Sacred Trust

by Meg O'Brien

  “What were you doing out here at this hour?” Ben asks after a moment.

  “I don’t know, what hour is it?”

  He glances at his watch. “After five in the morning now.”

  “God, what a night. I came out here to talk to Sister Helen.”

  “And did you?”

  “A bit.”

  “Are you feeling up to telling me what happened?”

  “I think so,” I say, touching the lump and wincing. “I talked to Sister Helen, then I decided to stay over because of the storm. In the middle of the night I went to the chapel to think. Somebody came up behind me. I tried to fight him off. I wasn’t ready for it, and he caught me off balance.”

  Ben’s face darkens with anger. “You think it was a man, then?”

  “Or a very strong woman.”

  I am remembering Sister Helen’s almost abnormal strength at my house earlier. But that was in anger. Surely she wouldn’t have pushed me over a railing in cold blood.

  “What were you doing at Rick Stone’s office yesterday?” Ben asks, obviously hoping to take me by surprise with his knowledge of my whereabouts.

  “You mean yesterday when you were following me?” I say.

  He has the grace to turn pink. “You saw me?”

  “Hard not to spot the Brown Turd.”

  “Oh. That.” He recovers, and his chin goes up. “So what were you doing at End-of-the-Trail Realty?”

  “Asking directions,” I say.

  “That’s all?”

  “You mean, did I go there to kill Rick Stone?”

  “No, that is not what I mean. Mauro and Hillars think you were taking a message to him from Jeffrey.”

  “Mauro and Hillars can go to hell.”

  For that, I get a mild glance from Sister Anne. “You must be feeling better,” she comments in a dry tone.

  “I am.”

  Despite her protestations, I sling my legs over the side of the bed. “I want to go home.”

  “You can’t,” Ben says firmly, reaching for my legs. He lifts them and shoves them under the covers.

  “The road is still out,” he says. “Besides, I’ve already arranged with Lydia Greyson for you to stay here today.”

  “You’ve arranged?” I say, annoyed. “And since when do you arrange my life for me?”

  “Since Jeffrey’s on the loose,” he says calmly. “He still has a key to the house, and I don’t want you there alone if he shows up.”

  “You know, I don’t particularly care what you want.” My head is splitting now, and I’m in too much pain not to be annoyed.

  “In addition,” he says, “we can’t overlook the possibility that Jeffrey might be the one who pushed you over that railing.”

  Jeffrey?

  I wonder. Do I remember anything that would give me a clue? Something seen out of the corner of my eye, or a scent? It seems there was something…A sound?

  “Besides, like I said,” Ben continues, “the road is still out. They won’t have it fixed till late today.”

  “So where does that leave you? Are you staying out here, too?”

  “No, I’m hitching a ride into town on the KION ’copter. They’ll be out here looking at the floods.”

  “Well, they can take me, too, then,” I argue.

  “Can’t. Not enough room—it’s a small ’copter.”

  “I’ll hire one, then.”

  He makes a grimace and stands, throwing up his hands. “Will you please stop arguing? God, Abby! You take a fifteen-foot fall and you’re worse than ever. Anybody else would have had some of the piss and vinegar knocked out of them.”

  Sister Anne puts in her two cents’ worth. “I’d really like to see you stay here in bed a few more hours, Abby. Just to make sure there’s nothing I’ve overlooked. I do feel responsible for you.”

  She looks tired. For that matter, Ben does, too. And I’m only giving them more grief.

  “All right, fine,” I say without much grace. “Ben—do me a favor? When you get back to town, call Sol, my lawyer, and tell him I can’t make that appointment today. Tell him I’ll be in touch.”

  “I’ll think about it,” he says, still annoyed. “What’s up with Sol?”

  I shake my head. “Nothing for you to worry about. By the way, how did I get up here from the chapel?”

  “For some reason I’ll never understand,” Ben says, frowning, “I cared enough about you to carry you.”

