“It’s only been eighteen years,” Alice Marie said.
“Same difference.” Scholastica had been standing against the door. Now she moved into the room and sat down at one of the desks. It was too small for her, but it was too small for everybody. Scholastica sometimes wondered if these desks had been misplaced from one of the order’s elementary schools.
“I told him all the things we agreed to tell him,” she said after a while. “I told him all about Brigit going out and wandering around. I told him all about getting the call from Pete Donovan.”
“Did you tell him about the phantom corpses?”
“I didn’t even think of it,” Scholastica said. “I don’t want to. It makes us sound so strange. I don’t know, Alice Marie, I just talked and talked and talked. About me, about us, about Brigit. I don’t know if I made much of anything like sense.”
Alice Marie looked suddenly uneasy—worse than uneasy, really, green around the gills—and Scholastica didn’t blame her. A year ago, Alice Marie had been Mistress of Postulants under old Sister Mary Jerome. Then Jerome had had a stroke and Reverend Mother General, who had always said she believed that Alice Marie didn’t have what it took to be a Novice Mistress, had had a change of heart. Now Alice Marie’s first year as Mistress of Novices was barely half over, and everything was going wrong.
In the old days, Sisters who couldn’t contain their nervousness were taught to fold their arms together within the sleeves of their habits and grab onto their wrists. Alice Marie, having been trained under the old dispensation, did that now.
“Scholastica,” she said, “when I came down this morning, down to this corridor, it was just going six o’clock. I know because I heard the Angelus bell ring. I’d left my Office down here and I wanted to pick it up.” She shot Scholastica an embarrassed look. “You’re probably modern enough to think I’m silly, but I don’t feel right about not reading my Office, even when I’m praying in community and I can just chant along with the rest of you.”
“I prefer to read it, too. What does that have to do with anything?”
“Nothing, really. I came down here, I came into the classroom across the hall from this one, I got my book and I came out again. It was when I came out again that I saw it.”
“Saw what?”
Alice Marie put her hand in her habit pocket and came out with a small wadded piece of cardboard. “That was stuck in the door at the end of this corridor. Just under the latch. Open it up.”
Scholastica opened it up. It was a square from the side of a box of generic laundry detergent, and that could mean only one thing. As long as there were postulants at the Motherhouse, only postulants did laundry. They were supervised by old Sister Anthony James, but she would never stick a piece of cardboard in one of the Motherhouse’s side doors. If she wanted to leave the building after it was locked up, she’d ask Reverend Mother General to use the override key. Scholastica handed the cardboard back.
“Somebody was trying to get out,” she said.
“Exactly,” Alice Marie said.
“Do you think they managed?”
Alice Marie gave a vigorous shake of her head. “They couldn’t have. The security system doesn’t work like that. If whoever it was had managed to get this cardboard stuck in the latch, the open latch would have set off every alarm in the building as soon as Reverend Mother pulled the lock-up switch.”
“And if that hadn’t done it, opening the door would have,” Scholastica said. “Except I don’t have to worry about an open door. You’re right. The latch would do it. You think the cardboard was put in the door last night?”
“Yesterday, yes,” Alice Marie said.
“It was crazy,” Scholastica said. “Whoever had such an idea? It’s knee-deep in snow out there. Nobody could have got out without getting drenched in the process and then she’d have been caught. I mean, even if she’d managed to get her clothes down to the laundry bins as soon as she came back in and before anyone saw her there would be her shoes—”
Alice Marie seemed about to make some protest about the shoes, but just then there was a knock on the door and the creaking sound of a knob that needed to be oiled turning in its socket. A moment later, a postulant named Leah Brady opened the door and stuck in her head, looking scared out of her mind.
“Sister?” she said, looking first at Alice Marie and then at Scholastica. She settled on Alice Marie with something like resolution and said “Sister” again. “Sister Josepha said to tell you you’re being buzzed for,” she went on. “She said you’re being buzzed for a lot and it’s Reverend Mother General and it’s probably urgent.”