pit Bull refocused the camera and The Scoop sprang into action.

  “Scoopers, you trust us to bring you important news. This is the big one. Don’t take your eyes from the screen. Let the kids go hungry. Lock the cat and dog in the basement. Take the phone off the hook.” Kanning backed three steps into the dark chapel, now that the lamps were useless. The camera’s spotlight framed him like he was an opera star about to sing a showstopper aria.

  “We’re here in the Convent of the Assumption, which has just been sold to Eagle Developers. Remember, Scoopers, this isn’t fake news. Every word out of my mouth is pure, unadulterated truth. As we entered the chapel to interview the Sisters, chaos greeted our eyes.”

  He raised his free hand to his shoulder and made a circular motion with his index finger out of the range of the lens. The camera panned left. Its light reached the broken floor lamp.

  “We heard the sound of things crashing behind the closed door of this sacred space. Could someone have broken into this house of holy women? We knew that fighting crime is more important than being first with the news, and that our Scoopers would forgive us for missing a story if it meant we saved the nuns from danger.”

  The light illuminated the overturned Bible.

  “This is the chapel tonight. Shattered lamps. Chairs tossed around like doll house furniture. A desecrated Bible. A sacred space poisoned by dark forces.”

  Bart ran between Pit Bull and Kanning, two light bulbs in one hand and a cut potato in the other. “Sister Fix-It to the rescue.” She knelt by one floor lamp and jammed the potato into the socket. With a few twists she unscrewed the remnants of the cap and replaced it with a fresh bulb. Bright white light lit the left half of the chapel as she righted the lamp. She repeated the actions with the other lamp and faced the camera with a huge grin. “All set. I’ll get out of your way.”

  Kanning gave her a thumbs-up. “Our angel of mercy is Sister Bartholomew, whose mission is feeding and clothing Cottonwood’s homeless. Who would be so depraved as to try to force these Godly women from their shelter?”

  He pointed to the empty hole in the wall above the Bible. The camera’s light followed his motion.

  “Scoopers, are you sitting down? Don’t reach for a snack or a drink, because you’ll spill it. I’m about to tell you the Big News. See that little hole up there in the wall? A cross hung
there up until a few minutes ago. As you can see, it isn’t hanging there now.” He whirled around. So did the camera. The spotlight focused on the crucifix in Giulia’s hand.

  “There is this room’s revered symbol of Christianity!”

  Giulia froze.

  “Scoopers, you’re familiar with Giulia Driscoll, Cottonwood’s most charming sleuth. Tonight she’s much more than that. As you’ll see on this replay, when we opened the chapel door, that very cross came off the wall and flew across the room under its own power. It aimed itself right at my head and only the resourceful Ms. Driscoll saved yours truly from a gruesome death.” Kanning photobombed Giulia’s moment in the spotlight and kissed her hand.

  Her innate courtesy stopped her from wiping her hand on her pant leg. Kanning also didn’t betray his abiding principle: Hog the spotlight for yourself whenever possible. He took the crucifix from her hands and placed it on the table. The camera deserted Giulia to capture him as he picked up the Bible and made a pass at straightening the wrinkled pages.

  “I’m not ignoring the elephant in the room, Scoopers. You’re thinking it. I’m thinking it. I’m sure Ms. Driscoll and the good Sisters are thinking it. Say it with me, Scoopers. On three. One. Two. Three.”

  Giulia had been edging nearer to Florence during The Scoop spectacle. At first, the ghost watched Kanning’s dramatics with her mouth open. Open the normal way, not the “look into my seething cauldron of hell” way. But as Kanning led up to his big reveal, Florence’s temper built.

  Giulia could see her in detail now. The skirt and blouse were robin’s-egg blue. The lace was ivory and gold and the hat was ivory with blue and white peonies. The ostrich feather had been dyed blue to match, as she’d thought at their first encounter in the cellar.

  She’d have to let Jasper know about Rule Number Five: Spending time with a ghost is the equivalent of tuning rabbit ears on a TV to clear the static.