  “I did check you out first to make sure it was all right to move you,” Sister Anne assures me.

  “So you’ve both been here with me for what—two hours, three?”

  Ben shrugs.

  “Your friend here,” Sister Anne says, “is a very stubborn man. He wouldn’t leave your side.”

  “I’m a cop,” Ben argues. “It’s my job not to leave victims of violent crimes unprotected.”

  Sister Anne rolls her eyes. “That’s it,” she says. “He was just doing his job.”

  When Ben leaves, Lydia Greyson takes his place. I am still fuming at my condition and the accompanying lack of freedom to move about, but Lydia sits beside me, seemingly unmoved by my grumblings. She doesn’t talk, but is leafing through what look like legal papers, making notes on them. Small reading glasses perch midway along the bridge of her nose.

  I remember Ben’s and Lydia’s words when they thought I was still out.

  “What did Ben mean,” I ask, “when he said, ‘You weren’t supposed to,’ and you told him to hush, because I was awake and might hear him?”

  She hesitates, then removes the reading glasses and says, “I don’t suppose it would hurt to tell you. He called earlier to ask if you were here. I told him you were staying the night, and he told me your husband had been seen in the area. He said Jeffrey was suspected of killing a local Realtor. I told Detective Schaeffer you were sleeping soundly, and he asked me not to let anything happen to you.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s it,” she says. “You’re a lucky woman, Abby, to have someone care that much about you.”

  “But how did you know I was sleeping soundly? I wasn’t, in fact. I was awake for hours before I went to the chapel.”

  “I suppose I thought you wouldn’t want to be disturbed,” she says, putting the glasses back on and turning back to her papers. “Did I overstep my bounds in wanting to look after you?”

  “No…” I say, though reluctantly. I wonder: Am I really being protected here? Or am I a prisoner? How much can Lydia Greyson be trusted?

  This is only a fleeting thought as I drift in and out. Sister Anne has told me I will probably sleep more than usual; a reaction to the emotional as well as physical trauma of the fall. She wakes me now and then to check for a concussion. Once satisfied I’m all right, she lets me slip back into the Land of Nod.

  When I wake again, sunlight streams through the infirmary windows. Birds sing, and I almost expect a dove with an olive branch to perch on a sill. The rains, apparently, are over. The floods will go down.

  There is a tray on the table beside the bed, loaded with orange juice, eggs, bacon and muffins overflowing with butter and jam. I would never eat all this at home, but this morning I am ravenous and wolf down every bite. My head no longer hurts so much, and the muscle pain in various parts of my body has eased up somewhat. Lydia is gone, and Sister Anne is with an elderly nun, who—she told me earlier—is confined to bed in the infirmary now. A condition has left her bones so brittle, they would break at the slightest movement.

  I watch Sister Anne lovingly tend to this slight skeleton of a woman and see in her eyes and touch the kindness I remember from certain nuns at J&M, who had given their lives to God.

  I remember seeing it in Sister Helen, as well, when she talked to students in high school who had a hard time making friends, or who had trouble at home.

  I can’t hold back a rush of pity for my old teacher, who began her religious life with nothing but a desire to serve God—only to fall on such hard times. When S
ister Anne comes back to check on me, I ask her, “How did you end up here? Can you tell me? Did your motherhouse close?”

  She takes a seat beside me and releases a tired sigh. “It did. And many of us were fine with that. After Vatican II we wanted to live in apartments, on our own. We felt we could support ourselves and work even better for God in the world.”

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “Well, it was and still is perfect for many of the sisters in my order. For others of us…I don’t know, perhaps we just march to a different drummer. I began to miss religious life as I knew it. I missed wearing the habit and living in a community. For me, that was one of the most important aspects of religious life.” She smiles. “I guess I didn’t really want to be in the world. That’s why I entered to begin with.”

  “What about Sister Helen?” I ask. “I thought she’d never give up her habit, much less leave her order.”

  “You know Helen?”

  “She was my teacher and my sponsor into Joseph and Mary twenty years ago.”

