Anne was dressed in black ankle-length tights and a loose white cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up, which made her look like a teenager. She was barefoot and her long dark hair was fastened at the nape of her neck with a leather thong. I didn't have to introduce myself, and she waved away my use of "Sister." She directed me to sit in an upholstered chair by the window, which looked out onto a sloping lawn bordered by a dense, shrubby mass of mes-quite and cedar.
"I've been expecting you." She sat down on the bed. "I thought you might want to talk about the letter. And die swimsuit too, of course.''
"The whole thing must have been unnerving," I said.
Anne gave a small shrug. Her olive skin was smooth, her small, triangular face closed and private. She looked as if she wouldn't be easily unnerved.
"Do you mind telling me about it?"
She folded her legs into a lotus position and spoke with a quick, active intelligence. "The spot where we swim is secluded. My suit was an ordinary swimsuit, not at all revealing. Actually, the letter struck me as being kind of crazy. Nobody in her right mind would write stuff like that. And there was that little bit of rue." Her chuckle was ironic. ' 'Herb of Grace, Mother Hilaria called it. She said the priests used to use it to sprinkle holy water and drive the devil out of the church. So maybe the rue was supposed to purify me." Her eyes glinted. "Or drive me out, like the devil."
"Your swimsuit was stolen from your room?"
She nodded toward a dresser. "From the second drawer."
Something about Anne's response puzzled me. I had expected her to be offended, even outraged by the theft, but she seemed almost to brush it off. "Was your door locked?" I asked.
"We don't lock doors around here," she said. "There's no need."
Obviously there was a need, considering that Mother Hi-laria's hot plate had also been taken. I persisted. "How did you feel when it happened? Did it bother you that somebody would steal a piece of your clotiiing and trash it?"
She shrugged. "Sure. But it bothered the others a lot more."
"The others?"
"Some of the older sisters went to pieces when they saw it hanging on the cross in the chapel." The corner of her
mouth quirked. "I guess it was the ketchup on the crotch that set them off."
"On the crotchV
She laughed deep in her throat. "Mother didn't tell you?'' She pulled her thick rope of hair over her shoulder and twisted it around her hand. "They thought it was blood, you see. It reminded them that even though we are nuns, we're real women, with real bodies. Women's bodies. Every month, we shed real blood." A smile flickered briefly and disappeared. "I wanted to leave the bloody thing up there to give us something to think about. But Olivia said it was obscene. Mother Winifred said it was blasphemous. So I took it down."
"You can't blame them," I said.
She tossed her hair back and leaned forward, her eyes bright. "Exactly! They're not to blame. For hundreds of years, the church fathers have taught us that women's blood is obscene-that women are obscene. The Church is afraid of our bodies, afraid of sex. That's why all this insistence on celibacy. The Church is afraid of womenV
Anne's face had come passionately alive as she spoke. I studied her for a moment. Her political agenda might be irrelevant to what had happened. On the other hand…
"So the bloody swimsuit didn't bother you," I said quietly. "I suppose you were even glad to see it hanging where everybody had to look at it."
She unfolded her legs and slid off the bed. ' 'Mother Hi-laria was wrong when she told me not to talk about the letter. Every woman here should have been talking about the attitudes that spawn that kind of poison." She walked to the window. "But that bloody swimsuit-it was right there where people had to see it. Mother Hilaria couldn't tell people not to talk about it."
"Did they? Talk about it, I mean."
"Not as much as I would have liked." She sighed. "It's hard for women who have grown up in the Church to confront its attitude toward women. But they've got to see how
it can poison everyone. The letter-writer, for instance. Her poison comes from the Church itself."
"But surely someone who writes such letters-"
"Don't you understand?" Anne's dark eyes were flashing, her body tense with the vitality of her argument. "It's not her fault! She's as much a victim as somebody who gets one of her letters. It's the Church that's poisoning people's hearts!"
Anne would have made a great trial attorney. She had just delivered the criminal-as-victim defense as passionately as I'd ever heard it. I paused for a moment, letting the energy of her words ring in the quiet room.
"If someone else hadn't hung the bloody swimsuit on the cross," I said at last, "would you have done it?"
She turned toward the window again. Half of her face was in shadow. "Perhaps."
"Perhaps you did," I said.
There was a long silence as she stood, not looking at me. "You're right," she said after a minute. "I hung it there. I wanted it to be part of our liturgy." She paused. "I don't know. Maybe the symbolism was too subtle. People didn't react the way I hoped."
"I take it, though, that the letter was genuine-that you didn't write it yourself?"
She was offended. "Of course the letter was genuine! Other people have gotten letters, too, haven't they?"
They had, and Anne might have written them, as easily as writing one to herself. But somehow I didn't think so. I answered with another question. "Since you received the letter, have any of your possessions been tampered with? I'm not talking about the swimsuit, of course."
She answered immediately. "Yes, actually. Somebody cut the strings on my tennis racket."
"When was this?"
"A few days after I got the letter-three or four, maybe.''
"Where do you keep your racket?"
"There." She pointed to a racket hanging on the bac' of her door. "I thought at the time there might be a con nection."
Dominica's guitar, Anne's racket. I wondered whether any of Perpetua's belongings had suffered a similar fate. Probably not. She had done her penance.
Anne went back to the bed and sat down. ' 'I suppose you know that my letter wasn't the first. But maybe you don't know that Mother had found out who wrote them. She was planning to put a stop to it"
"She knew?" I stared at her. "Did she tell you who it was?"
She shook her head. "She didn't say how she was plan ning to stop it, either. But it had to be something pretty drastic. Removal to another house, maybe, or even expulsion. Whatever it was, she said she had to talk it over with Reverend Mother General. She wouldn't do that unless it was really serious."
"And then she died," I said quietly.
She looked at me for a moment, started to speak and stopped, started again. "I wonder…"
"Wonder what?"
The words came slowly, almost reluctantly. "Do you suppose that the letter-writer… had something to do with Mother Hilaria's death?"
I watched her face. ' 'What makes you ask?''
She moved her hand over the plaid spread, smoothing it. "When it happened, I believed what Mother Winifred told us. About the hot plate and the puddle of milk and Mother Hilaria's bad heart. But now…" She paused and looked up at me. "The thing is, Mother Hilaria did know who was writing those letters, and she intended to do something about it. Then she died. Was it a coincidence, do you think, or something else?"