by J. A. Jance
In high school Bonnie Jean Dunleavy had looked as though she carried the weight of the world on her shoulders. Her eyes had seemed haunted somehow. The corners of her lips had turned down. This woman was totally at ease with herself. She approached me with a relaxed smile, an air of breezy confidence, and a hand outstretched in greeting. Something had worried Bonnie Jean as a teenager, but it no longer seemed to trouble her as an adult.
“Hello, Mr. Beaumont,” she said. “I don’t believe we officially ever met back in high school. After all, you were a senior when I was a lowly sophomore, but I certainly remember seeing you back then, and I’d still know you anywhere. It’s so good of you to come.”
She led me back to the table. I glanced over my shoulder at the entrance. “Fred will be here eventually,” she said. “He called a few minutes ago. He’s stuck in some kind of traffic tie-up on the freeway. Can I get you something, coffee or tea? It’s a little too early to order lunch.”
“Coffee would be fine,” I said.
She waved down a waiter and I ordered coffee. As soon as the waiter had left, she sat up straight, folded her hands on the edge of the table, and studied my face. “How much did Fred tell you?” she asked.
“Not much,” I admitted, probably sounding as grumpy as I felt. I’ve never liked being jerked around like a puppet by the whim of some invisible puppeteer.
“Did he mention that I’m not Bonnie Jean Dunleavy anymore?”
“No,” I said. “As a matter of fact, he didn’t.”
“That’s all right,” she said. “He made it clear that if you were going to know about any of this, it would have to come from me directly. He didn’t want to run the risk of violating my privacy. My name is Sister Mary Katherine now. I joined a convent—the Order of Saint Benedict—right out of high school. Now I’m mother superior of a small convent over on Whidbey Island.”
“He made no mention of that, either,” I said.
“It’s a long story,” she said. “Are you sure you have time?”
I thought about Harry waving me out of his office. “I’m at your disposal,” I told her.
“My folks married young. Daddy was eighteen and Mama was sixteen when they eloped. They left their disapproving families behind in Pennsylvania and came west. Neither of them had a high school diploma. In fact, I didn’t realize until after my father died that he had never learned to read. With benefit of hindsight, I suppose he was dyslexic, but I doubt people knew much about dyslexia back then. My mother covered for him as best she could, but he moved from one menial job to another and finally ended up working as a mechanic. By the time I graduated from eighth grade, I must have attended twenty different schools. That meant I was always behind academically, and the older I got, the further I fell behind.”
“It must have been tough,” I offered.
She nodded. “It was. Everybody thought I was stupid. Eventually I thought so, too. The summer before my freshman year, we were living in Seattle. My mother was working as a maid at one of the motels on Aurora, and my dad had a temporary summertime job working for a logging company over near Randle.
“I’m not sure how Mother did it, but somehow she wangled a scholarship for me to attend a weeklong CYO camp outside Leavenworth. We’d never had enough money for me to go to camp before, and I was thrilled. My parents’ fifteenth wedding anniversary was on Saturday while I was away at camp. My mother drove all the way to Randle by herself so she and my dad could celebrate. They planned to have a picnic lunch up on Mount Rainier, but they never made it. On their way there they were hit head-on by a runaway logging truck that came careening around a sharp curve. They both died instantly.”
She told the story with only a trace of sadness, with the poise that comes from having adjusted to a long-ago tragedy, but hearing about the deaths of Bonnie Jean Dunleavy’s parents certainly explained the sad expression that had been captured so clearly in her high school yearbook photo.
“Because I was away at camp, I had no idea what had happened. Mother and I, and occasionally my father, attended Christ the King Church up on Phinney Ridge. The priest there, Father Mark, had taken an interest in us, and he was the one who had made it possible for me to attend camp. When word of the accident reached him, Father Mark came all the way to Leavenworth to tell me what had happened and to bring me back home. Realizing no one would be there at our apartment to take care of me, Father Mark had one of the camp counselors, Maribeth Hogan, leave camp to come be with me. She was there through the funeral and stayed for the remainder of the summer. Not surprisingly, we’ve been friends ever since.”
