Zebulon beamed. He envisioned a fine reward of Sister Clare Francis’ baked goods for months to come. Not that he had acted for a reward. He had simply done what he thought right.
After Zebulon left the parlor, Mary Dominic took the cross Angela had found from her drawer and placed it next to the one that belonged in the guest chapel. One might easily be mistaken for the other.
Had the cocaine-filled cross belonged to Father Garcia? Mary Dominic hoped not. Although sad things were imputed to priests nowadays, none had yet been accused of drug trafficking. Yet Father Garcia must have taken the lookalike cross from the chapel. How had it gotten in the car that swept him away unless he himself had substituted it for its more sinister twin?
Why would Garcia exchange crosses? The most charitable explanation she could invent was that he had stumbled on a drug deal, and hoped to secrete the drug-filled cross safely in the convent while he threw its owners off the scent by carrying the nuns’ cross as a decoy.
She shivered. The convent might seem a safe hiding place to someone brought up to respect such things, but if the cross and its contents was the property of Father Garcia’s abductors, respect for church property wouldn’t hinder them from taking it back as ruthlessly as necessary.
She turned the cross in her hands. Something was out of kilter. Any diocesan priest who discovered drugs being delivered in crosses would go at once to his bishop with the evidence, and not try to hide it in a convent. It would seem that Father Garcia meant to hide the cross for himself. Frowning, Mary Dominic locked it safely away again.
The missing notice in the Archdiocesan Directory returned to mind. Father Garcia had said he was newly ordained, but in too poor health to hear confessions or to concelebrate mass. That didn’t add up.
Mary Dominic called the rectory of Gate of Heaven parish. When she asked for Father Garcia, a puzzled voice replied, “I’m afraid you have the wrong number. There’s no Father Garcia in this parish.”
Nor in any parish, Mary Dominic guessed. She dialed Mike McGuire at the police station and left an urgent message for him to meet with her at the convent as soon as possible. When she hung up the bell for evening prayer was ringing.
Mary Dominic went to chapel with much on her mind.
After Sister Vincent had seen the last of the retreatants off the grounds of the convent, she lingered until the cardinal’s driver had returned to his post, then planted herself on the path where the cardinal would emerge. She meant to let him know what a martyr on earth she was, ask his blessing, and finally investigate the outdoor Fatima shrine, which had distracted her during outdoor Benediction.
The moment the cardinal entered the parking lot, Vincent pounced, detaining him for fifteen minutes while the daylight turned to dusk. The bell for evening prayer sounded as the cardinal’s limo pulled out. Vincent’s duty was to lock the gates immediately and head straight for chapel, but she had to appease her curiosity before the light failed. The gates could wait a moment or two.
She approached the statue of Mary cautiously. There! she had been right after all! The same silvery glint she had noticed during Benediction shone on the statue’s white marble face.
As she drew closer, she saw that the glint was caused by a colorless liquid that reflected the sunset’s glow. Vincent squeezed her eyes shut. After several seconds she opened them slowly. The colorless liquid was still there. As she looked, it began to move down the statue’s face in distinct drops.
Tears.
Vincent’s heart hammered as if it would burst from her body. She had always been hard-headed, a practical creature incapable of the finer flights of fancy. Stories of various weeping statues occasionally reached the convent and caused lively discussion. The younger nuns, like Sister Angela, were only too ready to believe the tears were miraculous in spite of Mary Dominic’s repeated warnings that such phenomena could be misleading, and had nothing to do with holiness.
“It could be the result of certain atmospheric conditions,” Mary Dominic cautioned the more credulous sisters. “It could be imagination, or a kind of hysteria; perhaps deliberate trickery, or even diabolical manifestation.”
That was enough to convince Vincent such things were better left alone, but it wasn’t enough for Sister Angela.
“You did not mention, mother, that it could also be of God.”
Mary Dominic assented reluctantly with a brusque nod.
“Don’t you think, mother, that in the case of statues of Our Lady of Fatima, it is most likely God? When you consider Our Lady’s warning that war is the result of sin — surely, mother, she weeps to incite us to the penance and prayer she asked of us, that the world might know peace.”
It was one thing to talk about a weeping statue and quite another to experience it. Even as Vincent watched, the trickle of tears became a steady flow.
An effect of the sunset, Vincent told herself firmly, and boldly brushed the statue’s face to prove to herself nothing was there. When she drew her hand away, several teardrops clung to her fingertips, where they sparkled with the vibrancy of life.
That wasn’t what brought Vincent to her knees.
When she had touched the statue’s face, she felt the warm texture of living flesh. The eyes seemed to look straight at her.
Confounded, Vincent stared at the weeping figure. The eyes that looked back at her seemed profoundly sad.
Vincent, who had never experienced a single mystical moment in her life, seemed at one and the same time to be kneeling on the gravel before the weeping statue and, from a distance, to be viewing the earth, shimmering jewellike in the black immensity of space. She saw the sun-bathed planet as a whole simultaneously with its individual countries and peoples. Its beauty took her breath away.
As the planet rotated, a tide of darkness enveloped it, weighing it down, gradually overcoming the light. Countries and people were swept up in blackness. The blackness brought war to Serbia, famine to Somalia and the Sudan, oppression to many nations, greed, graft, the prostitution and abuse of children. The whole unchecked power of evil raged before her.
She saw her share in that dark tide and recoiled in horror. She owed nothing to the kingdom of darkness! She had vowed herself to the light; to good, and not to evil.
A great searchlight seemed to illuminate her being. At once she became aware of many things, first among them that she should not have been here in the garden alone but at evening prayer. She had sacrificed fidelity to duty to indulge her curiosity about the statue. Duty with her often came second-best to self-will.
The evil she did was small in comparison with drug dealing, ritual Satanic murder, unjust and corrupt wars; hers was the evil of impatience, of self-importance, of failing to reach out to others in love.
She had thought herself a drop of cleansing water scouring the filth of the world. In truth she was a bit of sludgy oil creating her own tarry wake. Her evil was small because she was small, not because she was the power for good.
She wanted with all her being to oppose the forces of darkness. With astounding clarity, she saw that her only weapon was to do the little good she was capable of. At the moment, that meant answering the bell for evening prayer.
No matter that the statue was weeping. That was its business. Evening prayer was hers.
She leaped up, no longer the woman she had been even a few minutes ago, and headed towards the chapel.
She had completely forgotten the unlocked gates behind her.
Zebulon, feeling relieved now that Mary Dominic had the scoop, skipped down the stone steps from the convent with a light heart. A cautious check of the street sent him scurrying up his favorite maple. The long black car was parked at the curb outside the convent once again, and two dark-suited men were advancing through the convent grounds on the tall skinny nun with the frowning face, the nun who always spoke to Zeb rudely. She was rising from her knees before a white statue that glowed faintly in the dusk. One of the men raised his arm. Zeb saw the glint of metal as he brought it down.