  “Really? No one told me that.”

  “I didn’t last long there,” I say. “I had a bit of a problem following the rules.”

  She smiles. “As did many of us, back in the old days. As for Helen, well, she’s a special case. Joseph and Mary closed just as she was getting ready to retire. At one time she’d have gone back there to live and been taken care of the rest of her life. But the order couldn’t afford to keep up the motherhouse, and the sisters were sent to various places for housing—some to a convent here or there, some to apartments or group houses. To make a long story short, Helen ended up having a hard time with this. She went over the edge and hasn’t fully come back since.”

  “You mean she was having emotional problems even before she ended up on the streets?”

  “I don’t know if you’d call them emotional problems, but she did have difficulty coping.” Sister Anne breaks off and looks as me curiously. “Did you know that Helen entered when she was eighteen, and her parents disowned her from that day on?”

  “No…no, I didn’t know that. I heard a few things about her parents in high school, but I certainly never heard that her parents disowned her.”

  “Well, they did. Both parents wanted more for her, as they put it, and were greatly disappointed that she decided to ‘throw her future away’ on a religious life. Her parents never once visited her as other parents did on visiting day, and she never had a single letter from home. Joseph and Mary became Helen’s home, and the sisters there were her family. You may remember that the teaching sisters went home every summer—to the motherhouse, that is—for a month-long vacation and retreat?”

  “Yes. It was a beautiful time, and they all seemed to look forward to it.”

  “Well, that was Helen’s version of a family reunion, the only kind she’d ever known. It’s understandable, I think, that when the one place she’d called home for more than forty years closed down, it felt as if her parents were disowning her all over again.”

  “But you say the sisters were relocated?”

  “To a variety of places, yes. I think that was the problem for Helen—the fact that they weren’t kept together. It must have been similar to growing up in an orphanage with all your brothers and sisters, then being split up for adoption. Helen lost not only her home, but her entire extended family. They sent her to a convent in Eureka, while some of her closest friends went to Southern California and even Arizona.”

  “How sad.”

  “I agree. Helen went where she was told to go, of course. She’s always been a great one for following the rules. At some point, however, she had a bad automobile accident, and following that she became clinically depressed. One day she disappeared, and months later she was discovered living in San Francisco, homeless. The people who found her brought her here.”

  “I just don’t understand how that happened. Isn’t there some kind of fund to help retired sisters with food and housing?”

  “There is now, but some orders have more money in that fund than others. A lot depends on the wealth of the parish, and how much people are willing to donate. At any rate, I don’t think that’s why Helen ended up the way she did. My guess is she just wrote everyone off—her order, the Church, her entire past life as a religious. She wrote them off and disappeared.”

  “She must have been incredibly angry to do that.”

  “Angry, yes, but proud, too. I think, because of the experience with her own parents, Helen has very definite ideas about the way families should treat each other. Her families—both of them—had let her down. I don’t mean this in an unkind way, but it strikes me that Helen has nothing but contempt for the religious life now.”

  “Yet she came here to live. And she’s stayed.”

  “That’s true, and she’s nothing but kind to everyone. Makes her soups, grows her vegetables, keeps to herself. For the most part, she seems contented. Or did, until recently.”

  “You’re not the first person who’s mentioned that. Do you know what’s bothering her now?”

  “Truthfully, I haven’t a clue. Some of the women here think it’s because a friend of hers—and ours, too, for that matter—recently died. Marti Bright. Did you know her?”

  “Very well.”

  “I’m just not so sure that’s all that’s wrong with Helen. I think she’s been going through something rather difficult for a few months now.”

  Since the time Justin disappeared, would be my guess.

  “You know,” I say, looking at the clock on an opposite wall, “I’d like to go talk to Helen. Maybe just sit with her in the kitchen. That’s where she’d be now, right? It’s almost noon.”

  “Oh, I don’t know…” Sister Anne says.

