by Kylie Logan
“Someone was the someone—” Another spoonful of soup cut off my protest. I gulped it down. “Someone was the someone who built that stove about a million years ago,” I told Luella. “Come on, there was a reason Elias didn’t want us cooking over at Water’s Edge. It—”
Chandra popped two goldfish crackers in my mouth.
I chewed and swallowed before I said, “Now we know why he wanted us to do all the cooking here. It’s my fault. I should have told Sister Catherine that she couldn’t bake a cake at the retreat center. We should have come here after we were done at the grocery store and she could have used my kitchen. Sister Catherine . . .” When Chandra came at me with another spoonful of steaming soup, I turned my head and put out a hand. “What’s the latest word?”
Kate sat down on the couch next to me. “No word. Not yet. Hank promised he’d call us as soon as he knew anything.”
“And it isn’t your fault.”
We all jumped at the sound of a fourth voice and, as one, turned. Sister Liliosa stood in the doorway to my suite.
“I hope you don’t mind I let myself in the front door,” she said.
“Of course not.” The nun’s arrival was just the excuse I needed. I waved away Chandra and her spoon and her crackers. “Please, come sit down.”
Luella grabbed the chair from in front of my desk and dragged it over and Sister Liliosa sat. “I wanted to call,” she said, “but I remembered what you said. About the ringing in your ears.”
“It’s better,” I told her and didn’t bother to point out that better is a relative word. The high-pitched sound coming from somewhere inside my skull was just about driving me crazy. “How did you get here?”
Sister Liliosa arranged the skirt of her long habit. “I took one of the golf carts, of course. The retreat center is in such an uproar, I doubt anyone’s even noticed that I’m gone. And really . . .” Her cheeks, already pink, flushed cherry red. “It really was wonderful tooling around the island with the wind in my face.”
“You haven’t heard—” I was afraid to finish the sentence.
“About Sister Catherine? No. Not a word from anyone. We’re praying. For her. For the doctors and nurses who are helping her at the hospital.”
There was silence for a minute and I was grateful for it. Without the added voices muddling up whichever of my senses had been scrambled, the ringing toned down a bit. I sighed and reached for the cup of tea, sniffing it carefully before I took a sip. It was strong, black tea laced with milk, the drink I’d learned to love in England and not one of Chandra’s stinky brews.
“You didn’t come all this way in a golf cart just to see how I was doing,” I said to the Sister.
“Of course I did. You saved Sister Catherine’s life, and besides, we’ve all come to depend on you and care for you.” She scooted forward in her chair. “But that’s not the only reason I came. I had to tell you what it was the police chief and the firefighter were talking about. You know, back at the retreat center.”
The memory rose from my brain through a fog—Sister Liliosa listening in at the door between the dining room and the hallway.
“That firefighter had already given the stove a quick look and he told Chief Florentine what he’d found.”
“Bea says the stove was old,” Chandra commented, and since I’d refused any more of her crackers, she popped a few down. I wondered if she realized they were shaped like fish and hoped her friends from the morning’s protest at the marina didn’t catch wind of her treachery.
“Well, it was obviously old,” Sister Liliosa agreed. “But the firefighter said that as he was examining the stove, Sister Paul stepped forward and made a confession.”
I put a hand to my suddenly hammering heart. “Sister Paul? You can’t mean that she admitted that she—”
“Messed with the stove? Of course not!” Why did I have a feeling that if Sister Liliosa had had a ruler, I would have gotten my knuckles slapped? “What she confessed was that she’d used the oven. Late last night. After all the commotion and the arrest of that man who tried to shoot you. She said she was too keyed up to sleep so she went downstairs and rewarmed some of the leftover pizza from the other night.”
“And the oven worked just fine.” Even if my ears had been working at 100 percent, I knew my voice would have sounded leaden. But then, some realizations just sort of have that effect. “That means—”
Sister Liliosa nodded. “The firefighter confirmed it. He said that sometime between yesterday when Sister Paul reheated the pizza and this morning, the gas line had been tampered with.”
My stomach went cold.
Luella was right.
Joe Roscoe might be in custody, but that didn’t change a thing.
Someone still—someone else—wanted us dead.
20
It was Friday afternoon before everyone finally decided I could actually be left on my own for a while. Sister Liliosa returned to the retreat house to await word about Sister Catherine. Kate had to check in at the winery, and promised she’d be back in a couple hours. Luella had some work to do on her boat, but she said if everyone else would pitch in with side dishes, she’d provide the main course for the night’s dinner. She’d caught some walleye that morning and with a defiant look at Chandra, she promised to fillet it and debone it and sauté it and she assured me it would taste like heaven on earth. Chandra, it should be noted, turned a tad green at the very thought, but that didn’t stop her from taking that bag of fish-shaped crackers with her when she walked out the door.
I was too tired to sleep and far too worried about Sister Catherine to keep still. My knees felt like Silly Putty, but I didn’t let that stop me. I went into the kitchen, made some coffee, and realized that besides those few spoonfuls of soup and those couple crackers, I hadn’t eaten a thing since early that morning. I grabbed a yogurt and sat down on one of the high stools near the breakfast counter to try to figure out what the heck was going on.
