by Kylie Logan
Someone had been killed in their school.
At least that’s the way it looked, and Jazz couldn’t imagine Bernadette’s death had happened any other way. If she’d been killed outside, off campus, it didn’t make any sense for her body to be brought back to St. Catherine’s, swaddled in plastic, hidden.
No, she had died here.
The realization froze Jazz to the core.
An atrocity had occurred inside the walls of their school. A life had been snuffed out.
They would all—teachers and students, administrators and staff—need to come to grips with the reality.
They would all need to learn to deal.
Jazz was jarred out of the thought by the sound of something falling in the hallway outside her office door.
She jumped, sucked in a breath, pressed a hand to her heart.
All the girls and their teachers were in the gym. All their guest speakers had agreed that, of course, they’d stay around and join the school for prayer and contemplation.
So who was hanging around in the hallway?
Jazz got up from her desk, but by the time she got to the hallway the only sign of life there was another door down the hallway, just swinging shut.
At the same time she reminded herself she was being too jumpy—and that the girls of St. Catherine’s deserved more from their administration than frazzled nerves and imaginations that could all too easily run wild—she went back to her desk and sat down to wait for the board to arrive.
They would all need to try to find some peace.
The words settled somewhere between her heart and her stomach, in a place that was still icy.
Peace.
Jazz drummed her fingers on her desk and listened to the echo of the sound fly back at her from the high ceiling.
Peace was something they had never had much of when Bernadette Quinn taught at St. Catherine’s.
CHAPTER 5
Fall, three years earlier
“What is it? What’s wrong?” Jazz was carrying an armload of T-shirts to the gym to hand out to the cross-country team, and she set them down next to the lost-and-found basket on the table outside the office. It was Thursday and just the third week of the school year and already the basket overflowed with glasses, pencils, hats. She hurried down the hallway and closed in on Bernadette Quinn where she stood outside her classroom door weeping so hard, her chest heaved and the big gold cross she wore that day with a white cotton blouse and an ankle-brushing plaid skirt wobbled up and down, winking at Jazz in the early-morning light. “Are you all right?”
“I’m…” Bernadette was older than Jazz and taller than Jazz’s five-feet-two. She was heavier than Jazz by at least forty pounds and she had shoulder-length hair darker than Jazz’s medium brown and a face that was pudgy and, some people would say, still cute. Her nose was turned up slightly at the end. Her lips—always free of lipstick—were bowed. Her eyes were dark and intense. Right then, they were also swollen and red. “I’m f-f-fine,” she stammered.
“You don’t look fine. Why don’t we…” Jazz hooked a hand around Bernadette’s arm. “I’ve got coffee brewing in my office. Would you like a cup?”
Bernadette hiccupped. “Coffee is…” She sniffled. “That would be…” She gulped. “I … I can’t. The bell is going to ring and I wouldn’t want to not be in my classroom when my girls show up.”
“We’ve got forty minutes until the first bell rings. And your classroom isn’t going anywhere, and neither are your girls.” Jazz tugged Bernadette into her office and deposited her in the guest chair in front of her desk. “How do you take your coffee?”
“Just milk,” Bernadette said, and Jazz breathed a sigh of relief at having corralled her, at having distracted her. Jazz may have only worked at St. Catherine’s for a year, but she knew beyond a doubt that the first month of the school year was not the time to let the girls see a teacher in total meltdown. Especially not a first-year teacher. The girls of St. Catherine’s were generally well behaved and sweet, but girls were girls. Jazz remembered her own school days. Any sign of weakness from anyone in authority was the equivalent of an open invitation to attack.
Jazz poured the coffee, added a dollop of milk, and delivered it to Bernadette.
“Want to tell me what’s going on?” she asked.
Bernadette’s gaze shot to Eileen’s closed office door.
“Sister Eileen isn’t here today,” Jazz told her. “She’s got a meeting with the board off-site. You worried she’ll find out what you’re upset about?”
Bernadette wiped a tear from her cheek. “I think she’s a kind woman.”
“She is.”
“But I know there are rules.”
Jazz sat back against her desk. “Rules about…?”
When Bernadette sighed, the red stone above Jesus’s head on her cross winked at Jazz.
Bernadette set her coffee cup on Jazz’s desk, the better to grasp her hands together on her lap, her fingers tight, her knuckles as pale as skeleton fingers. “I saw him when I was coming in this morning,” she said. “Over by the garden shed.”
“And he’s…?”
“A kitty. A little gray and white kitty. I’ve named him Titus. Titus, he was a companion of Paul the apostle, you know.”
Jazz took Bernadette’s word for it.
“And Titus…” Bernadette’s chest rose and fell. “I think there’s something wrong with him, Jazz. When I saw him, when I went over to check on him, he barely moved, the poor thing. He’s awfully skinny, too. Do you suppose he belongs to anyone?”
