Epilogue
The nun stood just inside the doorway of the single-storied concrete block building in the waste desert ten miles outside Taos, New Mexico. The sole of one heavy-heeled white shoe inclined against the raised threshold. A sun-browned hand was drawn up to shade her eyes against the sun. She waved to the last of the seventeen children climbing aboard the ramshackle school bus at the end of the dusty school yard. The arid wind that raised clouds of dust between her and the bus also lifted her gauzy white veil and played about the white folds of her habit. In a year she had grown used to it.
Only when the dented yellow doors had clanged unevenly shut and the vehicle sputtered off toward the Indian reservation to the north did the nun draw back into the scarcely cooler shadows of the mission schoolroom. Sister Maria, short and rotund, bobbed up and down in the farthest aisle, retrieving pencils and scraps of paper from the tiled floor.
“Oh, Sister Katherine,” cried the nun, standing erect and reaching round to massage the small of her expansive back, “I can never thank God enough for weekends! I declare, they are a taste of heaven!”
Andrea smiled, and turned her head slowly. The bones of her spine cracked a little. “I’ll finish the cleanup, Sister Maria,” she said. “You’ve worked very hard this week. Go back to the house if you like.”
“No no!” cried Sister Maria, wiping beads of perspiration from her sun-darkened face, “I’m the assistant and it’s my job. Besides, my work is nothing to what you do. If I had those children all day long, I don’t know what I’d do with myself. But they love you so. Poor things! I wonder what it’s like to grow up at the end of the world?”
“This is hardly the end of the world,” said Andrea, seating herself in the high-backed wooden chair behind the teacher’s desk. “You forget that we have missions in Taiwan, and Manaus, and Mozambique. I grew up in Boston—that’s supposed to be the hub of the universe—but I was never happy there. And here—well, here, I haven’t been unhappy.”
“Why were you unhappy in Boston, Sister?” asked Sister Maria curiously. “Did it—”
Andrea smiled. “Please, Sister Maria, the fact is, the children did tire me out today, and I’d just as soon sit here quietly for a while.”
“All right,” said Sister Maria. “Just let me get the windows.” Sister Maria secured all the latches and then softly left the room without speaking again to Sister Katherine, whose head was bowed over her folded hands.
Up until the very day that she was to be taken from Hingham to the Mother House in Worcester, Andrea had thought she might reveal her true identity, claim temporary insanity as an excuse for her incredible behavior and assumption of her twin sister’s identity, and return to Weston to claim her inheritance as her dead parents’ surviving daughter. But what she read in the paper on that last morning made it impossible for her to turn back.
In disgust over the brutal kidnapping of Andrea LoPonti from the convent-school playground and Jack and Dominic’s vowed intent to murder the young woman, Rita had taken the first opportunity to flee the house in Jamaica Plain. Having had nothing to do with either the robbery or the murders, she told the police all that she knew. But by the time the police presented themselves at the house. Jack and Dominic—and Andrea LoPonti—were no longer there. The corpses of Sid and Morgie were exhumed from their shallow graves in the Middlesex Fells, and it became known that Andrea LoPonti, the kidnapped girl, had murdered the two in revenge for her parents’ death.
Andrea, in the guise of Sister Katherine, had been at the Mother House for only two weeks, hiding herself easily among the two hundred women resident there. If she was occasionally clumsy or appeared not to know some simple rule of procedure, the lapse was ascribed to the traumas she had recently undergone. It was with three other postulants that she took her final vows, and Andrea was more amazed at the tears she shed at the ceremony than at the strangeness of her taking part in it at all.
At the beginning of March she was transferred to the mission at Taos and given fourteen children in the third and fourth grades. That she knew nothing of children or the mechanics of classrooms beyond what she remembered from the time that she was herself in elementary school was a considerable worry to Andrea. But as it happened, she need not have been bothered. The poor Indian and Hispanic children were so far behind that a modicum of love and patience and attention were of more value than all the courses in childhood psychology that the real Sister Katherine had taken in four years at Boston College would have been.
But Andrea was weary of being constantly on her guard against betraying herself. It had been only her sister’s detailed diary that had allowed her to succeed at all. Andrea kept the book hidden in her room, and actually brought it with her when she came to class every morning—feeling safer to have it near, in her desk drawer. As soon as she could duplicate Katherine’s childish script, Andrea had continued the diary with an assiduity that matched her sister’s own.
She had filled the last page that afternoon.
