For good measure, Alex tested all the bowls that still had soup in them. None of them had been poisoned either.
Dejected, Alex cleaned off the purity stone and returned it to his kit. Putting on the oculus once more, he removed the ghostlight burner and replaced it with the silverlight. This time the room lit up and glowed so brightly it took Alex’s eye a moment to get used to it. There were handprints, vomit, and urine everywhere. The leaky roof ensured that any old evidence had been washed away, so this was all new.
From the look of it, there had been chaos in the room at some point. Handprints showed where people had crawled and eventually collapsed as they succumbed to the strange illness. It looked like there had been a fight of some kind as Alex found traces of blood on the floor and even a tooth.
The greatest concentration of hand and finger prints were around and on the heavy oak doors that separated the Great Hall from the foyer and the dormitories. From the look of it, the doors had been locked, trapping everyone inside. That didn’t make any sense, though. Father Harry carried a key to this door in his pocket. He couldn’t have been locked in.
All of this was interesting, but after examining every trace, Alex was no closer to learning what happened than when he started.
Time to talk to Sister Gwen.
He returned his oculus and lamp to his kit and made his way to the kitchen.
“Learn anything?” Callahan asked when he emerged into the foyer.
“Not very much,” Alex admitted. “I’m going to talk to Sister Gwen.”
Callahan turned and followed him into the kitchen, opening up his notebook. Sister Gwen was sitting at the little table where the brothers and sisters of the mission took their meals, wrapped in a blanket. She still had the mug of tea in her hands and her trembling had subsided.
“Alex,” she said when she saw him. “You have to help us.” Her voice was distant but firm.
“I will, Sister,” he said, sitting down next to her. “Tell me what happened after I left last night.”
She took a slow breath and looked up into Alex’s eyes. He saw fear there, and pain — two things of which he thought the old nun incapable.
“We just opened the doors for dinner,” she said in a small voice. “I get tired helping with the cooking, so Father … Father Clementine lets me take a nap in my room until nine, when he holds the evening service for the poor. The bells wake me up, but…” Tears welled up in her eyes and she squeezed them shut, sending the water trailing down her cheeks. “But there weren’t any bells. I didn’t wake up till after two in the morning.”
“Then what happened?” Alex coaxed her.
“I went downstairs to make sure the front door was locked, but it was wide open. There wasn’t anyone at the desk, so I went to see Father Clementine, but his room was empty. I looked, but no one was in their rooms. I came back down here to check the Great Hall but the doors were locked.”
“Is that unusual?” Callahan asked.
“No.” Sister Gwen shook her head. “Anyone who needs a place to sleep can stay here, but we lock them in.”
“A few years ago, one of the vagrants got up in the middle of the night and attacked a nun,” Alex explained. “They lock the doors ever since.”
“Since I couldn’t find Father Clementine, I went and got the spare key from his office. When I came down and opened the door…” She shook her head as if trying to find the words. “Everyone was in the Great Hall.” She looked pleadingly up into Alex’s eyes. “They were all dead. “ She looked down at the mug in her hands. “All dead.”
Alex clenched his fists, feeling the nails digging into his palms. He’d always seen Sister Gwen as a paragon of strength and faith. To see her like this made him want to beat someone soundly.
“I promise you, Sister Gwen,” Alex said, managing to hide the rage in his voice. “I’m going to find out what happened here, and if someone did this, I’m gong to make them suffer for it.”
She looked up at him, her eyes suddenly clear, her old strength suddenly back. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” she said, her voice full of its old power. “If someone did this, you prove it, and you give them to the police, you understand?”
“I do,” Alex lied with a nod, and he could feel the weight of the semi-automatic pistol under his jacket. He would find whoever did this, and when he did, he wouldn’t bother the police.
He looked up to find Callahan watching him intently. It was obvious from his face that he knew what Alex had been thinking.
“What now?” he said.
“I have to check something,” Alex said, more to himself. “Take care of her,” he told the policewoman.
Alex left the kitchen and went to the big doors that separated the Great Hall from the foyer. He turned his back to the door and walked across the narrow foyer to the cast iron radiator on the opposite wall. A boiler in the basement heated the building and the radiator. It had been modified to use enchanted boiler stones to heat the water, but the rest of the system still worked normally. Being careful not to burn his hand, Alex felt around under the hot iron fixture, until he found what he sought.
“You find something?” the lieutenant asked.
“Father Harry’s key,” he said, holding the old-fashioned iron skeleton key up so that Callahan could see it.
“What does that mean?”
“It means I know what happened here, at the end anyway,” Alex said, standing. “Now let’s see if Doctor Bell can tell us how it began.”
6
The Client
“It’s a disease of some kind,” Iggy said once Alex and Lieutenant Callahan caught up with him. “It looks like smallpox but it’s not. Some of these people look sicker than the others — they have more spots and they’re larger, but I can’t tell you why.”
“What can you tell us?” Callahan said. “At this point I’d take anything.”
“It’s not magical,” Alex said. “And it’s not a poison. I checked the soup, the bread, and the water in all the pitchers.”
“How is that possible?” Callahan said. “That means these people all came here, contracted some disease no one’s ever heard of, and died in a matter of hours?”
Iggy nodded gravely.
“It’s time we brought in some professionals,” he said to Callahan. “Call over to the University, and wake up whoever you have to. Find out who is running their viral pathology program and get them over here as soon as possible.”
“Viral—?” Callahan started, then stopped. “What’s that now?”
“It’s the study of diseases. Now hurry.”
Iggy watched Callahan turn and head off toward a telephone, then turned to Alex.
“Anything else?”
“Father Harry must have realized what was happening.” Alex held up the key. “He locked everyone in here, then slid the key under the door.”
“He probably stopped whatever this is from killing a lot more people,” Iggy said. “I wish I had more data. Who was the first person to be sick? How long did it take for symptoms to show?”
“It took less than an hour for symptoms,” Alex said. “Sister Gwen said she didn’t wake up till two in the morning because no one rang the bells for the service. The bell rope is in the choir loft, and you can only get there from a stair behind the kitchen. That means the door was locked before nine o’clock.”
Iggy began stroking his mustache, something he did when thinking.
“We’ve got to find out how this plague came to be here,” he said. “Is there anyone new to the mission?”
Alex shook his head. “Father Harry said that the Brothers and Sisters were new, except Sister Gwen. But it looked like they’d been here a while at least.”