The Hour of Death

by Jane Willan

  “Well, I don’t know. But it wasn’t Millicent, right? I mean, I thought maybe it was Millicent who was sending all The Wizard of Oz threats to me. But we were just at her house, and unless she jumped into a waiting blue Subaru, followed us up the hill, and then disguised her voice as a man’s, it wasn’t she.” Lucy replied.

  “I wouldn’t dismiss her so quickly,” Sister Agatha said. “Whoever hit us knew where to find us. And only Millicent knew that we were heading back to the abbey in the minivan.”

  “Unless we were being followed,” Sister Gwenydd said. Sister Agatha noted a slight thrill of excitement in Sister Gwenydd’s voice. Too much Midsomer Murders with the sisters on Sunday nights.

  “Do you think Millicent is that scheming? To set out after us or, rather, to send some man in a Subaru after us?” Lucy asked. “After all, she’s this shy thing who paints birds.”

  The silence around the table answered Lucy’s question. The shy and hesitant Millicent had let a woman lie on the floor without calling for help and then stepped over her body to steal a painting. She had lied about where she’d been and claimed that she wasn’t an artist. The fact that Tiffany had manipulated her and stolen her work could have been enough to make an unrecognized artist angry enough to kill. Sister Agatha took a sip of tea. You never knew what could drive someone to murder.

  Reverend Mother took the slice of almond cake offered her by Sister Gwenydd. “Have you told me everything,” she asked, stabbing a forkful, “about Millicent and Tiffany? I don’t want to look uninformed when Constable Barnes gets here. He just texted that he was at the site of the accident, and the wrecking crew should be done soon.”

  “I don’t think we left anything out,” Sister Agatha answered. “Did we?” She looked at Sister Gwenydd, who looked back at her with an open expression.

  Lucy picked up her tea and peered over the cup at Sister Agatha. “Nope. Not that I can think of.”

  Sister Agatha noticed that her voice, though both casual and confident, was matched by the slightest quiver of her teacup. Shakiness was a sure sign of a suspect who was lying. Although, she reminded herself, Lucy is not a suspect at all, but a victim. And why would a victim lie? Had a victim ever lied to Miss Marple? Armand Gamache? Inspector Barnaby? Uncapping her Sharpie, she made a note to check.

  “I only ask, Sister Agatha,” Reverend Mother said. “Because on occasion—not often, of course but on occasion—you have withheld information from me when I really ought to have had all the facts.”

  “I think I have been very open with you, Reverend Mother. Yes. Absolutely, I have.”

  She folded her hands on her lap before there could be even the slightest chance of a tremor. A good detective keeps a few things up her sleeve. Although most detectives only had to answer to a mere lieutenant, not a Reverend Mother.

  “And anyway, I feel as if I know less and less every day about the murder of Tiffany. Not to mention the weird things at the abbey. The weird Wizard of Oz things.”

  “Well, I understand, but …” Reverend Mother was cut off by the sound of boots stomping in the hallway. Constable Barnes and Parker Clough came into the kitchen pulling off hats and gloves. “Ah. Nice and warm in here,” Constable Barnes said. “It’s brass monkeys out there in the ditch.” He nodded to Sister Agatha. “You laid that van in nice and easy, Sister Agatha.”

  “I was going slowly,” she said.

  “No one hurt, then?” Parker Clough asked, looking only at Lucy.

  “No. Thankfully no one was hurt.” Reverend Mother set out two teacups. “How does the van look? Reparable?”

  The two men exchanged a glance. “Sorry, Reverend Mother, but I would be very surprised if you could drive it again. Looked totaled to me.”

  Constable Barnes slid out of his anorak and draped it over a chair. Sitting down, he pulled out a black notebook. “Take a seat, Parker,” he said.

  Sister Agatha noticed that the young officer sat across from Lucy and smiled at her. She also noticed that Sister Gwenydd gave the slightest smirk in the direction of Lucy, who looked down at her tea and sighed. Apparently, young Parker wasn’t making a lot of progress in raising the estimation of either young woman.

  “Start at the beginning, if you will.”

  During the heavy silence that followed, Sister Agatha and Sister Gwenydd looked at each other. The beginning? How far back to go?