“You were lucky to have people like that in your life,” I said.
“More than lucky,” she replied. “As I said earlier, my parents came from Pennsylvania. They were pretty much estranged from both sides of their families. None of the relatives from back there bothered to come out for the funerals, but when the logging truck’s brakes were found to be faulty and it looked like there would be a sizable insurance settlement, those very same relatives—my father’s mother and my mother’s two brothers—descended on Seattle like a swarm of locusts, all of them bent on going to court to be declared my legal guardian. Father Mark came to see me and asked if I wanted to live with any of those relatives. I told him I didn’t even know them. The last thing I wanted to do was go all the way across the country to live in a strange place called Pittsburgh where I knew no one. Fortunately, Father Mark listened to me. I also think he suspected that my relatives were far more interested in laying hands on the insurance money than they were in looking after my welfare. He got in touch with Catholic Family Services. They placed me in a foster home in Ballard.
“Adelaide Rodgers, my foster mother, had entered a convent as a young woman but had been forced to drop out after only two years. Her mother had taken sick, and she’d had to go back home to help look after her younger brothers and sisters. These days you hear lots of horror stories about what goes on in foster homes, but Adelaide was wonderful. She was a loving, pious woman who went to Mass every Sunday and who lived her faith every single day. She believed in living frugally. She worked as a teller in a bank, but she sewed all her own clothing, and she taught me to do the same.
“Adelaide never used a dime of my insurance settlement. She said it was a nest egg for me to use when I was ready to go to college. She invested my money right along with her own. Over the years my nest egg grew to surprising proportions, and so did hers. Adelaide never officially adopted me. I don’t think it was possible for single women to adopt in those days, but as far as she was concerned, I was her daughter. When she died a number of years ago, she left me a small fortune and a farm she had inherited up on Double Bluff Road on Whidbey Island. She left me the property and the money but with an important request. She asked that I use both the property and the money to found a convent in her mother’s memory—which I did. It’s called the Convent of Saint Benedict.”
“Double Bluff Road. Isn’t there a country club somewhere around there?” I asked. “I think I went there for a conference once.”
Sister Mary Katherine—I had to teach myself to think of her as Sister Mary Katherine and not Bonnie Jean—smiled and nodded. “Useless Bay Country Club,” she said. “They’re neighbors of ours. We like to think of ourselves as the Useful Useless Bay Country Club.”
A nun cracking jokes and referring to her convent as a country club? That came as a bit of a surprise. “How did you go from Ballard High School to Mother Superior?” I asked.
“As I said, because I changed schools so much, I was way behind academically by the time I reached high school. Even with Adelaide’s nightly tutoring sessions, college prep courses were far beyond my abilities, but I was a star in Miss Breckenridge’s home ec classes.”
Miss Lola Breckenridge—I hadn’t thought of her in years. Even now it seems ironic that the woman in charge of Ballard’s home ec department had been an old maid. She was a tall, bony, yet imposing creature who dressed impeccably in desig
ner-style fashions that she sewed herself. And she was tough. Boys who got crosswise with Miss Breckenridge in study hall or the cafeteria soon wished they hadn’t. A word from her to some misbehaving boy’s coach would have even star athletes benched for that week’s game.
“Home ec was great. Because of what I had learned from Adelaide, I could sew circles around the other girls. Miss Breckenridge even let me come in before and after school to use the machines. Next to Adelaide, Miss Breckenridge was the best thing that ever happened to me. I may not have been able to make sense of algebra or geometry, but if I could sew well, I knew I’d be able to support myself.”
“That’s what my mother did,” I put in. The admission surprised me. “She was a seamstress and a single mother. That’s how she supported us the whole time I was growing up.”
Sister Mary Katherine looked thoughtful. “That’s interesting,” she said.
