And Then There Were Nuns

by Kylie Logan

  A familiar-looking beige blur.

  “Joe! Joe Roscoe!” I called out.

  The blur stopped and turned around and I saw that I was right. My B-and-B guest joined me in the circular driveway.

  “Didn’t want to disturb anyone,” he said. “I was just coming over here to see if I could get a look at the house . . . you know, since my ancestors might have helped build it . . . and then . . .” He glanced around at the parked ambulance and the three police cars in front of the house. “What’s going on?”

  I assured him it was no big deal. And I managed to sound like I meant it, too. “An accident, but nothing serious. Everyone’s fine.”

  “Except for you.” Joe adjusted that ever-present cardboard tube under his arm and wrinkled his nose before he looked me up and down. “You want to drive back to the B and B with me?” he asked.

  I pointed to my SUV. “I need to get it home. I’ll see you there.”

  He nodded and watched me pull away, and it wasn’t until I got to the end of the driveway and turned onto Niagara that a thought struck me.

  Joe offered me a ride home.

  Very nice of him.

  But funny, I didn’t see his car there at Water’s Edge.

  * * *

  Meg asked if she could take dinner over to the retreat house for me that evening and as kind as that was, I refused her offer. I was a walking bundle of sore muscle, bruised bone, and abraded skin, and keeping busy might not make me feel better but it would keep my mind off the near-death experience I’d had over at Water’s Edge.

  Besides, I was convinced that the answers to our questions—and Sister Helene’s motives for attacking her fellow nuns—lay at the retreat house.

  My mind made up, I packed up the caramel chocolate brownies Meg had made both for tea at the B and B that day and for the nuns, and I was just loading them into a bag when Kate walked into my kitchen.

  “I heard what happened. You should be sitting with your feet up, not cooking dinner for the nuns. I came to help.”

  “All done.” I pointed to the one tote bag on my counter.

  “So somebody’s trying to kill nuns by dropping pieces of a house on them, and you’re trying to kill them by starving them to death?”

  I would have laughed if my ribs didn’t hurt so darn much. Instead, I picked up my phone from the kitchen counter and waggled it at Kate. “Ordered six large pizzas and three big antipasto salads and I’m having it all delivered to Water’s Edge. The only thing I have to worry about is getting dessert there.”

  “Hardly.” Kate was nothing if not analytical. It’s what made her such a successful businesswoman and such a challenging friend. She’d changed out of the brown tweed suit she’d had on that morning when we shared breakfast on my front porch. This evening, she was wearing khakis and a hoodie the same color as her amazing green eyes. The sweatshirt was emblazoned with the words South Bass and a picture of a boat with billowing sails. She tucked her hands into the kangaroo pocket.

  “You’ve got to worry about somebody trying to kill you, Bea.”

  “It wasn’t me. It was Sister Catherine.”

  “You’re sure?”

  I remembered what Hank had said back at Water’s Edge. “I’m sure,” I said, then, in the interest of full disclosure, added, “Pretty sure, anyway. I wish we could figure out what’s going on inside Helene’s head, then maybe we could anticipate her next move.”

  Kate led the way out of the kitchen. “It’s a nice evening,” she said, “and I’ve got the top down on the convertible. I’ll drive.”

  It was her way of telling me that she knew I was hurting, and Kate being Kate, she wouldn’t appreciate it if I told her I knew what she was up to. Instead, I slid into her black BMW and rested my head back against the leather seat, grateful for the warmth of the evening, the dome of blue skies over our heads, and the fact that I had a friend who was willing to sacrifice part of her evening to help me out.

  Within minutes, we were nearing the retreat house.

  “I love this part of the island.” We were the only car around so it didn’t matter that Kate slowed down. Together, we listened to the sound of crows chattering away somewhere in the woods that bordered the road on our left. “There used to be a huge summer resort here, you know. Right here, where the state park is now.”

  I’d heard the stories, and of course, they sparked my already overactive imagination. “Hotel Victory, right?”

  “You’ve been paying attention to island history!” Kate stopped the car. “See, right over there. You can see a pile of stone. It’s part of the foundation of the old hotel. It burned down nearly one hundred years ago.”

  Together, we peered through the tangle of undergrowth and trees into what was now the campgrounds of the state park.

  Those crows kept on chattering.

  I guess that’s why I asked, “Think it’s haunted?”

  She chuckled. “Leave it to FX O’Grady to ask! Except the way those birds are going at it . . .” She shivered inside her hoodie.

  I peered farther into the park grounds. Or at least I tried. From where we were on the road, it was hard to see much of anything but a scramble of black somewhere in the distance that was accompanied by the rustle of bird wings.

  “Honk your horn,” I told Kate.

  “Huh?” Like I said, she’s a good friend. She might have questioned my sanity, but she played along. She gave a sharp blast on her car horn.

  There in the woods, a dozen crows rose in the air like a black cloud and let us know they were not amused. Their sharp caws echoed in the evening silence.

  I wondered how it was I could hear them over the sudden pounding of my heart.

  “Turn the car around,” I said.

