by Morgana Best
I shot a look over my shoulder to see Gemma comforting Bunny. “I have no idea how they got out,” I said to Janet, but as soon as I opened the door, I saw the problem. I slapped my forehead — how could I have been so stupid?
As I live on a highway, I do not allow the cats outside — that is, except for the long narrow yard behind my house. It has a smooth-surfaced, twelve foot high brick fence which cats cannot climb over, so when I got Bernard, I secured an old tree branch to run from my laundry room window to the ground below. I usually leave the laundry room window open so he can come and go as he pleases. However, I had forgotten to shut it earlier that night. Bernard had left through the laundry room window, and then had made his way back in through the kitchen window.
I shut the window and then bribed Bernard and Sasha with more cat food.
Janet smiled at them. “They’re getting on well considering Sasha’s only just arrived.”
“Partners in crime,” I said, frowning.
Chapter 5.
I smiled as I walked along the two blocks of the main street which had been blocked off for the Thunderbolt Festival. It happened once a year, and was in honor of a local nineteenth century bushranger — what else? We Aussies love our bushrangers.
The businesses in town put together booths and sold their goods outside, in a massive sort of yard sale. I, of course, had a booth, but I had paid a local teenager a good rate to watch it for a few hours so I could enjoy the sale.
There were small games here and there for the kids, and delicious foods and drinks. I clutched some deliciously disgusting looking cake in one hand. I hadn’t been able to eat it all, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away either.
I saw many familiar faces, and I stopped here and there to chat with people. Just about everyone I saw predicted snow. The general saying in these parts was that if it suddenly warmed up in winter, it was a sign of coming snow.
I was enjoying browsing at my own pace. Twenty minutes after I had stopped eating the cake, I thought I had it in me to give it another shot. I sat on a small bench at the edge of one of the local parks. I set the paper plate on my lap and began pulling bite size pieces of the cake off with my fingers, popping them into my mouth as I watched people walk by.
I was enjoying the sun and the cake, and didn’t at first realize that someone had stopped in front of me. I looked up, straight into the face of the Reverend Mother.
She stood on the sidewalk, frozen in place, only five feet in front of me. I had no idea what to do. Finally the woman came toward me, and sat on the bench beside me.
“Rose, right?” the nun said.
“Yes. Sister Maria.”
She nodded. “How are you?”
“Fine.”
The nun turned to look at me. “Rose. It’s quite a lovely name. No one calls me by my birth name anymore, but that suits me just fine as I never liked it.”
“What is it?” I asked. It seemed strange to me to be making small talk with a fake nun, with the woman who was the leader of the infamous Shadow Gang.
“Abigail,” Sister Maria said. “My mother called me Abby.”
“That’s a nice name,” I said. The conversation itself was bizarre, and as I had no idea what to say, I fell into platitudes.
“Do you think so?” the woman said. “I think it’s dreadful. Abby this, Abby that. Maybe I just hate my mother, and not my name. My mother was a weak woman, she really was. Her name was Helen. She married my father when she was only seventeen. That sort of thing happened back then a lot more than it does today. I think today people look badly upon anyone who marries that young. My father was nineteen when they married. He was a big man, tall, broad. I remember him only as this force of discipline. He was a military man. We moved around a lot. I had lived in more countries by the time I was fifteen than most people will go to in a lifetime.”
I just nodded. I wondered if she was telling me the truth. I wondered why she was talking to me at all. It couldn’t be a good thing.
“My father and mother are both dead now, of course,” the Reverend Mother a.k.a. the leader of the Shadow Gang went on. “My father died fifteen years ago, and my mom went on for ten years after that. He died in a car accident. My mother shut down. I wondered why, for a long time. He wasn’t a kind man; he was rather cruel. I used to hate my mother for marrying him in the first place. Why would she have married a man like that? So many women do. They fall in love with these horrible, horrible men.”
The woman fell quiet and I looked at her. “My father is a good man,” I said.
She looked at me and smiled. “I’m sure he is. You’re a good person. You learned that from somewhere.”
“So your father was cruel, and your mother was weak,” I said softly. “Which did you learn?”
She looked at me for a long while, and then she laughed, a soft sound that she cut short rather suddenly. “I guess I learned from my father.”
“You’re cruel?” I asked. “Nuns shouldn’t be cruel.”
“They’re portrayed that way all the time in films, aren’t they? The mean school marm, the horrible old biddy out to make life miserable.”
I nodded.
“I was telling you about my mother, because she never owned up to what she was. She never just came out and said, ‘I’m a weak woman. I did wrong. I didn’t stand up for myself, or for my daughter’.”
“You hate her for it?”
“Some days,” Sister Maria said, sighing and looking up to the heavens.
I finally got fed up with such talk. I wondered why she had really come to talk to me. “How did you get involved with the Shadow Gang?” I asked her. I wasn’t expecting her to answer, but she did.
“That’s a long story. But I’m sitting here because I know you know, and I’m not my mother. I can admit it to myself, and to you. We aren’t what we look like. You know that.”
I was frustrated. “So why talk to me?”
