Rueful Death

by Susan Wittig Albert

  What did I think? To tell the truth, sitting here with Tom in the bright light of late afternoon, with a postcard-pretty view of St. T across the river, the idea seemed pretty farfetched. "The JP-Royce Townsend-ruled that Mother Hilaria died of a heart attack," I said. "And there won't be an autopsy report on Sister Perpetua until later in the week. As to murder-there's certainly no evidence."

  "Well, I can't buy it," Tom said. "Nuns don't do those kinds of things."

  "That just shows how much you know," I snapped. ' "You only have to be here a couple of hours to realize that there are all kinds of emotional currents and cross-currents eddying around this place, some of them pretty turbulent."

  Tom pulled the nylon bag onto the ledge between us and unzipped it. "Well, there's certainly been plenty of turbulence since the merger," he said in a conciliatory tone. "The two groups don't have much in common."

  "About as much as Austin and Dallas," I said. "Or San Francisco and L.A." I peered into the bag. "What's all this stuff?"

  "Happy hour." He handed me two long-stemmed plastic wineglasses and went back to the bag. "I suppose you've heard that the Mother General wants to build a retreat center here. She thinks it would make money for the order."

  "She's probably right." I set the glasses on a rocky outcropping and took the paper napkins he handed me. "I never knew that the Church was obliged to show a profit

  to its principle stockholder, though. By the way, I met Sadie Marsh this morning."

  "Sadie's something else." He pulled out a cold bottle of zinfandel and a corkscrew. With a deft motion, he extracted the cork and handed me the bottle. "You pour," he said, diving into the bag again. "There's cheese and crackers here somewhere, and some other stuff."

  There was indeed cheese, a creamy Brie and a tangy blue, along with smoked salmon, chunks of raw celery. broccoli, crab-stuffed mushrooms, and buttery crackers- none of which came from the Carr corner grocery. I poured the wine and we touched rim to rim, our glances meeting and sliding away again.

  "To old times," I said.

  "To good friends," he amended. We ate and drank in companionable silence as the sun slipped lower behind us. I was feeling relaxed now, warmer, looser, happier. It could have been the wine, or the sun on my shoulders, or Tom's company. Whatever it was, it felt good.

  Tom put what was left of our happy hour-a few crackers, some leftover dip, the empty zinfandel bottle-into the bag. "I'm curious," he said. "How did you and Sadie Marsh happen to get together?''

  I chuckled. "She came over to size up Mother Winifred's hired gun."

  ' T wonder what she thought of you. More to the point, what did you think of her?"

  "As you said: She's something else. If she gets her way, St. T's will grow garlic till kingdom come."

  Tom shrugged. "That's what she wants, all right, but she doesn't have any leverage."

  "Maybe more than you give her credit for," I said unguardedly, thinking about the deed restrictions.

  "Oh, yeah?" Tom's look sharpened. "What kind of leverage could she have?"

  I shouldn't have opened my big mouth. The old deed was Sadie's trump card, not mine, and she ought to decide

  when to play it. Also, I was beginning to wonder about Tom's curiosity. But of course, where property and money are concerned, banks are always curious. And never neutral, I reminded myself. Tom would side with the player who controlled the dollars. He wouldn't have any choice.

  I changed the subject. "Tell me about the Townsends," I said.

  "Carl and Rena?"

  "And the boys."

  He shrugged. "You probably know the type-high rollers in a closed game. Carl's a loan shark who trades in favors. He'll do one for you and charge you three. Rena is a political power broker in county politics. The oldest boy, Royce, is a doctor-not the best in the world, actually. There have been several complaints at the local hospital, and I hear another doctor is opening a new practice next month. But Royce has also gotten himself elected justice of the peace, so he's in on almost everything that happens in his precinct, which includes the town of Carr. There's another son, Byron. He used to practice law. Now he's a county judge."

  "That's a lot of power to be tied up in one family."

  "It's not unusual in a rural area. It would probably be a good idea for you to stay clear of them." Before I could respond, his tone lightened and he circled my shoulders with his arm, pulling me against him. I knew I should pull away, but it felt familiar, comfortable. "So, old friend. What's your personal life like?"