  Constable Barnes looked up. “Well, what happened? Your van is in a ditch and you say someone ran you off the road. You must have something to say?”

  “It is just that the beginning is a little difficult to identify.”

  “How about when you got hit by the other car? That seems like a pretty good start to me.” Constable Barnes looked toward Reverend Mother and back to Sister Agatha. “Did it start before then? Did you notice the car when you were in the village?”

  “I’ll tell you where it began,” Lucy said, sitting up straight and pushing away her plate of almond cake. “It began a year ago with a despicable example of emotional manipulation and artist abuse. And it has ended with a kidnapped dog, a wrecked van, a stolen painting, and a dead woman.” She drew a breath. “Actually, it hasn’t ended at all. Because we have some crazy Judy Garland fan out there who is targeting me. Probably because I’m an artist.”

  She stood up. “Sorry, but this calls for coffee. Tea might have gotten Wales through the Norman invasion, Reverend Mother, but coffee got me through art school.”

  Lucy stood and reached for a dusty tin of coffee that the nuns kept for the rare visitor who didn’t want tea.

  Taking Lucy’s outburst as her cue, Sister Agatha launched into the long and detailed description of everything Millicent had told them. Constable Barnes sat silently taking notes in his notebook. When she got to the part about the painting being Millicent’s and that Tiffany Reese wasn’t an artist at all but a thief, Constable Barnes stopped writing and tossed his pen onto the table. Then, when she told him that Millicent had been at the crime scene and stolen back the painting, he nodded to Parker Clough, who got up and left the room. Sister Agatha noticed that Reverend Mother picked up her mobile and began to text. She hoped Reverend Mother was texting Father Selwyn. If Millicent was about to be arrested, she was going to need some pastoral care. And Father Selwyn wasn’t expecting the story to be told to the constable tonight. On the other hand, he didn’t know that they had been run off the road either.

  When the long saga was finished—ending with the man yelling out the window “There’s no place like the ditch, Dorothy!” the constable looked at Reverend Mother and then at each woman at the table in turn.

  “That’s it, then? Nothing else?”

  No one spoke. Sister Agatha felt exhaustion creeping into her very bones. A fatigue that even almond cake wasn’t going to fix. Constable Barnes opened his notebook and read aloud: “Tiffany stole art from Millicent. The only one who knew was the brother, Kendrick Geddings. The victim of the theft was at the crime scene, stole from the victim, says she hated the victim, but insists that she didn’t kill anyone.”

  He closed the notebook and tossed it on the farmhouse table. “Then, after you get all this out of her, you drive home and someone in a Subaru runs you off the road.” He paused and looked from one to the other. “That’s it in a nutshell, right?”

  “You left out all the stuff about The Wizard of Oz,” Sister Gwenydd pointed out. “Remember, Millicent refers to ‘flying monkeys’ and the guy yelled, ‘There’s no place like the ditch, Dorothy.’ ” Sister Agatha noticed that Constable Barnes looked as if he were in pain.

  “Right. The Wizard of Oz bit again.”

  “Don’t you think it’s odd, Constable, that the person who is threatening me has this obsession with The Wizard of Oz?” Lucy waited, and when he didn’t respond, added, “Weird, right?”

  Constable Barnes picked up his notebook from the table and tucking it into his front pocket fixed his gaze on Lucy.

  “Why are you in Wales, Miss Pennoyer?”


  “Excuse me?” she said, sounding surprised.

  Everyone looked at Constable Barnes. Seldom did you hear him use a voice like that. For one fleeting second, Sister Agatha was reminded of Armand Gamache. She sat up straight. Could she have underestimated the constable all these years? Thinking he was an amiable middle-aged man counting the years to retirement when all the time he was Chief Inspector Gamache come to Wales?

  “Why do you ask?” Lucy said.

  “Well?” Constable Barnes sat back without moving his eyes from Lucy.

  Sister Agatha noticed that even Reverend Mother had stopped pouring tea into her cup and was staring at the constable.

  “I came here to rent a studio and pursue my art.”

  “You came all the way across the Atlantic to North Wales for studio space in a convent?” He leaned forward. “There aren’t any good art studios in the United States?”