Just then Freddy Mac came hurrying up to the table. “Sorry I’m so late,” he said, taking a seat. “Traffic on the freeway was horrendous. By the time I realized there was an accident at Southeast Eighth, I couldn’t get off. I had to wait it out. What have I missed?”
“Nothing much,” Sister Mary Katherine said. “I’ve been filling Mr. Beaumont in on some of my background.”
“Beau,” I interjected.
She smiled. “And I was just getting to you, Fred,” she added. “By the time I was a sophomore, Adelaide was worried that I was focusing all my energies on home ec. She wanted me to try my hand at something else. That’s how I wound up following Fred here around while he tried to teach me how to be a photographer. Despite his very capable mentoring, I never made the grade in the photojournalism arena, but he and I became good friends. We still are.”
The waitstaff, which had made itself scarce while there were just two of us, began hovering the moment the third member of our party showed up. They refilled coffee cups and took food orders. As soon as they disappeared once again, Sister Mary Katherine resumed her story.
“By the time I was a junior in high school, I knew I wanted to be a nun. With my sewing abilities, joining the Benedictine order was a natural.”
That one stumped me, and Sister Mary Katherine must have realized it. “How much do you know about the Catholic Church?”
“What I don’t know fills volumes,” I told her.
“Traditionally Benedictine nuns serve the church by sewing—making altar cloths and vestments for priests. That’s what we do up on Whidbey, too. Saint Benedict’s is a small convent. Twelve nuns and two lay sisters. We sew and we pray. For much of the day and night we live in self-imposed silence so we can spend our time with our hearts and minds focused on God rather than chatting endlessly about the weather. And that brings me to why we’re here.”
I have to admit I had been wondering. Nothing in Sister Mary Katherine’s story hinted at any wrongdoing, and she certainly didn’t strike me as a potential murderess.
“We’re supposed to maintain certain hours of silence,” she continued. “About a year ago I broke the silence by waking up screaming in the middle of the night. As I said, Saint Benedict’s is small. Having the mother superior roust everyone out of bed by screaming her head off was unsettling. I knew I’d had a nightmare, a terrible nightmare, but I couldn’t remember any of it. I had no idea what the dream was about. Eventually everyone returned to their own rooms, and we all went back to sleep. A few weeks later it happened again—exactly the same way. It’s gone on like that for months now. I started avoiding going to sleep at night because I was afraid of having the dream and disturbing everyone else, but having a sleep-deprived mother superior is almost as bad for a convent as having one who wakes everybody up screaming like a banshee.
“One of my younger nuns, Sister Therese, was a psychology major in college. She suggested that perhaps the reason I couldn’t remember the dream was that it had its origins in some terribly traumatic event in my past. Whatever had happened was so horrific that I had suppressed it, but now it was attempting to surface again via the dream. Sister Therese also suggested that I consider using hypnosis. She thought that remembering what the dream was about might make it go away.” Sister Mary Katherine looked at Fred, who beamed back at her. “Fortunately for me, I had a good friend who just happened to be a hypnotherapist.”
Our food came then. Fred and I both tucked into steak sandwiches. Sister Mary Katherine had a Caesar salad, which made me wonder if it was possible Benedictine nuns were also semi-vegans.
“So you went to see him?” I asked.
“Not right away,” she replied. “People tell me I’m stubborn, and I guess it’s true. I assumed the nightmare had to have something to do with the deaths of my parents. Being orphaned at such a young age was pretty much the defining moment of my life. It seemed reasonable to me that if that’s what it was, I could do what needed to be done on my own. If I thought about what happened to them long enough and hard enough—if I meditated and prayed about it—the nightmare would eventually reveal itself. But that didn’t happen, and unfortunately the screaming didn’t stop, either. Finally the sisters staged a small revolt. The entire convent signed a petition asking me to do something about it. And I did. Three weeks ago I came to Seattle and had my first official appointment with Fred. I think it worked because the trust I felt for him back in high school makes it easy for me to trust him now.”
