"Sister Olivia!" I said, surprised. "I thought you weren't coming back until tomorrow."
She recognized me and stiffened. "My plans changed," she said, taking a small suitcase from the backseat
I thought of my list of questions-Mother Hilaria's hot plate, Father Steven's scar, the letters. "Now that you're back, I'd like to make a time to talk. It really is important that I ask you about-"
She slammed the car door and locked it. "No," she said. She came around the car and the light fell on her. Her face was a white mask, her eyes two dark smudges.
"I don't mean that we have to talk right now," I persisted. "How about after breakfast tomorrow?"
"No," she said again. Her voice was rising, frantic, half-hysterical. "I have nothing to say to you. Nothing at all, do you hear?" She pushed past me into the dark. I could hear the staccato tattoo of her heels on the cement sidewalk.
"Good morning," Maggie said cheerfully, interrupting my thoughts as I came around the truck. "It's a pretty day, isn't it?" She gave me a quick glance. "How'd it go last night?"
"How'd it go?" I repeated, still wondering why Sister Olivia had been so anxious to escape from me. She had been almost running.
The corners of her mouth twitched. ' 'You know. Your date. With Tom."
"Oh, that." I grinned. "It was okay."
She held the door open as we went inside Sophia. "What? No champagne and roses?" Her mouth twitched. "No propositions?"
"There was a proposition," I said offhandedly. "I just said no."
The twitch became a smile. ' 'You see? Never underestimate the power of prayer."
"Oh, so that was it," I said. We went into the refectory, and I sniffed appreciatively. Fresh cinnamon rolls this morning. Ah, yes.
There was ample time between breakfast and the board meeting to talk to Olivia and get straight on what she knew about the letters and the fires. But even though I waited until the last sister had come through the refectory door, Olivia didn't show up. She wasn't in the office in Sophia, either, or in the chapel, in her room, or with Regina in the infirmary. And Mother Winifred, who was doing some paperwork at the desk in her cottage, couldn't suggest where else I might look.
"I didn't even know she'd returned from the mother-house," she said, sounding slightly miffed. "In the old days, nobody went anywhere or came back from anywhere without asking Mother's permission." She straightened a sheaf of papers and stuck them into a file folder. "But Olivia is a law unto herself, and I'm a very lame duck. Reverend Mother General will probably call today and tell me when to schedule the election." She put the papers into a drawer and looked at the clock on the wall. "It's almost time for me to be off to the board meeting."
"I'll be there too," I said. "I saw Sadie yesterday and she asked me to come. She wants legal counsel, I gather."
From the look on her face, Mother was not pleased. "I love Sadie dearly," she said with irritation, "but she has the capacity to do the order a great harm. We've got enough
difficulty on our hands without her stirring up trouble."
There wasn't anything I could say to that, but I did have a question. "Before we go to the meeting, there's something else I want to ask you about," I said. "I gather that a number of the sisters here did their novitiate together under Perpetua. Ramona mentioned that Olivia and Regina knew one another even then."
"And Ruth, as well," Mother said. She took a navy sweater off a peg on the wall and pulled it on. "I was at the motherhouse when that class came through, and I remember the three of them. Regina and Ruth were good friends, always getting into some sort of mischief. Olivia felt she had to stand up for them. She showed quite a bit of leadership capability, even in the novitiate."
"She stood up for them?"
"Oh, yes. You wouldn't know it to look at either of them now, because they've both settled down and become quite serious. But Ruth and Regina were once quite fun-loving. Mischievous, really. They enjoyed little pranks." She smiled. "One or two of their practical jokes got them into trouble with Perpetua, as I recall."
"I see," I said, thinking that I was beginning to see a great deal. "Do you think Olivia would talk to me about some of those pranks?"
"I don't see why not," Mother said. She stepped in front of a mirror on the wall and ran a comb through her white hair. "Or you could ask Ruth or Regina directly. But why do you want to know about all that old business?"
I wanted to know because I was beginning to make some connections between what had happened at the novitiate twenty years before and what was happening here now. But I wasn't comfortable sharing my thoughts with Mother Winifred until I had talked with Olivia and sorted it out some more-especially after having been so wrong only yesterday.
I glanced at my watch. "If we're not going to be late to
that meeting, we'd better go. Shall we walk to Sophia together?"
The board meeting was held in a long, narrow room adjacent to the monastery office. It was high-ceilinged, wood-paneled, and bare of decoration, except for a painted statue of Mary in one corner, a heavy dictionary on a wooden stand in another, and a pendulum clock on the wall. Its hands showed nine fifty-five.
Three of the board members were already in the room when we got there. Tom got up from the head of the table, where he was sorting through a stack of papers, and came to greet us. He was wearing a suit and tie, and he looked tired, as if he hadn't slept very much. He shook Mother's hand and gave me a quick nod. His eyes slid away. I thought I understood. He was embarrassed about last night.
"Is your dad here?" I asked.
He shook his head. "Something came up at the last minute and he couldn't make it."
Mother Winifred tugged at his sleeve. "May I have a word with you, Tom?"
I went around the table and sat down beside Sister Ga-briella, who was talking to a plump, brown-haired woman in a too-tight lipstick-red suit with a fussy blouse and pearls. She turned out to be Cleva Mason, the one who had missed the last four board meetings. She slanted a glance around the table, licking her lips with a nervous tongue.
There was a stack of papers in the middle of the table, probably the board's agenda. Tom finished talking to Mother Winifred, looked at his watch, then at the clock. He seemed unusually jittery. He glanced around the table and cleared his throat.
"If everyone's ready…" he said.
"Sadie's not here," Sister Gabriella said.
"Oh, okay," Tom said, and I had the impression that he'd been hoping to start without her. He looked at his watch again. "I guess we'll have to wait, then."
"There's plenty of coffee," Mother Winifred said, gesturing to a table at the end of the room where coffee and cups had been set out. "She'll probably be here in a few minutes."
But at ten-fifteen, we were on our second cup of coffee, we'd almost run out of small talk, and Sadie still hadn't arrived. Tom was more tense and withdrawn than I had seen him, with a wary, nervous look. I wondered once again whether he knew what Sadie was going to bring up this morning. From the look of him, I'd have said yes. But how had he learned it? Sadie had kept her intentions to herself.
Gabriella touched my arm. "It's not like Sadie to be late," she said quietly. "She had a lot riding on this meeting."
"Maybe we'd better call her," I said. "She might have slept through the alarm."
Gabriella left the room. A few minutes later, she was back. To Tom's questioning glance, she said, "Nobody answers the phone."
"She's on her way over, then," Tom said. He shuffled the papers, obviously anxious to begin. ' 'There are several information items on the agenda. We could handle those first. She'll be here by the time we're ready to get to the substantive issues."