  Lucy’s pale skin turned splotchy red starting at her neck and climbing up to the roots of her red hair. And Sister Agatha noticed that Sister Gwenydd was staring at the table top, outlining a groove in the pine top with her finger. Did Sister Gwenydd know something that she didn’t know? Good gracious! This was getting complicated. She longed to open her purple notebook, but Constable Barnes/Inspector Gamache would probably find that suspicious.

  “Constable Barnes,” Reverend Mother said, setting the teapot down. “Lucy is our guest here at the abbey.”

  Sister Agatha looked inquiringly at Reverend Mother. Lucy wasn’t exactly a guest. She was a paying tenant who had signed a lease. She also noticed that Reverend Mother looked quite put-together for a midnight interrogation in the abbey kitchen.

  “I just find it interesting,” Constable Barnes said, “that at the same moment a young woman from America shows up in a tiny village in the North of Wales, suddenly a person is murdered and then all sorts of strange things begin to happen.”

  “Constable Barnes!” Reverend Mother bridled. “That is entirely uncalled for. Certainly you are not saying that you think Lucy had anything to do with any of this?”

  “My apologies, Reverend Mother,” he said. “It’s late. But tomorrow morning, when we’ve all had a chance to think things through, I would like Miss Pennoyer to pay me a call at the station. We need to have a talk.”

  He stood up, his heavy frame seeming to fill the kitchen.

  “If any of you think of anything,” he said, looking directly at Lucy, “that you think might contribute to figuring out this tangled mess, call me straight away. I’ll stop by the rectory and see if Father Selwyn can give me his version of what happened.”

  Pulling on his anorak, he tipped his head to Reverend Mother. “Stay in touch.” Then he fixed Lucy in a steady gaze. “And if you don’t mind, Miss Pennoyer, don’t leave the village.”

  With that the door closed behind him and the group sat in a stunned and exhausted silence. Reverend Mother was the first to speak.

  “I think it’s time you told us, Lucy.”

  “It’s a long story,” Lucy said quietly.

  Without moving her eyes from Lucy, Sister Agatha opened her notebook and uncapped her Sharpie. She knew it. Lucy did have a secret. And Reverend Mother had figured it out. Reverend Mother. A regular Miss Marple.

  “Tonight seems to be the night for long stories,” Reverend Mother observed. She turned to Sister Gwenydd. “I think we will need something to see us through beyond your wonderful almond cake. Anything in the larder?”

  Sister Gwenydd stood up, pushing back her kitchen chair. “Savory or sweet?”

  “Well, I for one am hungry. How about you Sister Agatha?”

  “Starved.”

  “Lucy?”

  “Famished.”

  “Savory, then, Sister Gwenydd.”

  “I’ve got just the thing.” She lifted her long kitchen apron off the hook next to the larder. “Keep talking, I can listen while I cook.”

  “I’m thinking that you might already know most of Lucy’s story already. Am I right, Sister Gwenydd?” Reverend Mother and her youngest nun exchanged a long look. Sister Gwenydd didn’t say anything, just stood there with her apron half-tied.

  “So, Lucy. Tell us everything,” Reverend Mother said. “I’m dying to hear. And I have a feeling so is Sister Agatha.”

  Lucy looked at Sister Gwenydd, who shrugged and smiled. “Alright then. Have you heard of Bernardo’s Children’s Home?” Lucy asked.

  “Of course,” Reverend Mother replied. “Bernardo’s is well known in Wales.”

  “And very respected,” Sister Agatha added. “They’ve taken care of the children of Wales for more than a century. Bernardo’s took in children back in the day when we still called them orphans.

  “Well, my parents adopted me from Bernardo’s when I was just a few weeks old,” Lucy said. “My parents are Welsh, which I’ve told you. But as soon as the adoption was final, they moved to the United States. They both had fellowships at Stanford.”

  This was all information that Sister Agatha knew already. She wondered when the secret stuff was to be revealed.

  “I’m sure your adoptive parents were thrilled to get an infant,” Reverend Mother said.

  “And a Welsh baby, at that,” Sister Agatha added. Sister Gwenydd grunted from the stove.

  “You may protest all you want Sister, but Welsh children are superior.” She looked at Lucy. “It’s common knowledge. Everyone knows it.”

  “Well, superior or not,” Lucy said. “They took me home, and I grew up in New York City, which was a very cool place to be a kid.”