  Again, she didn’t question me, not even when I had her drive back the way we’d come and turn into the park. We drove as far as we could, and when the paved road ended, we parked the car and got out and walked.

  It wasn’t hard to find what we were looking for. But then, the crows were back and we followed the sound of their squawking all the way to the abandoned swimming pool of Hotel Victory.

  The birds scattered when we approached and landed on the branches of the bare trees around us. I could feel their black eyes on us as we looked over the scene.

  The first coed swimming pool in the country was dry these days, just as it had been in all the years since the biggest fire the island had ever seen consumed the six-hundred-and-twenty-five-room hotel and everything in it. The cement sides and bottom of the pool were cracked and caked with winter debris. The storm earlier in the week had left puddles here and there and in one of them—

  Kate saw what I did exactly when I did, and she clutched both her hands on my arm so tight, she cut off my circulation.

  “Is that . . . ?”

  It was.

  I stepped nearer to the rim of the pool at the same time I pulled out my phone and called Hank. While someone there at the station went to find him for me, I took a better look at the body that lay facedown in a puddle of rainwater, rotting leaves, and muck.

  The jeans and sweater could have belonged to anyone, but the hair, that was a dead giveaway.

  Sorry about the bad pun.

  It glimmered in the gathering evening light like quicksilver.

  “Hank . . .” When he finally came on the line, I had a hard time getting out the words. “I think you’d better get over to the park, Hank. We found . . .” I cleared a ball of revulsion and unspeakable sadness from my throat.

  “I’m pretty sure Sister Helene isn’t our killer.”

  14

  “Somebody would have found her eventually.” Hank looked over to where a couple of cops were winding yellow crime scene tape around the trees that surrounded the abandoned swimming pool, then looked back at me and Kate. “How did you two—”

 
“The birds.” They were still flashing from tree to tree, still obviously annoyed at the interruption, and I looked up at the birds looking down at me and shivered. “We heard them from out on the road.”

  Hank’s mouth pulled into a thin line. “It could have gotten ugly.”

  I remembered what we saw when we arrived at the pool. “It was already ugly.”

  “Yeah, but you know what I mean.”

  I did, but I didn’t want to think about it. “Please tell me it was an accident.”

  He stuffed his hands in the pockets of his jacket. “I’d like nothing better.”

  “But . . .”

  Rather than answer me, he turned to Kate, whose complexion was as green as her sweatshirt. “Why don’t you go have a talk with Officer Jenkins over there.” It wasn’t a suggestion. Hank put a gentle hand on the small of Kate’s back and gave her a little nudge. “He’s going to take your statement.”

  I watched Kate go, her steps stiff and uncoordinated, like a person who’d been woken suddenly from a deep sleep and a bad dream.

  “She can take it,” I told Hank. “She’s tougher than she looks.”

  “I know.” He waited until Kate was all the way over to where the officer waited for her. “But why should she have to? Bad enough I’m going to make you listen to the details. Except from what Chandra tells me . . .” He ran a finger around the inside of his collar. “I guess you’re no stranger to blood and guts, huh?”

  My shoulders drooped. “She was supposed to keep that a secret.”

  “You know better than that, Bea. If you want to keep something a secret, you can’t tell Chandra.”

  “I had to.” It was as simple as that, and I knew it. I couldn’t have told Kate and Luella the truth about my past and not told Chandra. Swimming pools, giant lampposts, and People Against Fishing Lake Erie aside, that would have been the worst sort of betrayal of a friendship. “But you’re not supposed to know. No one’s supposed to know.”

  “Yeah, Chandra said that right after she spilled the beans. That’s why I’m mentioning it to you now. Thought it was important that you know that I know. Not fair otherwise. For what it’s worth . . .” He knew it was the wrong time and the wrong place to smile, so he buried the expression under his usual gruff exterior. “I’m a huge fan.”

  I watched a couple of the birds take off from their tree branches and circle the swimming pool. They cawed their displeasure and disappeared toward the lake. “Writing about death at the hands of zombies and vampires and evil spirits is one thing,” I told Hank. “It’s storytelling, nothing more. It might be scary to think about, but since it can’t really happen, it’s a safe sort of scare, if you know what I mean. But seeing death for real, in person, that’s different.”

  “No doubt. But the way you write about it . . .” He gathered his thoughts. “The way you describe it, it’s like you’ve looked death right in the eye.”

  “No. Not really. Not until I moved here, anyway.”

  Hank barked out a laugh. “Except for crazy partiers, this has always been a quiet island. Until you showed up.”

  It was Hank’s way of lightening the mood. Or at least of trying. I appreciated it and shook off the pall that sat on my shoulders. “We need to put things right,” I told him and just to prove it, I went closer to where a couple paramedics were down in the empty pool with Sister Helene’s body. I would like to say I strode with purpose, but my knees hurt. I’m afraid it was more of a shuffled limp.

  One of the paramedics looked up at us when we arrived at the edge of the pool. “Single gunshot to the back of the head,” he said.

  “Suicide?” Hank asked.

  The paramedic glanced around the pool. “No sign of a weapon. And not much blood. I’d guess she was killed somewhere else and the body was dumped here.”

  “Not an accident.”