“And?” I asked.
Sister Mary Katherine put down her fork and peered at me through those thick lenses of hers. “The nightmare isn’t about my parents,” she said. “According to what I told Fred while I was under hypnosis, sometime when I was very young, I may have witnessed a murder.”
A chill ran down my back. “You actually saw it happen?”
“I believe so, but we’re not sure. Under hypnosis I seem to remember looking out through a window and seeing a man murder the woman who lived next door to me.” She turned to Fred. “Did you bring the tapes?” she asked.
Nodding, Fred reached into his briefcase and pulled out three separate videotapes. “I often tape sessions so I can go back through them and look for things I might have missed the first time—facial expressions, nervous tics, that sort of thing,” he explained. “In cases of repressed memories, I usually do several sessions. Bringing painful memories to the surface is a lot like peeling an onion. Often more substantial details are recalled with each subsequent session.”
“When Fred told me about this, my first thought was that I’d made the whole thing up, that it was nothing but a childhood fantasy,” Mary Katherine resumed. “If I had really seen such an awful thing—a man and a woman stabbing someone to death—how was it possible for me to have forgotten it completely?”
“Man and woman?” I repeated. “So there were two of them?”
“Yes. And the dead woman’s name was Mimi.”
“No last name?” I asked.
Sister Mary Katherine shook her head. “No, just Mimi.”
I took my notebook out of my pocket and wrote down that one name: Mimi.
“Whereabouts did she live?”
“That’s the thing. I have no idea,” Mary Katherine answered. “We moved around so much when I was little that I really don’t know, but I’m assuming it was somewhere here in Washington.”
“It’s still possible that you did make it up,” I suggested mildly.
“Perhaps,” Mary Katherine said, “but I don’t think so. When Adelaide died and I was going through her things, I found several boxes with my name on them. They contained the few paltry belongings I brought with me when I came to live with Adelaide. Catholic Family Services had attached a complete inventory sheet. Inside one of the boxes, I found this.”
Mary Katherine reached into a briefcase-size purse and extracted a slim book, which she passed over to me. It was a much-read volume of Watty Piper’s classic children’s book, The Little Engine That Could. That book had been a particular favorite of mine when I was a child. It was a story my mother read to me over an
d over, and this copy, with its tattered but familiar dust jacket, came from that same era.
“Look inside,” Sister Mary Katherine said.
On the inside cover I found an inscription written in fading blue ink. “For Bonnie, Merry Christmas. Love, Mimi.”
“I got rid of most of the rest of the things, but I kept the book and a few photos. I always wondered who Mimi was. I thought maybe she was some friend or relative of my parents. Clearly we had been close once, or she wouldn’t have given me such an expensive gift. And I thought it was odd that I never heard from her after my parents died. As soon as Fred told me what I had said under hypnosis, I knew why. Mimi was dead long before my parents died. So I asked Fred to see if he could find any record of a woman named Mimi being stabbed to death. I wanted to know whether or not the people who did it were ever caught and punished. I felt I owed her that much.”
I glanced at Fred. “Any luck?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I guess I’m better at being a hypnotherapist than I am at being a detective. That’s your job, not mine.”
“And how exactly did this particular case get to be my job?” I asked.
“That’s my fault,” Sister Mary Katherine said at once. “Fred was the one who knew you worked in that new investigative unit in the attorney general’s office.”
I made a mental note not to call us the SHIT squad in the good sister’s presence.
“Before Father Mark retired from Christ the King, he had a young assistant priest named Father Andrew who moved up into the diocese office years ago. Father Andrew is now the new archbishop’s right-hand man. He was a huge help to me personally when I was starting Saint Benedict’s and needed to cut through mounds of red tape.”
She stopped talking as if she had said enough, but I still didn’t get it.
Obligingly, Freddy Mac clued me in. “Years ago, Father Andrew Carter and Ross Connors played football together at O’Dea High School.”