  "The shop keeps me pretty busy."

  "Any boyfriends?"

  Boyfriend? Not the word I'd used to describe my relationship with McQuaid. "One."

  "Just one?" He looked down at me, his face inches away. "It's serious, then?"

  "We've been dating for several years." Why was I so reluctant to talk about McQuaid? Maybe it was because he was part of my life back there, and I was here-here to get

  away from there. "We've been living together since last May."

  "Why aren't you married?" he asked bluntly.

  Why? It's a question McQuaid asks from time to time, more often now that we're living together. Maybe it's because personal independence is a high priority with me, higher than family values. Maybe it's because I'm still learning who I am and what I want out of life. How many reasons do you need for not being married?

  Tom dropped his arm and got to his feet. "Maybe you haven't found the right guy," he said. He grinned and held out a hand to help me up. "Or maybe you found him and let him get away, say, eight or nine years ago."

  I couldn't help laughing. "Modest, aren't we? You haven't changed, either, you know. Still the same arrogant SOB."

  He slung the bag over his left shoulder and hooked his right arm through mine. He glanced down at me, his eyes reminding me of past intimacies. "Are you happy, China?"

  I thought of the long hours at the shop and the pressures of living with McQuaid and Brian. And of the quiet pleasure of being alone in Jeremiah with no demands to meet, no obligations to fulfill-once I had settled the business of the letters. "I don't know," I said. "That's part of why I'm here, I guess. To figure it out." We were walking slowly in the direction of the path and the downhill climb. "What about you?"

  "What about me?"

  "Are you happy?"

  He laughed shortly. "Happy? Hell, no. There's too much up in the air. Dad's cancer, personal finances, things at the bank that need to be changed but can't as long as he's in the picture. My life has been on hold for the last couple of years."

  Personal finances. I wondered what that was about. "Any girlfriends?"

  "Since you?" He chuckled. "Come on, China. Who could possibly replace you?"

  "Be serious," I said. "You haven't been twiddling your thumbs and hoping you and I would stumble across one another and fall wildly in love again."

  He dropped my arm and took my hand instead. "I was married for a couple of years. A woman named Janie."

  "Past tense?"

  He nodded.

  "What happened?"

  "It didn't work."

  "Why not?"

  "Like us, sort of." He shrugged. "There was a lot of competition from our careers. Janie was-still is-a TV anchor woman for Channel 6, very sexy, very beautiful, very busy. After the flame died down, we didn't have a lot in common. Unfortunately, the divorce was messy."

  Messy? I wondered if it was the "messy business" Mother had mentioned. He fell silent for a minute, while I debated whether to ask him if the failure of his marriage was one of the things that had brought him back to Carr.

  "That bit about our falling wildly in love again," he said, interrupting my thoughts. "It's not outside the realm of possibility."

  "Yes, it is," I said. "I'm committed."

  He grinned. ' 'You are?'' The question just missed being a challenge.

  I tried to pull my hand away, but he was holding it tightly. He drew me against him. "We'll just see about that," he murmured, and kissed me
hard, long.

  The kiss fanned a spark of body-memory I had thought was long extinguished. I pushed him away. "I need to go," I said. "I have to talk to Mother Winifred before supper."

  "You haven't changed a bit, have you," he said, and grinned.

  I caught Mother Winifred in her herb garden at twilight, a half hour before the supper bell. She was trimming the lower branches from a young chaste tree, its trunk still pale gray, unfurrowed.

  "Did you know that the seeds of this tree used to be used to fend off temptation?'' she asked, holding out a bundle of reddish brown twigs. ' 'People called it the Tree of Chastity."

  I thought of Tom's kiss. "Maybe we could use a little of it these days." I told her what I had learned from J. R. Nutall, and what I had concluded about Dwight's guilt. "The case is entirely circumstantial," I added, "which means that the county attorney probably won't prosecute."

  "Well, then, what do you suggest?" she asked.

  "I think we should let things ride for tonight," I said. "Tomorrow morning, I'll drive into town and talk with Deputy Walters. Is there a car I can borrow?"