  My words settled in the evening silence between me and Hank.

  “How long?” I asked the paramedic.

  “How long has she been dead?” He scratched a hand behind his ear. “I’m no coroner.”

  “Take a guess,” Hank told him.

  “Between the chilly night last night and the birds . . .” He made a face. “I’m guessing at least twenty-four hours.”

  Both Hank and I knew what it meant. “Helene couldn’t have loosened the stone on the house this morning,” I said. “Not if she was already dead. Someone else did.”

  “The same someone else who killed Sheila?”

  My thoughts flashed to And Then There Were None. “If someone’s trying to pick them off one by one . . .”

  “That someone’s got a long way to go,” Hank grumbled. “We’ve still got eight nuns alive and kicking and they’re supposed to leave the island on Saturday. Eight murders in three more days? I’m not buying that, and I don’t think you are, either.”

  I couldn’t. Not without losing complete faith in humanity.

  “We need to tell them,” I said.

  “About Helene, yeah. But I’m not going to march over there and announce that someone’s trying to murder them all. For one thing, we don’t have anything to back up a crazy theory like that. For another, we don’t need a full-scale panic on our hands.”

  I’d spent more time around the nuns than Hank had; I knew that with them, full-scale panic was just about as likely as all of them buying a houseboat together and moving to Key West to lounge in hammocks and sip drinks decorated with little umbrellas.

  “I’ve got guys over there,” Hank said, and I wondered if he was trying to reassure me or himself. “Two guys at Water’s Edge. I’ll keep a detail there around the clock until we figure out what’s going on.”

  An hour and a half later when we arrived at Water’s Edge, what was going on was the equivalent of sisterly chaos.

  Those two policemen Hank had assigned to keep an eye on things were there, all right. They stood in a living room dotted with the remains of the dinner I’d sent over—pizza boxes, empty paper plates, salad bowls. The nuns were gathered around the cops, voices raised, their words washing over one another so fast, it was impossible to know what they were talking about.

  “You said . . . ,” I heard Sister Grace blurt out.

  “You promised,” Sister Francelle added.

  “We can’t know . . . ,” Sister Mary Jean was telling the younger of the two cops.

  “How are we supposed to feel comfortable?” Sister Liliosa demanded.

  I pushed past both cops. “What’s going on? What’s happening here?”

  Like I thought anyone could actually hear me above the din?

  Hank took care of that when he bellowed, “Everybody shut up!”

  Shut up, they did.

  Hank nodded toward the nuns. “Beggin’ your pardon, ladies,” he said before he swung around to pin his officers with a look. “Explain,” he barked.

  “I was in . . . in back,” the first officer said. “You know, out on the patio. And Cunningham here, he was up front. We were keeping an eye on things, Chief. Honest. Just like you said we were supposed to.”

  “But then the Sisters here . . .” Officer Cunningham turned pale beneath Hank’s withering look. “The pizza came and they said it was time to eat and they invited us to join them and when we were done . . .”

  “That’s when I went up to my room for a minute.” Sister Liliosa stepped forward, her hands clutched at her waist. “That’s when I discovered that my room had been ransacked.”

  “Your room?” I couldn’t help but gasp.

  “All our rooms.” Sister Liliosa looked to the other nuns to support the statement and they all nodded. “Sometime while we were eating dinner . . . well, there must have been somebody upstairs. By the time we realized it, that somebody was gone.”

  Honestly, I thought Hank’s head was going to pop off right there and then. He stalked out of t
he room and he didn’t have to say a word, those two cops followed right along. I will not report what he said to them out in the hallway word for word. I will say that a couple of the nuns blushed.

  “It was Sister Helene!” Sister Grace’s voice rang with certainty. “It had to be. Who else would have been so bold to walk right in here while we were all eating and go through our rooms?”

  “But what was she looking for?” Sister Francelle asked. “What’s she up to?”

  She, of course, was not up to anything. Not anymore. Not for the last twenty-four hours.

  I delivered the news with as much detachment as I could muster and watched as, one by one, the horror registered on the nuns’ faces. As if they were moving in slow motion, each of them backed up and found a seat, and the silence that settled was so profound, I could hear the waves slapping the beach below the patio.

  They allowed themselves a few minutes for private grief, then Sister Paul took out her rosary and began to pray and when the others joined in, I stepped out of the living room.

  Hank was just coming down the steps from the second floor and he heard their prayers wafting through the air. “You told ’em, huh?”

  “Sorry. I should have left it up to you, but they were sure Sister Helene was the one who’d been through their rooms and I . . .” I coughed away the tightness in my throat. “It didn’t seem right letting them think that. Not considering what we found at the park earlier.” I looked past him and up the stairs. “And their rooms?”

  “Somebody’s looking for something, all right.” Hank chewed on his lower lip. “Every single room is tossed. What’s going on here, Bea?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  “Well, I’ve called in two more officers. And I had those two . . .” When he looked over his shoulder to where Officer Cunningham and the other policeman were coming down the steps, Hank’s eyes narrowed. “These two jackasses are going outside right now to have a look around,” he said. “A careful look around.”

  The two officers did just that.