This early in the school year, Jazz didn’t know Bernadette well. They’d met at new-teacher orientation. They’d sat next to each other for lunch the first day all the teachers gathered at St. Catherine’s to talk about their plans and their hopes for the new school year. They’d passed each other in the hallway any number of times, and every time Jazz was struck by how quiet Bernadette was, how shy. Jazz had dared to ask Eileen about her decision to hire Bernadette and she wasn’t surprised when she got a lecture—delivered politely, of course, but clearly meant as a lesson for Jazz—that Bernadette was sincere, and Bernadette was intelligent, and Bernadette had real potential. Of course Eileen had hired her. Bernadette would be a brilliant teacher someday, and Eileen believed everyone needed the chance to prove themselves.
For all Jazz knew, that’s why Eileen had hired her, too.
The thought was enough to make Jazz tread carefully, but it didn’t make her any less down-to-earth. She made sure she offered Bernadette a soft smile, but she told her, “There are a lot of feral cats in the neighborhood.”
Bernadette nodded. “But Titus, he’s different. He seems so…” Her shoulders rose and fell to the tempo of her rough breathing. “He’s so lonely.”
Far be it from Jazz to dispute the impressions of a fellow animal lover. Still, if Bernadette went to pieces about every homeless animal she encountered in their urban neighborhood, it was going to be a long year.
“The Animal Protective League has a shelter not far away,” she told Bernadette. “We could get Titus and—”
“Oh, no! He’d be so unhappy there.” Bernadette sucked in her bottom lip. “I thought…” Again her gaze darted in the direction of the principal’s closed door. “If I gathered up some old blankets … if I got him something to eat and kept him warm and found a box where he could sleep behind my desk … I could watch out for him. And then Titus would get better.”
With Eileen gone for the day, Jazz was in charge, and she was okay with that. She was smart, and she was savvy, and she was prepared to handle whatever administrative situations came her way.
She was not ready to handle kitties. Or teachers in kitty crisis.
Jazz cleared her throat. “You can’t bring the cat into the building,” she told Bernadette.
“But—”
“Like you said, there are rules. And there’s the health department, and the diocesan office, and I’m sure we have students with aller
gies.”
Bernadette sniffled. “Titus is so frail and cold.”
“He’s not cold.” Jazz didn’t mean to snap, but really, there was only so much she could take. Like most schools in the area, St. Catherine’s year began in August. It wasn’t even Labor Day and it was still summer hot. That day, the air sizzled and even the old men who played in the Thursday-morning bocce league in the park across the street and usually showed up early to sit and talk and drink their coffee were nowhere to be seen.
She bit back her impatience and added, “But I bet he is hungry. How about…” She leaned way back so she could see her computer screen and check the time. “How about you finish your coffee, then go get cleaned up and get into your classroom. I’ll shoot down to the cafeteria and get some food for Titus. And I bet Loretta has some old towels we can use as bedding, too.”
“But where—”
Jazz expected the question. She hopped off the desk and ducked into Eileen’s office long enough to find the ring of keys Eileen kept in the top drawer of her desk. Most of the school’s doors had electronic keypad locks on them. But there were a few other doors—doors to places long unused—that weren’t worth re-keying. When Jazz walked back into her office, the keys that jangled in her hand were big and heavy, as old as the building itself.
She flipped up the first one for Bernadette to see. “I’ll open up the garden shed for Titus. How about that?”
Bernadette’s smile didn’t last long. “But how will he get out when he needs to?”
Since Jazz didn’t have the answer, she scrambled. “I’ll ask Frank in Maintenance what he suggests. Of course once Titus is better, we’re not going to be able to keep him around,” she told Bernadette in no uncertain terms. “A little food, a little water … he’s better off staying here for now because there are more of us to keep an eye on him, but when he’s feeling better, maybe you’d like to take him home?”
“Yes, yes of course!” Bernadette bounded to her feet. “In the meantime, I’ll have the girls pray for him. That will work. That will surely work.” She finished the last of her coffee and headed to the door and it wasn’t until she got there that she turned to Jazz, her expression joyful.
“You’re very kind, Jazz,” she said. “I’ll tell the angels. They’ll be so pleased.”
* * *
When she passed Bernadette’s classroom door the next day, Jazz heard Bernadette telling her students about Titus, leading them in prayer to Saint Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals.
And Titus?
Jazz looked in on him throughout the day, and since she lived close by, she walked Manny over on the weekend, brought the cat food and treats, and checked out the ingenious temporary cat door Frank had rigged.
But Titus, she was sure, was on his last legs.
Malnourished, flea-bitten, jittery. Thanks to her dad’s work with search and rescue dogs and Jazz’s own training with cadaver dogs, she knew enough about basic animal first aid to know not even a trip to the vet was going to make Titus well. She decided that on Monday after school she’d take Titus in and she had no doubt the vet would put him down. She couldn’t stand the thought of the cat being in pain.
How would she tell Bernadette?
Jazz wasn’t sure, but she was confident she’d think of something.
As it turned out, she didn’t have to. She arrived at school that Monday morning to find Bernadette already there, standing outside the office waiting for Jazz, dancing from foot to foot, wreathed in smiles.
Jazz poked her security code into the keypad outside the office door. “What’s up?” she asked Bernadette.
“Nothing short of a miracle!” Bernadette beamed. “He’s better, Jazz. Titus is much, much better this morning.”