  “Sounds exciting to me. Living in New York City,” Sister Agatha said. “All that crime.”

  “Most people don’t like the crime aspect of New York.”

  “I suppose not. But there must be so many murders to investigate.”

  “Sister,” Reverend Mother said, shaking her head. “Please.”

  “I just mean, it would be great for my writing.”

  “Lucy, could you keep talking or it’ll be time for morning prayer before you tell them,” Sister Gwenydd said, sliding a platter of Welsh rarebit onto the table and taking her seat at the table. A fragrant, cheesy steam rose up from the toasted bread.

  Reverend Mother and Sister Agatha looked expectantly at Lucy while each picked up a slice of the Gouda-covered bread.

  “First, I want you to know that I love my parents. I don’t think of them as ‘adoptive parents’ but as my real parents.”

  “Of course they are, dear.” Reverend Mother said, biting delicately into the thick, crusty slice. “Sister Gwenydd, you really take Welsh rarebit to new heights.”

  “But here’s the thing,” Lucy said. “My dad’s a neuroscientist and my mother’s a biochemist.” She looked around the table. Sister Agatha wondered if Lucy felt she had made her point. “Don’t you see?” she said when no one responded.

  “See what?” Sister Agatha said. “Your parents sound very accomplished.”

  “They’re not artists,” Lucy stated emphatically.

  “No, they’re not,” Sister Gwenydd said. “Which means they’re able to earn a living from what they do.”

  “Very funny. The problem is … I’m an artist, and so I’ve always wondered, were my birth parents artists? I mean is it in my DNA or did I just grow up with enough privilege to have the money for art lessons?”

  “Why would having artist parents mean anything? I’m a nun. My parents were sheep farmers. Sister Gwenydd is a brilliant chef, and neither of her parents is a chef.” Sister Agatha looked at her.

  “My mother can’t boil water.” Sister Gwenydd added. “And it’s doubtful that my father ever made his own tea.”

  “But isn’t art different? Shouldn’t it be at least a little inside of you? The artistic temperament and all that.” Lucy said.

  “That’s the problem with artists,” Sister Gwenydd said. “You think you’re special. I’m surprised art school didn’t cure you of that. I went into cooking school thinking I was amazingly talented
. But I learned pretty quickly that I’m no better than anyone else.”

  “Sister Gwenydd, please,” Reverend Mother said. “We are all entitled to our own insecurities. And you are very talented. At least to us, here at the abbey. Before you came along, we were ordering takeaway twice a week.”

  Reverend Mother looked at the plate of Welsh rarebit. “Split one with me, Sister Agatha?”

  Sister Agatha held out her plate.

  “What I think Lucy is telling us,” Reverend Mother said, pushing her knife into a piece of the thick, crusty bread oozing with toasted cheese. “Is that she would feel more legitimate, or validated, if her parents were also artists.”

  “You want to feel that you’re for real.” Sister Agatha said. “I feel that way as a writer sometimes. And then I kill someone off and it helps.” She ignored Reverend Mother’s quiet sigh.

  “Yes.” Lucy agreed. “I want to feel like I’m for real.”

  “I’ve seen your work, Lucy, at least some of it. I can’t imagine it being more for real than some of your portraits,” Reverend Mother said. “The painting you have done of Ben Holden is striking. And anyway, aren’t we all here on earth to see where God takes us?”

  “That’s right,” Sister Gwenydd affirmed. “You were created in God’s image. Think of it that way.”

  “Well, that argument only works if you believe in God. I don’t.” Lucy said.

  “Then I see your point.” Reverend Mother said. She chewed a bite of Welsh rarebit thoughtfully. “Atheism does seem to throw a monkey wrench into things.”

  “OK. Let’s forget about God for a moment,” Sister Agatha said.

  “I beg your pardon,” Reverend Mother said, picking up her teacup. Sister Gwenydd noticed that she smiled into her tea.

  “You know what I mean. Just think of it as a wonderful thing that two such non-artistic people—scientists—would be willing to raise an artist. In a lot of families, you only would have been encouraged to go into the sciences and nothing else. Especially not to art school, which I understand doesn’t come cheap. Nor is it, as Sister Gwenydd has pointed out, a quick path to gainful employment.”