Maybe the noise in my head would block out the distractions of the day and help me concentrate.
It didn’t block out the sound of someone rapping on the back door.
I’d already called out, “Come in,” before I saw that it was Levi.
“You okay?” At least he had the sense to stay back near the door, but still, I could see the shimmer of genuine concern in his eyes.
I waved it away with one hand. “I’m fine. Well, except for my ears. Sister Catherine—”
“Hank says she’s still in surgery. I thought you’d want to know.”
“Thanks.” I meant it and figured I should show my appreciation. “Coffee?”
He crossed the kitchen. “It smells great. You want a cup?”
It was the first I realized that though I’d brewed a pot, I’d never poured a cup for myself.
Levi brought one over. “You’re not going to eat yogurt, are you?” he asked. “After a day like you had?”
“After a day like I had, what am I supposed to eat?”
He scooped the carton of yogurt off the counter and put it back in the fridge. While he was on the other side of the room, he grabbed a mixing bowl. “Scrambled eggs,” he said, plunking the bowl down on the counter near where I was sitting. “You drink too much the night before, you eat scrambled eggs the next day. You’re worried or nervous or you’re trying to make some big decision in your life, scrambled eggs clear your head and make things better every time.”
“You know this for a fact?”
Rather than answer, he went and got the eggs, expertly cracked them into the bowl, and found a whisk. Realizing he was familiar enough with my kitchen to find all that and a pan without asking brought a pang to my chest, so I concentrated on my coffee and didn’t watch him cook.
A few minutes later, he slid a plate of perfectly scrambled eggs in front of me and put a fork in my hand. “You’re joining me?�
�� I asked him.
“Absolutely.” He got another plate of eggs for himself and sat down next to me. “You want hot sauce?”
I never ate hot sauce with my eggs, but there was something about having the world blown out from under my feet that made me think maybe this was the time to start. Levi sprinkled hot sauce on his eggs and passed the bottle my way.
“So . . .” With his fork, he pointed toward me so that I knew I had to take a bite before he would, and I dutifully obeyed. The first forkful was drizzled with hot sauce and I sucked in a breath.
Levi was apparently an old pro when it came to hot sauce. He chewed and swallowed. “Where are we on the case?”
I wanted to say we weren’t anywhere, but I didn’t have the energy.
“Joe Roscoe was in police custody when the stove was tampered with,” I said instead.
“I know that.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised.
“So Joe couldn’t have messed with the gas line.”
Levi knew that, too, which explained why he kept on eating and didn’t say a word.
I followed his lead and finished my eggs.
“So what are we going to do?” he asked.
I knew he wasn’t talking about a second helping of eggs.
I drummed my fingers against the black granite countertop. “I think Joe Roscoe was working alone.” Truth be told, this hadn’t occurred to me until that very moment. “I mean, if he’s a professional hit man, he would be, wouldn’t he? It’s not exactly a business where you share what you’re doing with other folks.”
“True.” Since I’d finished my coffee, Levi got up and refilled my cup and got another cup for himself while he was at it.
“That means there’s another bad guy.”
“That’s got to be true, too.” He set the coffee in front of me. “So who is it? And what is he after?”
“That’s the million-dollar question.” It was the first I realized the ringing in my ears had gone from a gong to a muted knell and I smiled. Maybe Levi was right about scrambled eggs and how they could cure anything. “So maybe Joe isn’t the one who killed Sister Sheila or Sister Helene.”
“He swears he’s not.”
“So let’s pretend for a minute that he’s telling the truth. That means Joe was here simply to recover the money from the bank robbery from Ginger Mancini and that he was willing to do anything like take a potshot at her to scare her and make her give him the money. And our other bad guy—we’ll call him Bad Guy Number Two—he’s the real killer.”
“But why kill two nuns?”
The question was at the heart of our mystery, and I knew until we found the answer, we’d never find the person who was responsible.
“Let’s think about who died,” Levi suggested. “First Sister Sheila. What do we know about her?”
“She was a musician and she might have been a little unstable, I mean, if you believe what Sister Helene said about her and about how her behavior was always a little erratic.”
“And the other dead nun?”
“Sister Helene. Also a musician.” For one brief shining moment, a feeling very much like hope lifted my spirits, but a second later, it burst like a pinpricked balloon and my shoulders sagged. “That certainly doesn’t explain why anyone would attempt to kill Sister Catherine. She runs a women’s shelter. She has nothing to do with music.”
“So what the nuns do for a living might not be the connection. What else do they have in common?”
“They’re nuns.” Levi didn’t laugh, but then, it wasn’t much of a joke. I sifted through the bits and pieces of the week that felt as if they’d been scattered when the oven went blam. My mind drifted over the scene.
Sister Catherine, facedown on the kitchen floor.
Just like Sister Sheila had been facedown in the lake when I found her.
Facedown, her dove-gray habit ghostly in the twilight.