The next morning, Sister Katherine borrowed one of the three vehicles belonging to the convent. She said she was driving into Taos in order to buy materials for her students’ art lessons the following week. She declined Mother Superior’s offer of money from petty cash, saying she might be reimbursed upon her return.
Andrea drove not to Taos, but to Sante Fe, seventy-five miles distant. She made two stops. The first was at a bank in Fairview, where she changed into more convenient denominations the fifteen carefully preserved one-hundred-dollar bills. The teller eyed her curiously, wondering why a nun had so much money, but thought it impertinent to ask questions. Shortly after she left this town, Andrea turned the car off on a side road and changed into jeans, a red polka-dot blouse, and much-scuffed boots that she had some time before taken from the church’s charity box. The discarded habit she folded neatly and placed in the trunk of the car. To the scapular she pinned a note that read simply, “I am perfectly safe, but I do not intend to return. Sister Katherine.”
In Sante Fe she abandoned the car in the lot of a shopping mall, unlocked and with the keys in the ignition. Inside the mall she went into a jewelry store and had her left ear pierced and her sister’s ruby chip inserted.
At a department store she purchased cosmetics and a leather flight bag. She took a taxi to the bus station and purchased a ticket to Los Angeles. While waiting for the bus, she borrowed a pen from the man sitting next to her and filled out the identification card on the leather flight bag.
Her new name was to be Katherine-Andrea Lodesco—her sister’s name, her own name, her mother’s name. That felt right, as did the new ruby in the lobe of her left ear.
The bus arrived, and Katherine-Andrea Lodesco climbed on, smiling. She relished the light-headed exuberance that had swept over her—a sense of achieving, at last, real freedom. She swung her bag onto the overhead luggage rack and scooted past a grumbling old woman to settle into the window seat. “Katherine-Andrea Lodesco,” she whispered, under the noise of the slamming door and the engine grinding to life. In a moment the bus pulled out of the Santa Fe terminal and moved slowly for several blocks before angling onto the highway and picking up speed as it headed west.
She had purchased the previous day’s Los Angeles Times, and, after reading and circling promising advertisements for employment and housing, she turned idly to the news sections. On page three her eyes drifted down and stopped abruptly at a block of three photographs, her attention riveted by only the first. At first she giggled to see there her own high-school graduation photograph—and the caption Andrea LoPonti. It seemed so long since she had thought of herself in that identity that the significance of the photograph did not strike her until she had examined its two companions. Though as much out of date as her own, they were unmistakably portraits of Dominic and Jack.
Her hands began to tremble so badly that she was forced to press the newspape
r flat against her thighs. The old woman in the next seat grunted and shifted her weight closer toward the aisle. Diesel fumes seemed suddenly to overwhelm Andrea when she had not even noticed them before. Nausea swept over her as she feverishly read the article.
She learned that Dominic Batista, already wanted in Massachusetts for armed robbery and murder, had been shot and killed in a police raid on a large-scale cocaine ring in southern New Jersey. His accomplices, tentatively identified as Jack Schifler and Andrea LoPonti, also wanted in Massachusetts, had fled the scene and were being sought in four states along the eastern seaboard.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Michael McDowell was born in 1950 in Enterprise, Alabama and attended public schools in southern Alabama until 1968. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in English from Harvard, and in 1978 he was awarded his Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Brandeis.
His seventh novel written and first to be sold, The Amulet, was published in 1979 and would be followed by over thirty additional volumes of fiction written under his own name or the pseudonyms Nathan Aldyne, Axel Young, Mike McCray, and Preston MacAdam. His notable works include the Southern Gothic horror novels Cold Moon Over Babylon (1980) and The Elementals (1981), the serial novel Blackwater (1983), which was first published in a series of six paperback volumes, and the trilogy of “Jack & Susan” books.
By 1985 McDowell was writing screenplays for television, including episodes for a number of anthology series such as Tales from the Darkside, Amazing Stories, Tales from the Crypt, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He went on to write the screenplays for Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988) and The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), as well as the script for Thinner (1996). McDowell died in 1999 from AIDS-related illness. Tabitha King, wife of author Stephen King, completed an unfinished McDowell novel, Candles Burning, which was published in 2006.
Dennis Schuetz was born in 1946 in Parkersburg, West Virginia. He graduated from West Virginia University and later moved to Boston, where he attended the Orson Welles Film School and began to write fiction. He collaborated with Michael McDowell on six novels (the two “Axel Young” books and a series of gay-themed mysteries published under the name “Nathan Aldyne.”) For the last ten years of his life, Schuetz worked for the Massachusetts Department of Public Works. He died of a brain tumor in 1989.
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