“Because I like you. You’re a good person. Like my mother should have been, like I can’t be — not with my father in me. But you, with your father, you’re a good person and I don’t want you to be hurt.”
I didn’t know what to say. I took a moment to search for the right words. “Are you threatening me?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “No dear, I’m not. It’s more of a warning.”
“Isn’t a warning just another way to say threat?”
“You misunderstand,” Sister Maria said. “If you don’t stop, you will be hurt. It’s a warning. Stop. Don’t come for us — don’t try to figure it all out. We will win. I will win. My father won — my mother lost. You aren’t weak, but you aren’t cruel. The cruel win.”
“Mrs. Sutton. Why?” I asked before I could stop myself. “She said she saw something at the AFL match, and what with her husband having been something of a footy legend, I guess she had figured out that the nuns were men. Is that why you had her killed?”
For a moment I once again thought she wasn’t going to answer. The two of us looked hard and long at one another, neither willing to be the first to look away. Finally some noisy children walked by and we both turned our attention to them.
“I will tell you that the woman did make the mistake of calling me to tell me that,” she said, “but never mention her again.”
“Is this a warning?” I asked.
“No, that one is a threat,” Sister Maria said, as she went to rise.
“Threats don’t scare me,” I said, although I was very much scared.
“They should,” she said simply, and then she turned and made her way down the road.
I sat for some time, staring after the woman, even after I couldn’t see her any longer. Finally I stood and took the plate, dumping it and the half eaten cake into the nearest trash. The meeting had floored me, and I was frightened. I didn’t know what to do.
I knew the police would never believe me — they would be annoyed that I once again had gone to them over the nuns. Still, the woman had th
reatened me. I couldn’t just let that slide.
I walked back to my table, shaken and feeling somewhat ill. When I got there, Karin was completing a sale.
“Oh hey, Rose,” the young girl said when she saw her boss for the day.
“Hey,” I said, trying to paint a smile onto my face, but finding it hard to do so. “Give me twenty minutes and then I’ll be back down, and you’re free to go.”
“All right,” Karin said with a nod. She sat down on the small stool I had brought out for her earlier, and I went to the door beside my shop’s door and unlocked it. I hurried up the narrow stairs and into my apartment. Once safely inside, I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and called Adam. The man’s phone rang and rang, but he didn’t answer.
I hung up and tossed my phone to the couch, where I collapsed a moment later, overcome with sudden tears.
The crying came hard, and it came relentlessly. I was quaking, trying to force myself to take deep breaths of air. I wasn’t even sure why I was crying. It was the meeting, obviously — I knew that much, but why was I so upset? I hadn’t felt terribly scared then, but now, with Mrs. Sutton’s image fresh in my mind, I was frightened. Were they going to come for me?
The meeting had upset me. Logically, I knew that was the woman’s intention, but that was no consolation. The meeting was supposed to scare me, and it had. I suddenly didn’t feel safe there, not in my little apartment. Yet I didn’t know what to do, or where to go. There was no point hiding out somewhere, not in this town. The town was small — everyone knew each other. The fake nuns could track me down easily.
There was nothing left for me to do but go into the bathroom and wash my face with cold water. I went downstairs and relieved Karin, paying the girl from the small cash box under the table. I then sat on the stool myself, going through the rest of the day in a haze. I sold some things, and even bought a few things from people wanting to sell. At the end of the day when the sky was growing dark, it was time to pack everything inside.
I took my things inside one by one, folding up the table last and pulling it along the ground to the rear room, where I leaned it up against the wall. I was turning to head back to the front of the store when the bell chimed, indicating the door had opened.
“Hello?” I called, but no one answered. I crept slowly forward. The bell chimed again and I paused. Either the person who had come in was gone, or someone else had joined them. I knew I just had to get it over with, so I hurried into the store proper and looked around. No one was there.
I breathed a sigh of relief and hurried to the door, turning the lock and flipping the Open sign to Closed.
I went back to the counter in the rear of the store, and caught my breath. There, sitting on the counter, were Rosary beads.
Chapter 6.
As the morning rushed by, I struggled to push the thoughts about my meeting the day before with Sister Maria from my mind. I was worried about what this might mean going forward. More death? More crimes? The thought of what else could be lingering in the near future haunted me. As I drifted off into deep thought, a sound startled me.
I looked up to see Adam walking through the front door with a large smile plastered across his face. “Hey,” he said.
I smiled in response. “Hey yourself. I really should look into changing that bell sound! It always seems to catch me off guard.”
Adam laughed. “Are you feeling any better today?”
I nodded. Adam had called me late the previous night and I’d told him about my encounter with Sister Maria. He was clearly worried and just as clearly trying not to show that he was.
Suddenly, my fear about my encounter swirled around my mind once more, making me somewhat dizzy and sick to the stomach. “To be honest, I’m not really sure how I’m feeling. There’s been another murder in town, and now we know for a fact that Sister Maria is behind it all, but it’s not like the police will even lift a finger to investigate the nuns,” I said.
Adam bit his lip and looked aimlessly around the room before fixing his gaze on me. “Look, I know this is all overwhelming, but we’ll get through it. I promise you, just like before, we’ll be the victors.”