  “I really am feeling better. I don’t even hurt anymore.”

  Her look tells me she’s not buying that. “Abby, I promised Detective Schaeffer that I wouldn’t let you out of my sight until I was sure you were well.”

  “And I am,” I insist.

  Just to prove it, I slide my legs over the side of the bed and stand, trying hard not to wince when pain shoots up from my ankles. That was one hell of a landing, and in truth I feel like I jumped from a 300-foot-high bridge without a bungee cord.

  “Look at me,” I say firmly. “I’m fine now.”

  Sister Anne raises a brow. “I can certainly see that.”

  “Come on, Sister. I just want to sit in the kitchen instead of up here in bed. Maybe I can even sneak a bowl of soup out from under Sister Helen’s nose.”

  She smiles. “I’d be surprised if she didn’t force it on you. Despite her gruff attitude, she’s quite the little nurturer, you know.”

  Taking her thin penlight from her pocket, she flashes it into my pupils. “Let me take one more look.”

  Finally she nods and makes a satisfied sound. Standing upright she says, “Still no sign of concussion. I think you’re pretty much out of the woods. I wouldn’t do too much for the rest of the day, though. And promise to come back up here and let me check you out once more before you leave?”

  “Absolutely,” I say.

  “Another thing. Get Helen to fix you some soothing chamomile tea. It’ll help relax those leg muscles and keep them from tensing up.”

  “Okay. And thanks. I mean that—really. I appreciate the way you’ve looked after me.”

  “It’s what we do here,” she says. “The first rule of The Prayer House, from the time it was founded— ‘Inasmuch as you do this for the least of My brethren, you do it for Me.’”

  In a bathroom next to the infirmary I wash my face and brush my teeth, thinking about Sister Anne’s last words to me. Inasmuch as you do this for the least of My brethren…

  My mind has begun to clear from the fall, and I am remembering thoughts I had in the chapel just before that, putting clues together that have been all around me, but that for one reason or another I haven’t been clear enough to see.

  I am now even more anxious to talk to my ol
d teacher.

  My clothes have been left for me on a chest of drawers in the bathroom, and moving with agonizing slowness, I manage to sit on the commode and slide first one leg then the other into my jeans. My back still hurts, and I can’t seem to get my legs raised as much as I’d like without jabbing pains in my calves, hips and thighs.

  Once dressed, I make my way down to the kitchen on the first floor—still a bit wobbly, but gaining.

  Sister Helen is at a table cutting vegetables. She looks up with surprise to see me. Without asking, I take a chair from along the wall and painfully drag it over, sitting down and leaning on the table before I fall down. Behind Sister Helen I note a large refrigerator with a glass door. It is full of cleaned vegetables, some neatly wrapped in Baggies or Saran Wrap.

  “That’s some larder you have there,” I say conversationally.

  “Our gardens do well,” she answers shortly.

  “So what do you do, keep a good supply of them in there so you don’t have to pick and clean them every day?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You must have had your work cut out for you this morning, then,” I say.

  She just looks at me.

  “Well, there aren’t any that are still muddy from the storm. You must have been scrubbing all morning.”

  She doesn’t answer that directly, but says instead, “You don’t look well. I heard what happened to you.”

  “Sister Anne thought I was well enough to come down here, though. She said to ask you for some chamomile tea.”

  Sister Helen shrugs. “There’s always a kettle of hot water on. Tea doesn’t take much work, I guess.”

  I stifle a smile. “Do you want me to fix it myself? I will.”

  “No,” she says grudgingly. “I’ll get it.”

  This is more like the Sister Helen I remember. Everything is always “trouble,” but she never really means it.

  “Thank you, Sister,” I say out of habit.

  “Don’t call me that!” she grumps as she takes a teabag from a box and puts it in a cup, pouring boiling water over it. “Here.”

  She thumps the cup down in front of me, leaving the teabag in.

  “Sorry, it’s a difficult habit to break,” I say. “I don’t suppose you have a spoon?”