  Mother pulled down one of the slender branches and clipped it. "We have two cars, but I'm afraid that both are in use. Sister Rowena has one, and Sister Olivia the other. Dwight drives our GMC, of course-he's taken it to town this evening. But there is another truck you can use. It may be past its prime, but it works fine."

  "Thanks," I said. I could drive over to Sadie Marsh's ranch as well, and tomorrow evening, drive into town for dinner with Tom and his dad. "Since Dwight's an ex-felon, his prints are on file. If they match any prints on the cigarette pack or the cartridge case, the deputy and the county attorney will decide whether there's enough to make an assault charge stick. They may decide not to arrest him at all."

  Mother piled the clipped branches together. "In which case I'll simply discharge him." She smiled. "It will be an enormous relief to stop worrying about the place burning down around our ears." She picked up her pruning shears. "If you can only resolve the other matter as handily, all my prayers will have been answered."

  "I'm afraid it's not going to be quite so simple, Mother." We turned to walk toward the cottage. "I'll know more after I've talked to Olivia and John Roberta, though."

  Mother glanced up at me. "That may take a while, my dear."

  "Why?"

  She paused to replace a rock that had been jostled out of the border and onto the path. ' 'Because neither of them are here. John Roberta suffers from asdima, you see, and she had an attack after Mass this morning. Her inhalator couldn't be found, and she was getting worse, so Rowena drove her to the Carr County Hospital for treatment. She'll be there at least another day, perhaps more. Dr. Townsend apparently wants to do some tests."

  I frowned. "Did you talk to Townsend yourself?"

  "No. Rowena handles that sort of thing." She glanced at me. "Why are you asking?"

  I was asking because early this morning, John Roberta had sought me out, anxious to tell me something that Sister Rowena might consider "disloyal." A few hours later, Sister Rowena had spirited her away. Those two events seemed entirely too coincidental to suit me. And what was this business about the inhalator being misplaced?

  But that was beside the point, at least for the moment. If John Roberta was in the hospital, it shouldn't be all that difficult to talk to her. I could do it tomorrow morning, after I talked to Stu Walters. In the meantime…

  Mother put her basket beside the cottage door. "What about Olivia?" I asked, following her into the cottage. "She isn't here either?"

  Mother went to the small bathroom to wash her hands in the basin. "She's been summoned to the motherhouse at El Paso," she said through the open door, "to confer with Reverend Mother General. She drove into Austin this morning and caught a plane. She'll be back Tuesday morning."

  "Isn't that rather unusual-for a sister to see the Mother General?"

  "Before the merger, Olivia was St. Agatha's abbess," Mother reminded me. She sighed as she dried her hands. "I imagine they're planning strategy."

  "Strategy?"

  "For the election. Reverend Mother will probably telephone tomorrow with word that we should vote as soon as possible."

  "But I thought Maggie's return-"

  Mother Winifred came back into the room, pursing her lips. "Reverend Mother has approved Margaret Mary's petition to resume her vocation, on the condition that her voting privileges be suspended for a year. Until she's sure she wants to stay, that is." She sighed again. "A perfectly reasonable suggestion."

  On the face of it, yes. But given Reverend Mother General's motives… "I suppose that means that Sister Olivia will be elected?"

  "I suppose." Mother dropped into a chair. I noticed how pale she looked, her skin the color of old ivory. "I'm sorry to see the changes coming."

  "But you're not willing to oppose them?"

  Mother shook her head tiredly. "Hilaria would have, I'm sure." Her shoulders slumped; her voice was muffled. "But opposing Reverend Mother's authority goes against everything I've been taught. And I'm seventy years old. I'm ready to step aside and let someone else do this work."

  I frowned. "I still think-"

  "Don't you understand?" Mother Winifred raised her head. "After Olivia has taken over, my time will be my own. See that clump of lemongrass?" She pointed. "I forgot to dig it up and the frost killed it. Next year, when Olivia is doing this job-and doing it quite well, I'm confident-that won't happen. She and Reverend Mother General have assured me that the herb garden-especially the

  apothecary's garden-will be one of the conference center's major assets."

  I was beginning to sense some of the pressure that had been brought to bear on Mother Winifred. But there was another side to the argument, and I pressed it. "Don't you feel you have an obligation, if not to St. Theresa's, then to Mrs. Laney and Mother Hilaria? If it's possible to preserve their dream for this place, shouldn't you try?"