Adam’s reassurances always made me feel better, but I still worried about this whole mess. I knew we couldn’t just sit around idly waiting for the police to do something, but I was fresh out of ideas as to how a furniture shop owner and a journalist could take down such a ruthless gang.
I was about to continue speaking, when a low rumbling sound erupted through the air. It sounded like a wind turbine churning. Adam didn’t seem to have a clue as to the source of the noise. He scrunched his eyebrows and looked around frantically. “What the —? What’s that noise?” he asked.
“It’s just one of the helicopters from the airport,” I said. “There’s a whole fleet. They check the power lines around the town about once a year to make sure everything looks kosher, so that’s most likely what is going on.”
Adam walked to the glass windows of the shop and craned his neck to look out. “What’s the purpose of having an entire fleet?” he asked.
“Well, they’re mainly for the tourists,” I said. “Tourists always want joyrides over the gorge country around here.”
“That could be our way over those walls!” he exclaimed.
I shot him a confused look.
“The walls of the convent,” he said. “If we can fly overhead and take some photographs, maybe we can find some actual evidence to show to the police. Do you know if the tour goes near the convent?”
I shook my head. “I’m sure it doesn’t. The gorge country’s west of here. Well, I’m not entirely sure. I think they have a few different routes to view certain landmarks and whatnot, but I’m sure you could get them to go wherever you liked.”
I knew the flights were expensive. My store wasn’t doing well enough for me to able to afford an expensive flight, and I didn’t think the flight would be worth it just to get a glimpse behind the convent’s barricades.
“That’s perfect then,” Adam replied.
Oh dear. He was going to push it. “Not really,” I said. “I’m not sure that it will be worth the cost of the tour. What do you expect to see? The nuns will stop doing anything suspicious as soon as they hear the helicopter, and it’s not like they’ll have bags of money out in the open or anything.”
Adam’s face fell. “I understand, but we can’t just give up. You never know what we might see. At any rate, I can write off the expenses on my taxes since it’s work related, so don’t worry about the money! My treat.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I just smiled and nodded. “Thanks, Adam. I guess you’re right. It won’t hurt to get a candid look behind those walls.” And spend some time with you, I added silently.
“I do agree with you — I’m not sure if we’ll see anything useful,” Adam said, “but even if we don’t find anything, it’s still worth a shot. All we need is one thing that sticks out like a sore thumb. And even if we don’t, it could prove useful to know the layout of the grounds.”
I couldn’t see how knowing the layout of the grounds would help at all, but I didn’t want to sound like a wet blanket. “Then let’s try the tour and see how it goes,” I said, hoping he was right. “I don’t know how far ahead you have to book, though. With the festival this weekend, they’re probably fully booked for a while.”
Just then, the man from the joint Italian restaurant and second-hand bookstore just down the road from me burst through the door. “Rose, do you have any chairs?” he asked in an agitated manner, yet quietly, while waving his hands around. “I just had a huge booking and we don’t have enough chairs.”
Adam and I exchanged glances. “I’ll call the airport and see, while you’re doing that,” he whispered.
I went over to see what Max wanted. Max was Australian, but loved Italy, and was known for declaring the last word — which was invariably Italian — on his menu items in a sudden, booming voice after saying the rest of the wor
ds softly. The locals were accustomed to it, but I’m sure he frightened the tourists.
I had recently bought six wooden Edwardian chairs that I’d been working on. Max was thrilled to borrow them, and by the time I returned from helping him take them to his restaurant, Adam had already booked the flights.
“You’ll never guess,” he said. “They’re booked out for the rest of the month, but they just had a cancelation for this afternoon.”
“Wow,” I said, and would’ve said more, when Max burst through the door again, carrying two plates of delicious looking desserts.
“Here you are, Rose. Just a little thank you for letting me borrow those chairs. It got me out of quite a fix.”
“Thanks, Max,” I said. “It looks amazing.”
Max nodded. “It’s strawberry meringue —” he said in little more than a whisper, and then yelled at the top of his lungs, “ricoperti!”
Adam jumped and dropped his cell phone. Sasha let out a long howl from upstairs.
I thanked a puzzled Max and took the two plates from him.
I locked the door behind Max and flipped over the Closed sign. It didn’t take us long to devour our desserts. “We should probably leave soon,” I said, as soon as I’d shoveled in the last mouthful. “Our appointment’s in a little over an hour.”
Adam nodded. “Then let’s get moving.” He walked out the front door and got in his truck. I locked up before meeting him outside.
It seemed to take forever to get to the airport. The drive up the highway had been slow, with people driving considerably under the speed limit, but then speeding up every time we had an opportunity to overtake.
I got out of the vehicle and looked back to see Adam fidgeting with something in the back. He emerged from his truck with a duffel bag strapped around his shoulder. “Don’t they tell journalists to pack light for helicopter flights?” I asked, trying to hold in my laughter at the thought of him as Indiana Jones.
Adam glanced down at his bag. “Oh, this? It’s mostly empty, just some notepads and my new camera with a telephoto lens. I figured it might come in handy during our flight.”
