"Yes?"
Matt unconsciously bent down to the wizened face peering around the door frame like an ancient child's. Sister Mary Monica was ninety and quite deaf.
"I'm here to see Sister Seraphina O'Donnell,'' he enunciated carefully into the beige plastic appliance in her visible ear.
Before the old nun could indicate whether she'd heard him, a voice bore down on her fast from behind.
"Sister," it rebuked fondly. "You shouldn't answer the door. It might be someone we don't want to--" The door whooshed wide, revealing Seraphina herself ready to glower at a possible gang-banger trying to extort protection money, "Oh, Matt!" Her about-face in tone from challenging to charming would have flattered him if he'd been in the mood. "Come in."
He stepped onto the quarry-tile entry hall floor, feeling the cool shade of the house settling on him like a cloak.
Sister Seraphina swiftly shut and locked the door behind him, a silent commentary on the safety of Our Lady of Guadalupe's venerable neighborhood in these days of youthful crime.
She shooed Sister Mary Monica back into the front parlor, where a television set blared out a soap opera, of all things. Ninety-year-old nuns were not what they had used to be.
Farther down the hall, the visitors' parlor was the same tidy retreat of pale stucco walls, burnt-umber tile floor and Hispanic-black wooden furniture embellished with formal carving.
Once ushered within. Matt noticed one of the convent cats, Peter or Paul, ensconced in a slice of sunlight on the window-sill.
"Peter," Sister Seraphina said behind him, her voice content, all the industrious bustle gone.
''He's done beautifully. Doesn't even walk with a limp. Perhaps cats have nine lives, after all."
"I doubt that's sound theology. Sister," he returned, surprised to hear the tease in his voice, to realize how quickly he fell into old ways.
"Peter's theology consists of a firm belief in the power of the multiplied loaves and fishes, with an emphasis on the fishes." She sat on one over-formal chair and gestured him to another.
Today the heavy wooden cross that was her daily decoration had been complimented by a pair of wooden button earrings. It still disconcerted him to see nuns in permanent waves and costume jewelry, with a touch of lip gloss or blush. He knew he was reacting in a more old-fashioned mode than his relatively young age required, but archaic symbols die hard and nuns were the everyday anchor of the Catholic faith.
Matt remembered the oblong box wrapped in white paper and handed it to Seraphina like an apple to a favorite teacher. She had been that, as well as a sometimes feared one.
''Oh, Matthias, you shouldn't have, but how nice. My, Ethel M. Sister St. Rose of Lima's favorite. You always were the most thoughtful young man. ..." She pulled off the white paper and deposited it on a tabletop, then lofted the box cover with theatrical relish. "Lovely. Would you--? Well, I'll share them later with everyone."
Their mutual smiles grew uneasy. The years and their present roles rose like a flood tide between them, a moat no number of chocolates could bridge.
"How is everything here now?" he asked.
"Back to normal. The cat's recovery is splendid, as you can see. Sister Mary Monica has forgotten all about the obscene phone caller--that's beatitude for the aged: blessed are the forgetful. Rose and I no longer worry about Father Hernandez. He's been rock-steady since Peter Burns was unveiled as the worm eating away at the heart of our parish."
''No drinking," Matt said, hating to be explicit.
''I realize that you're worried, Matt. I realize that you felt a tremendous responsibility about knowing that Father was . . . not himself, but no. Matt, he touches nothing but sacramental wine these days. Amazing. I've never known someone to recover so swiftly from that kind of addiction,"
''It was fairly recent."
Her permed white head shook briskly. "Still, once the bottle sings its siren song . . . look at Sister Rose and the bishop's tea! I didn't dream what we were drinking until afterwards."
"We'd all had a shock. Even Lieutenant Molina didn't spill the beans."
"Yes, most unlike her."
"And Sister Rose meant well. She must have heard of restorative brandy."
"But in tea! She hadn't heard enough about it. Ah, Matt, there'll never be another generation of nuns like us, true innocents."
He kept silent, thinking that there might never be another generation of nuns, period.
They were a dying breed, as priests were a wounded breed nowadays. His mind flashed back to the seminary. He saw the eager, scrubbed young women who had made up ten percent of the student body even in his day. They ached to become priests because the role was forbidden them.
Now that the priesthood itself was tainted, perhaps these earnest, feminist, budding theologians could redeem it--if the church could overcome centuries of male centrism to admit women as fully functioning clergy. The women's motives were purer, of course, because they were would-be pioneers; that didn't mean they wouldn't fall into the same old traps. He wondered if anyone had the amazing grace it took to embrace a religious vocation anymore.
"Matt? You're not still worrying about Father Hernandez? He's right as rain, I promise."
Only it doesn't rain much in Las Vegas, Sister, Matt thought wryly. And you don't know the whole story behind the good Father's recent bout with the bottle.
So here he was, Matt Devine, needing to know something much more sensitive from Sister Seraphina O'Donnell than Father Hernandez's relationship with alcohol, and needing to disguise his purpose.
He had become like Molina, he realized, prying information from an unsuspecting witness.
An ex-priest was used to keeping confidences, not extracting them. But Temple could do it, Eightball O'Rourke was right about that. And so could Matt, especially here and now, because Sister Seraphina trusted him. She thought they spoke the same language, she assumed they had the same objectives.
And they did. Salvation. Their own souls. And the salvation of other souls.
"You know something about alcoholism. Sister."
"Are you surprised, Matthias? After all those years of teaching? Oh, we nuns were supposed to be utter innocents, but we saw more than everyone thought. We knew why certain fathers never came to parent-teacher meetings, why some mothers wore this sad, cringing, broken look, and their kids too." She shook her head, her mouth curled as if tasting spoiled milk.
"Especially their kids."
Matt digested this confession. ''Sure, the kids themselves knew what went on at home, but the rest of us kids never thought about those things either," he said carefully. "We would just get quiet when certain parents were mentioned, as if they were unspoken bogeymen, but we never wondered why. 'Mr. Johnson' was just 'like that.' Maybe mean, or maybe erratic and surely to be gingerly avoided. We never thought in terms of alcoholism, or abuse. We just thought that was the way life was. It was normal."
"That's the trouble!" The flat of Seraphina's hand slapped her chair's ornate wooden arm.
"There's nothing normal about alcoholism and abuse, no matter how common it might be, or might have become. Kids accept the unacceptable because they know nothing different. All those children. All those years. If we--we all . . . I!--had been better informed, had been more honest with others and ourselves, had been educated in the terrible cost of all addictions, we could have intervened."
Matt knew real regret when he heard it. He had heard enough formal confessions, despite the sacrament's fading practice. The large, welcome space had suddenly shrunk to the claustrophobic dimensions of an old-fashioned confessional. The room seemed to darken with deep self-examination. Seraphina's worry perfumed the air like a sensor dispensing the odor of penance, she blamed herself for something, perhaps for years of somethings. Now, she could do nothing about it but rue the golden old days."