He wasn’t better the evening before when Jazz brought over a can of tuna that Titus ignored.
“That’s…” She shoved open the office door and went inside to turn on the lights and deposit her purse. “That’s terrific,” she told Bernadette. “But last night, he wasn’t well at all. How—”
“There’s no mystery there!” Bernadette’s sallow cheeks flushed. “It’s a miracle, of course. Saint Francis heard us. We received a miracle! Oh, the girls will be so happy. And I’m happy, too. Not just because Titus is well, but because this will show the girls the power of prayer. What a wonderful lesson!” She clapped her hands with excitement and then kept them in front of her chest, palms together in a prayerful pose. “Thank the Lord!”
It wasn’t that Jazz wasn’t happy to hear of Titus’s recovery. And it wasn’t like she didn’t believe Bernadette’s assessment of the cat. But if there was one thing she’d learned about herself in the time she’d worked with Manny in human remains detection, it was that seeing was believing.
As soon as she was able to get away that morning, she ducked out to the garden shed at the back corner of the school’s parking lot.
And there she found exactly what Bernadette had promised.
The gray and white kitty was better—healthier, fatter, livelier.
There was only one problem.
The healthy happy kitty in the shed was a female.
It wasn’t Titus at all.
* * *
Jazz spent all that day trying to decide what to say to Bernadette.
It wasn’t easy.
When she listened in at the doorway on Bernadette’s first-period class, she heard the prayer of gratitude Bernadette led the girls in saying and the heartfelt talk she gave them about the power of positive thinking, and the joy of giving troubles over to the Lord, and the wonderful, undeniable fact that God was listening. When she stopped by the classroom again during Bernadette’s lunch period, hoping to catch her at her desk where she routinely ate the brown-bag lunch she brought from home, Jazz found a note saying Bernadette was up in the chapel, giving thanks. When she ran into Bernadette just after the final bell rang and saw the smile on Bernadette’s face and the bag of cat treats in her hand, she realized she didn’t have the words—or the heart—to disappoint her.
“I know about the cat.” While Jazz stood watching Bernadette practically skip down the hallway toward the door that led into the back parking lot, Eileen had come up behind her, and when Jazz turned she saw the principal looking where she was looking.
“Of course you do.” Jazz wasn’t the least bit surprised.
“That’s because I’m way nosier than anyone realizes.”
Jazz smiled at her boss. “Good to know.”
“Don’t spread it around,” Eileen told her. “People have this mistaken impression that nuns are all Zen about everyday things. They think I’m in my own little world when I’m actually just keeping quiet so I can listen and find out what everyone else is up to. You…” She led the way back into the office. “You are exhibit number one—you brought cans of cat food to work with you today.”
There was a grocery bag next to Jazz’s desk and the cans were inside it, visible to anyone who bothered to look. Because there was always a need at the Animal Protective League, she had planned to donate the food when she went to have Titus put down that afternoon.
“You got me there,” Jazz admitted. “But how did you know Bernadette had anything to do with it?”
“She’s been praying. Even more than usual. And now she’s smiling. And I’ve seen her out by the garden shed during her breaks. You think I didn’t check?”
Jazz laughed. “I would have been disappointed if you didn’t.”
“I actually don’t mind if the cat stays around,” Eileen said. “But it could get tricky during pickups and drop-offs. Too many cars and drivers aren’t on the lookout for a cat.” She drifted into her office. “Maybe we could make sure the shed stays locked early and late. Hey, and while we’re at it, he could always be the school mascot.”
“Except he isn’t he,” Jazz informed Eileen.
“I thought his name was Titus.”
Jazz made a mental note—it wasn’t just a story; Eileen really
did know everything that happened at St. Catherine’s.
“The name of the cat out in the shed all weekend was Titus,” she told Eileen. “But the cat out in the shed now isn’t Titus. They have the same coloring. And they’re about the same size. But the cat outside now is a female.”
“And Titus was—”
“Definitely male.”
One corner of Eileen’s mouth pulled tight. “What do you suppose it means?”
“I’ve been wondering the same thing.” In keeping with her job, Eileen’s office was larger and grander than Jazz’s. Jazz sat down in one of the wing chairs in a seating group near the door and Eileen took the chair opposite hers.
“You don’t suppose Bernadette switched the cats, do you?” Eileen asked.
Jazz had considered it. “If she wanted to show the girls the power of prayer, I guess she might have done that. But she’s awfully happy about the whole thing. Like she really believes.”
“Oh, yes, she really believes.” Eileen’s sigh rippled the air. “Maybe that’s part of the problem.”
It wasn’t something Jazz thought she’d ever hear from a nun, and Eileen knew it because she laughed. “A lot of people think nuns are praying machines,” she said. “They think our heads are always filled with sacred thoughts, our hands are always busy over our rosary beads.”
“You wouldn’t get much done if that were true.”
“Exactly.” Eileen nodded. “Bernadette is more nunny than any nun I’ve ever met. She’s convinced she’s seen God’s hand at work here.”
“And you’re not.”
Eileen’s eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch. “Are you?”
Jazz’s laugh was uncomfortable. “I feel like I’m back in religion class in high school.”