  Mother Winifred gave me a small smile. ' 'Sadie is perfectly capable of preserving Helen Laney's dream. And to tell the truth, there's very little I can do."

  I thought of what Tom had said. "But without your help, Sadie will be in the minority. She needs you."

  Mother's voice firmed. "If God wants St. Theresa's to be a contemplative house, my dear, that's what it will be, no matter what Reverend Mother and Olivia have in mind. If He prefers us to operate a retreat center here, that's what we will have, regardless of what Sadie Marsh and Sister Gabriella want." Her eyes softened. "I feel He prefers me to look after the lemongrass."

  I could hardly argue with God. There was a space of silence, then she said, "Before we go to supper, please tell me: Have you learned anything about the letters?''

  "Two things," I said. "The letter-writer had nothing to do with the sacrifice of Anne's swimsuit."

  Her brows went up. "No? Then who-?"

  "I'm afraid you'll have to take my word for it."

  An answering smile glimmered on her mouth, as if I had confirmed something she'd already guessed. "Very well, then. The other thing?"

  "Mother Hilaria's hot plate is missing from the storage room. Ruth says it disappeared sometime last month, right after Rowena inquired about it."

  "Oh, dear." Mother looked deeply troubled. "Oh, dear. But if you're thinking that Rowena took it, I must say that I can't agree. She's an extraordinarily conscientious woman." She thought for a moment. "But for that matter,

  so is Ruth. She treats every item, even the toilet paper, as if God had assigned it to her custody. Oh, dear."

  I sat down across the table. "If it won't make us late to supper," I said, "I'd like to hear about Mother Hilaria's death."

  It wasn't hard to re-create the scene in my mind as Mother Winifred spoke. The day, a Saturday, had been quite cool for September, and the afternoon and evening were rainy. Mother Hilaria ate supper as usual, stepped into the office to do a half hour's worth of paperwork, then went back to her cottage on the other side of Rebecca, s
topping in the garden to pick some tansy and a few stalks of late-blooming golden yarrow.

  When she went into the cottage, she put the blossoms into a vase, placed it on her desk, and settled down to work. "She was always busy with one project or another," Mother Winifred added. "This time, it was Hildegard of Bingham. She was working on Hildegard's Book of Healing Herbs. I'm hoping to continue her work, when I get some free time."

  Mother Hilaria had taken out a tablet of handwritten notes on Hildegard, the abbess of a Benedictine convent during the twelfth century, and began to work. At some point, she apparently decided to make a cup of chocolate. The hot plate was on a wide shelf in the back corner of the living-sitting area, next to the small sink.

  "Her shelf looked very much like mine," Mother Winifred said, nodding toward it.

  I turned to look. There was the shelf, with a hot plate on it, and beside that, a small sink. Under the shelf was an apartment-size refrigerator. Hie rest of the story was tragically simple. Mother Hilaria had filled her kettle from the water tap, put it on the hot plate, and got out a tin of cocoa mix. As she took a quart carton of milk from the refrigerator, she dropped it on the floor. It broke open and spilled where she was standing. Without thinking, she reached for the knob to turn off the hot plate. It gave her a severe shock,

  which jolted her heart into arrhythmic spasms that quickly led to full cardiac arrest. John Roberta found her body an hour later, when she came for a late-evening talk they had scheduled.

  "Did anyone examine the hot plate?" I asked. "Ruth said something about bare wires in the switch. That suggests the wires were somehow stripped."

  Mother frowned. "I don't know anything about that. I thought the thing was just old, and somehow malfunctioned."

  It was possible that the old insulation became brittle and simply disintegrated. But it was also possible that the process had been accelerated.

  ' 'I wonder-'' I said. Just at that moment, however, the supper bell began to ring, and we stood to go. But Mother had one more thing to tell me.

  "This is on a much more pleasant subject," she said as we went to the door together. "I expect you'll be glad to know that one of our prayers was answered this afternoon, rather dramatically. Sister Gabriella was quite pleased. In fact, she jumped up and down a time or two. I don't think I've seen her that excited in years."