Bishop asked if anyone had heard the latest on Sister Pat’s condition.
“According to Sister Ann, she probably will be released from the hospital today,” said Kim Anderson.
Bishop surmised that the principal would leave school right after morning announcements in order to be with Sister Pat at the hospital. He had had a long conversation with Lieutenant Hodge the previous night not only about Debbie but also about Dan Morehouse. When he told him what he hoped to do, Hodge reminded him that he wasn’t a lawyer and couldn’t offer a legal opinion. Bishop took that as implicit approval to proceed as planned. He grabbed a blank piece of copy paper, scribbled a note, sealed it in an envelope, and placed the envelope in Sister Ann’s mailbox. The reaction to the get-well cards continued.
“It was bad enough that I had to sign that card yesterday. I couldn’t write what I really felt so I just signed my name. I don’t see why we should make the kids sign a card for her since I’d bet that most of them can’t stand her.” Roger Willis was poised to toss the card in the trash.
“I hear what you’re saying, Rog,” said Kim, “but you gotta believe she’ll be making a list of those who signed and those who didn’t.”
“Damn! Double damn!” Charlie blurted out as he pretended to hit his head against the wall.
“What’s the matter?” asked Kim.
“I forgot to sign that stupid card yesterday! I was so focused on dealing with that little thief, Billy Sprowl, that it completely slipped my mind.”
Bishop noticed that Charlie left the name of Clare Mooney out of the story of his missing exam. He also suspected that Charlie had forgotten to sign the card from the faculty intentionally. That way he could send his own card filled with sentimental slop that he would not want other teachers to read. He’d probably send along a box of chocolates as well without realizing that she wouldn’t be able to eat them after surgery. He laughed to himself as he considered the possibility that Charlie would make a quick visit to the hospital during his prep period.
Given the intensity of resentment displayed by the faculty, Bishop expected no less from the students. However, when he explained the purpose of the card and handed it to the person in the first seat in the first row, there was no word of protest. They might have just heard the words “hospital” and “surgery” and assumed that she was at death’s door. Then he realized what was probably closer to the truth. Wishing someone well who has fallen ill, no matter your personal feelings toward that person, was the right thing to do. The students were simply reflecting the values of Holy Family High School. It wasn’t the first time that the faculty might learn a lesson from the students.
***
When the last student had left the room, he quickly scanned the card. Regardless of the willingness to sign without protest, he was just being prudent in making sure that no inappropriate comments had been included.
During his first class, he received a call from the office. He answered without giving the interruption much thought. Terry probably was looking for a student.
“Michael?”
“Yes.”
“This is Sister Ann.” After all these years, Bishop knew very well who it was by the sound of her voice. The tone of her voice also told him that she had found his note in her mailbox and was not too happy about it.
“I found your note in my mailbox, and I was hoping to run over to the hospital this morning. Could we meet some other day?” She probably had her appointment book open ready to pencil him in later in the week.
“I’m afraid not.”
That answer was met with silence. She clearly was not pleased.
“Can you explain to me exactly what is so important?”
He spoke as softly as he could. “Sister, I have a room full of students with me. I can come down right after this class.”
“Very well,” she said as she abruptly ended the call.
When he returned to the front of the room, everyone waited patiently for him to say something. It was a bad time to have one of those memory lapses.
“Now, where were we?”
Tiffany raised her hand.
Although he had taught this young lady all year long, he suddenly could not recall her name. To avoid the risk of guessing, he simply looked at her and said, “Yes.”
“If you need to go down to the office, we can study quietly.” The class erupted in approval. In that moment of laughter, her name came to him.
“I appreciate the offer, Tiffany, but that won’t be necessary.” He also managed to recall the specific point that they had been discussing.
“We were reviewing how brilliantly Chaucer captures character in the “Prologue” of The Canterbury Tales. We’ve already mentioned the knight for whom Chaucer has nothing but praise. Very few of the other pilgrims are presented as favorably. In most of the other portraits, he exposes their flaws even when he appears to be complimenting them.” He looked around the room. Chad looked a bit disengaged as he chewed at the top of his pen. “Can you give us an example, Chad?”
Quickly removing the pen from his mouth, he straightened up in his chair. “What about the nun?” Some students were flipping pages in their text to find that section.
“Excellent! What does Chaucer say about her?”
Without looking at his book or his notes, he offered some examples. “Well, he says that she is a very caring person because she would cry if she saw a mouse caught in a trap, and that she fed her dogs the finest foods.”
Jerry already had his hand in the air, but Bishop wanted to complete the point before he took another question. “Okay, there’s the compliment, but how does he turn that into a criticism, Jerry?”
“I was going to say something else,” he announced.
“That’s all right, but answer my question first. How does Chaucer turn those details from a positive to a negative?”
“He’s suggesting that perhaps she is more concerned about her dogs than she is about her fellow man.”
“Right. Now, what did you want to say?”