“They dressed alike,” I blurted out and in answer to Levi’s inquisitive look added, “Not Sister Helene. Sister Helene wore street clothes. But Sister Sheila and Sister Catherine . . . Sister Catherine was the one who said it, I think. Earlier in the week when we were talking about what might be going on over at the retreat house, she was the one who said that to a lot of people, all nuns look alike.”
I knew exactly when what I was saying clicked in Levi’s brain; his eyes shone. “And Sister Sheila and Sister Catherine would have looked alike, at least from the back.”
“Their dresses were the same. Only their veils were different. And if the light was bad, and it was because it was evening—”
“And someone came at Sister Sheila from behind—”
“Catherine might have been the target all along!” Back when I was writing, the feeling was second nature to me—that moment when the plot points came together and the denouement to a convoluted story line made so much sense, I sometimes jumped out of my desk chair and shouted, “Hallelujah!”
This was one of those moments!
Or at least it would have been if another thought hadn’t hit me.
Before the Hallelujah had a chance to escape my lips, I sighed. “It’s a great theory, but it doesn’t explain Sister Helene. She didn’t wear a habit. No one could have mistaken her for Sister Catherine.”
“You got that right.” Levi tapped out a rhythm against his coffee cup. “But when that piece of the house came down—”
“Sister Catherine was there.”
“And the oven, of course.”
“Sister Catherine again. But how could anyone have known we were going to bake a cake? And now poor Sister Catherine is in a hospital over on the mainland and—”
Now that the ringing in my ears had toned down, maybe my mind was clearing because a new thought hit me.
“Do you think anyone called her family?” I asked Levi.
His shrug pretty much said it all.
The thought still simmering, I went into my suite and dug through the pocket of my jeans for Sister Catherine’s cell phone.
“She said her brother left a message this morning,” I told Levi, but when I checked, the only call that had come in that morning was listed as restricted.
“I need to listen to her messages. Maybe he left a number where she could get ahold of him.”
If I’d been with just about anyone else (except maybe the Ladies of the League, who were getting pretty darned good at investigating), they would have reacted like normal people and been outraged that I’d even think to snoop so blatantly.
But Levi wasn’t other people. Snooping was the name of his game.
“You’re going to have to figure out her password,” he told me.
But I was one step ahead of him.
I keyed in “Gram” and was into her voicemail in an instant.
The only message in it was from her brother, Michael.
I listened to the message for just a second and made a face. “She was right,” I told Levi. “Sister Catherine said there was so much noise in the background, she could barely understand what her brother was saying.” I listened some more and I guess I knew when my mouth fell open because Levi popped out of his chair.
“What?” he asked.
I waved a hand to tell him to keep quiet and listened until the end of the message before I jumped out of my chair, too, and told him, “We’ve got to go see Hank.”
* * *
By dinnertime that night, the news was all over the island—Sister Catherine Lang had died on the operating table. I felt awful about it, and more determined than ever to find justice for the murdered nuns.
I kept the thought firmly in mind as Levi and I drove back home from the police station.
We were just in time to find Tyler Stevens packing his camera equipment into his car.
It took me an uncomfortable moment to drag
my aching body out of Levi’s Jeep, but that didn’t much matter, Levi had parked right behind Tyler’s rental car; he wasn’t going anywhere.
“You’re leaving?” I asked him.
He poked a thumb over his shoulder. “I left you a note on the hall table, and the rest of the money I owed you. I’m not having any luck at all with the warblers and well . . . I don’t mean to make you feel bad or anything. You’ve got a lovely home and I hope to come back some day. But I heard the news. You know, about the latest nun who was killed. It’s just really too much. I’ve got two more days of vacation before I have to get back to work. I have to go somewhere that doesn’t have a black cloud hanging over it. I need to clear my head. I think I’ll have a better chance to do all that on the mainland.”
“Well, then I’m glad I caught you right in time.” I hooked an arm through Tyler’s and turned him toward the Jeep. “Levi and I were just over on the other side of the island. We saw them! We saw warblers.”
“No, no, no.” Tyler shook me off. “There’s no way. I’ve been looking for them all week. There’s no way an inexperienced birder would have—”
“Small songbird, yellow underparts with an olive green back, right? That’s what you told me, Tyler. You said warblers have black sideburns down the side of their faces and throats and yellow stripes around their eyes, like glasses.”
“Black sideburns, yellow stripes.” He considered the possibility. “Yes, it sounds like a warbler, but—”
“And their song. It’s cheery, cheery, cheery, right?” I put a hand on Tyler’s back to usher him into the Jeep.
He locked his knees. “It does sound like a warbler, but—”
“Then you don’t want to miss it, do you?”
“I don’t, but the ferry—”
“It’s Friday,” I reminded him. “There will be a late ferry tonight. You’ll see your warbler and then you can be off.”
I mean, what could the poor guy say?
He smiled and climbed into the Jeep, but truth be told, he didn’t look very cheery, cheery, cheery.
* * *
Tyler’s mood did not improve when we pulled into the driveway at Water’s Edge. He glanced around. “You saw warblers? Here? I’m sorry, Bea, I know you’re only trying to help, but it seems an unlikely place. I searched all over this part of the island and I never—”