Jerry seemed puzzled for a moment. He had forgotten what he wanted to say. Bishop realized that some memory issues weren’t confined to the older generation. Just as Bishop was about to call on someone else, Jerry’s thought came back to him. “I was going to mention the Latin inscription on the gold brooch that the nun is wearing.”
“What are the words and what do they mean?”
“‘Amor vincit omnia,’ and it means, “‘Love conquers all.’”
“Tiffany, what does that inscription tell us about the nun?”
She cleared her throat before answering the question. “I think that on the surface it’s a compliment. I mean … it’s a good thing if it refers to her love of God as more important than anything else. But Chaucer shows her as more concerned with herself and with her dogs than she is with other people.”
Jerry added, “And that brooch is gold which makes you wonder how seriously she takes her vow of poverty.”
The class went on to review some of the other pilgrims from Chaucer’s work. At the end of the period, it was the portrait of the nun that lingered in Bishop’s mind. This woman, who went by the name of Madame Eglantine, was not evil, but she certainly was a poor example of what a nun should be.
As he made his way down to the principal’s office, he wondered what Chaucer would think of Sister Ann.
***
When he got there, her office door was closed, but he could see through the door’s window that she was on the telephone. When he knocked, she looked up, quickly ended her call, and signaled for him to come in.
As he opened the door, a blast of cool air hit him. He shut the door and approached her desk. She folded her hands and placed them at the edge of her desk. She looked at the clock on the wall near the door. It was clear that she was annoyed that he had kept her in the building when she wanted to be with Sister Pat at the hospital. She didn’t bother to ask him to sit down.
He sat in the straight-backed wooden chair on the other sid
e of her desk. “How is Sister Pat?” he asked, although he had heard that she was doing just fine and was to be released from the hospital sometime today.
“As if you care,” she snarled.
“I do care, as a matter of fact. I wouldn’t wish ill on anyone.” He refrained from adding that that even included someone who had plotted his forced retirement.
“Well, let’s not waste time on chitchat. I want to know what is so damned important that it couldn’t wait a day or two.” Her phone buzzed once. She grabbed the receiver, listened for a few seconds, and said sharply, “No! And hold all my calls!” She slammed the receiver down and waited for Bishop to begin.
Bishop kept reminding himself to remain calm. “First of all, I wanted to tell you that Ed Cooper’s killer is in custody.”
From the puzzled look on her face, it appeared that that issue had taken a back seat in her thinking. “Oh … well … that’s good. Are you going to tell me who was arrested?”
“I’m sorry to say that it’s Debbie Bates.”
“Debbie? She’s the one who recommended Cooper to me in the first place.”
“Yes, I know. I don’t believe that she intended to do what she did. She’s a very troubled young woman.”
“Obviously,” she said sarcastically. She glanced at the clock again and began to get up. “Well, if that’s all, I really must be going.”
He gestured for her to wait. “That’s not all, Sister. In fact, that wasn’t the main reason why I needed to see you this morning.”
Sister sat back down in her leather chair, clearly annoyed and confused. “What are you talking about?”
“I had an interesting visit with your nephew yesterday.” Sister’s face was expressionless as she waited for Bishop to continue. Perhaps she knew what was coming. “It seems that he rigged the school’s financial records to show a $1.2 million loss.”
“That’s ridiculous!” she snapped. “Why would he do such a thing?”
Bishop reached into his jacket pocket, but not for a mint. He pulled out a small object about the size of a pack of cigarettes and placed it on her desk.
“Don’t tell me that you’ve been recording this conversation,” she shouted angrily.
“No … not this conversation. This one.” He hit the play button.
“It was her idea to show some significant paper losses.”
“Why would she want losses?”
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Sister Pat has a huge influence on my aunt. I think they decided that the only way they could push through some changes was to convince people that the school was in trouble financially.”
As she listened, her surprise turned to anger. “That stupid, stupid man! All he had to do was keep quiet for a few more days.” By then, she would have succeeded in ridding herself of several teachers who made her life difficult, chief among them none other than Bishop. Before the audit, the “mistakes” would have been corrected, and all would be well.
She was trying to figure a way to extricate herself from this awkward situation without the benefit of consulting with Sister Pat. “That’s not the worst of it,” he said matter-of-factly.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Your idea sounded so good that he decided to go that extra step from deceitful to criminal.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Those weren’t just mistakes on paper. Your nephew actually transferred that money to his own business account.”
Sister Ann always looked a bit pale, but now her face lost all color as she sat there in disbelief. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” After a moment’s thought, she concluded, “Well, he’ll just have to put the money back.”
“I’m afraid that it’s not that simple.”
“Why not?”
“He used the money, most of it anyway, to cover some debt.”
“How much of it does he have left?”
“I’m not sure, really. I know that he gave $25,000 to the school as encouragement for other large donors to help Trinity through its supposed financial crisis.”
She looked up to the ceiling as if she were hoping for some sign that this was all just a cruel joke. “You mean that that was the school’s money he was donating?”
“Exactly. And that’s not all.”
She seemed afraid to ask but also afraid not to ask. “What else?” she groaned.
“Apparently, Ed Cooper figured out that Dan had stolen the school’s money, and he threatened to expose him if he didn’t give him $5,000.”
“Oh, my word! How awful!”
If Sister Ann thought that Cooper’s extortion of $5,000 was awful, Bishop wondered how she might characterize her nephew’s embezzlement of $1.2 million. After taking a moment to think through all that she had been told, she asked, “How did Cooper know what Dan had done?”
Bishop was intentionally vague. “I guess he knew a lot about computers.”
Sister glanced at the clock again. She undoubtedly wanted to share this unfortunate turn of events with Sister Pat. Her plans were coming undone. “Will Dan be arrested?” she wondered.
“That depends.”
“Depends on what?”
“Someone would have to file charges against him.”
“I certainly won’t do that,” she said dismissively. “”It would ruin him and damage the school as well.”
“Someone on the board could bring charges.”
“Who on the board knows about this?”
“No one … yet.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Let me be very clear, Sister. If I went to the board with the information on this tape, Dan would likely be headed to jail, and you more than likely would lose your job.” He picked up the recording device and placed it back in his pocket.
Her eyes narrowed as she gave him a steely look. “Go on.”
“Here’s one scenario: Dan allows one of his competitors to buy into his business so that he can make full restitution to the school within thirty days. Dan resigns from the board citing personal reasons. You meet with the board and convince them to restore all of the teaching positions that were to be eliminated. Shortly thereafter, you announce that the school’s financial picture has improved and sign new contracts giving teachers a three percent increase and staff an increase of one dollar an hour.”
“This is blackmail!” she shouted angrily.
“No, it isn’t,” he responded calmly. “It’s a resolution to a problem of your own making that is beneficial to everyone involved.”
She slumped back in his chair. “I’ll have to think about it.” That was her typical response when put on the spot.
“I’m afraid there’s no time for that.” He pulled some papers from the inside pocket of his jacket. “I’ve typed up the conditions that I just outlined to you.” He handed her the papers. “If you would please read this, sign and date one copy for me, and keep the other for yourself.”
She snatched the papers from him and slapped them on the desk. When she had finished reading, she picked up her pen and signed one copy. Then, she shoved it in his direction.
He quickly checked for her signature, a perfect example of the Palmer method of penmanship, before folding the paper and returning it to his inner jacket pocket. That done, he got up to leave.
“Wait! What guarantee do I have that you’ll keep your end of the agreement?”
He smiled. “Sister, I’ve been at Trinity for forty-five years. I don’t think you have to worry about that.” As he opened the door, he looked back at her. “By the way, when Sister Pat gets home, make sure that she changes her Trinity password.”
Bishop wished that he could have pulled out his cell phone to capture the look on her face.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Graduation took place without incident. Both Billy Sprowl and Clare Mooney had waived their right to a hearing before the faculty council made its decision. They were not allowed to wear the medallions that indicated their membershi
p in the National Honor Society. That distinction was also removed from future copies of their official school transcript. Both young people seemed ready to put their mistakes behind them.
Sister Pat felt well enough to attend the ceremony. She appeared to have lost a bit of weight although she still had a difficult time squeezing into one of the auditorium seats. Bishop was delighted that the theme of the valedictory speech was “Carpe Diem.” That was sure to confound the assistant principal.
After the event, as the seniors gathered outside the auditorium to receive congratulations from friends and family and to pose for photos, he found himself face to face with Sister Ann and Sister Pat.
“Good evening, Sisters.”
“What’s so good about it?” Sister Pat snapped back. “That speech was awful. I didn’t even get half of the references, and it was way too long!”
Sister Ann quickly glanced around, hoping that no one was close enough to hear what her friend was saying.
Sister Pat pointed her index finger at Bishop. “And you! You’re a disgrace!” Sister Ann tugged on Sister Pat’s arm in a futile attempt to move her away from the source of her anger. “Forcing the principal to accept all of your conditions! You better believe that if I wasn’t on my sick bed, I wouldn’t have let her give in to your demands.”
“The Lord works in mysterious ways,” said Bishop.
“What do you mean by that?”
Before he had a chance to respond, Charlie Mitchell managed to get Sister Pat’s attention by telling her how happy he was to see her up and about. If she only knew half of what Charlie said about her behind her back, she wouldn’t have smiled at his flattering remarks. Bishop took advantage of the distraction to slip away. When he considered the duplicitous behavior of Sister Ann and her nephew, he felt that his own actions, taken in the best interests of the school, were more than justified. He knew that both administrators would be looking for ways to settle the score with him when a new school year began in September. He also knew that he would be ready for them.
***
Schooled in Deception: A Michael Bishop Mystery Page 23