Her brows went up. "No? Then who-?"
"I'm afraid you'll have to take my word for it."
An answering smile glimmered on her mouth, as if I had confirmed something she'd already guessed. "Very well, then. The other thing?"
"Mother Hilaria's hot plate is missing from the storage room. Ruth says it disappeared sometime last month, right after Rowena inquired about it."
"Oh, dear." Mother looked deeply troubled. "Oh, dear. But if you're thinking that Rowena took it, I must say that I can't agree. She's an extraordinarily conscientious woman." She thought for a moment. "But for that matter,
so is Ruth. She treats every item, even the toilet paper, as if God had assigned it to her custody. Oh, dear."
I sat down across the table. "If it won't make us late to supper," I said, "I'd like to hear about Mother Hilaria's death."
It wasn't hard to re-create the scene in my mind as Mother Winifred spoke. The day, a Saturday, had been quite cool for September, and the afternoon and evening were rainy. Mother Hilaria ate supper as usual, stepped into the office to do a half hour's worth of paperwork, then went back to her cottage on the other side of Rebecca, stopping in the garden to pick some tansy and a few stalks of late-blooming golden yarrow.
When she went into the cottage, she put the blossoms into a vase, placed it on her desk, and settled down to work. "She was always busy with one project or another," Mother Winifred added. "This time, it was Hildegard of Bingham. She was working on Hildegard's Book of Healing Herbs. I'm hoping to continue her work, when I get some free time."
Mother Hilaria had taken out a tablet of handwritten notes on Hildegard, the abbess of a Benedictine convent during the twelfth century, and began to work. At some point, she apparently decided to make a cup of chocolate. The hot plate was on a wide shelf in the back corner of the living-sitting area, next to the small sink.
"Her shelf looked very much like mine," Mother Winifred said, nodding toward it.
I turned to look. There was the shelf, with a hot plate on it, and beside that, a small sink. Under the shelf was an apartment-size refrigerator. Hie rest of the story was tragically simple. Mother Hilaria had filled her kettle from the water tap, put it on the hot plate, and got out a tin of cocoa mix. As she took a quart carton of milk from the refrigerator, she dropped it on the floor. It broke open and spilled where she was standing. Without thinking, she reached for the knob to turn off the hot plate. It gave her a severe shock,
which jolted her heart into arrhythmic spasms that quickly led to full cardiac arrest. John Roberta found her body an hour later, when she came for a late-evening talk they had scheduled.
"Did anyone examine the hot plate?" I asked. "Ruth said something about bare wires in the switch. That suggests the wires were somehow stripped."
Mother frowned. "I don't know anything about that. I thought the thing was just old, and somehow malfunctioned."
It was possible that the old insulation became brittle and simply disintegrated. But it was also possible that the process had been accelerated.
' 'I wonder-'' I said. Just at that moment, however, the supper bell began to ring, and we stood to go. But Mother had one more thing to tell me.
"This is on a much more pleasant subject," she said as we went to the door together. "I expect you'll be glad to know that one of our prayers was answered this afternoon, rather dramatically. Sister Gabriella was quite pleased. In fact, she jumped up and down a time or two. I don't think I've seen her that excited in years."
"Really?" I paused with my hand on the knob. What kind of prayer deserved that sort of response?
Her blue eyes twinkled. "Yes, really. The Cowboys beat the Packers, 21- 14, in the very last second. The announcer had quite a catchy name for the winning play."
"Oh?"
"Yes. He called it a Hail Mary pass." She was beaming. "Football is like life, my dear. God likes to keep people on their toes until the very last play."
Chapter Ten
If a man be anointed with the juice of Rue, the poison of Wolf's-bane, Mushrooms, or Tode stooles, the biting of Serpents, stinging of Scorpions, spiders, bees, hornets and wasps will not hurt him, and the Serpent is driven away at the smell thereof.
John Gerard The Herbal or General History of Plants, 1633
I had hoped to talk to Rowena after Sunday night supper, but she didn't appear. Maybe she'd stayed at the hospital with John Roberta. Dwight didn't show up-probably still in town. And Maggie wasn't there, either. Mother had said she'd decided to extend her personal retreat and was taking her meals alone. I was glad for her. Coming back to the inner life from the outer world was a major move. It was good mat she could settle into it at her own pace.
But Maggie knew the monastery's history, and I knew I could trust her. I wanted to get her opinion on some of the questions I was turning over in my mind. I needed to talk to her as soon as she surfaced again.
I ate quickly-the meal was tomato soup with basil, grilled cheese sandwiches, cabbage slaw seasoned with caraway, and a beautifully ripe apple-and went back to Jeremiah. After the day I'd had, I was ready to pamper myself. I lit a vanilla-scented candle, added lavender oil to a tubful of warm water, and climbed in. I leaned back and closed my eyes, letting the thoughts go, letting my body soak in
the lavender-scented silence. After a long while I scrubbed with rosemary soap and a loofah, relishing the gentle ras-piness. When I toweled off, I pulled on a pair of silky pink pajamas-how long had it been since I'd worn anything but a ratty old tee shirt to sleep in?-and climbed into bed with the Agatha Christie mystery Dominica had given me. The sheets were smooth, the light fell on the pages exactly the way I like it, and the cottage was so quiet I could hear the rippling murmur of the river not far from my door.
But my mind kept returning to the real-life mysteries at St. Theresa's, the plots of which had gotten considerably more tangled in the last twenty-four hours. With luck, I had managed to solve the simplest puzzle, the business of the fires. By tomorrow, the affair would be in the hands of the Carr County authorities and Dwight's plot would be closed out.
The other plot, though, was as mazelike as one of Agatha Christie's mysteries. I found a piece of scrap paper and jotted down its basic elements-the ones I knew about so far, anyway. The poisonous letters to Perpetua, to Anne, to Dominica and Miriam, and the letter to Mother Hilaria, missing and presumed destroyed. Mother Hilaria's diary, with its cryptic references to talks with Sister Olivia and Sister R. The bloody swimsuit had proved to be a red herring, but Anne's mutilated tennis racket and Dominica's burned guitar had yet to be accounted for. And Mother Hilaria's hot plate, missing since Rowena had inquired about it. I frowned. That hot plate bothered me. I kept thinking about Ruth's remark about the bare wires.
I reached into die drawer of the bedside table for the roster and wrote down the nine R names. I had already met three of them: Rachel, the sister who had deplored Perpe-tua's autopsy; the housekeeper, Ruth; and the elusive John Roberta. There were six others I hadn't yet encountered: Rowena the infirmarian, Rosabel, Rose, Rosaline, Ramona, and Regina. I felt as if I were snared in a sticky cobweb of Rs.
Muttering a curse, I stared at the list. Wasn't there a way to narrow it, or at least focus my efforts? I found the room roster and checked to see which ones lived in Hannah. Of the nuns I hadn't yet talked with, four were St. Agatha sisters: Rowena, Ramona, Rose, and Regina. I'd speak with them tomorrow.
And of course, there was the ubiquitous Sister O. I wrote the name Olivia and drew curlicues around it. I'd be waiting for her the minute she got back from her visit to the motherhouse.
And then, as an afterthought, I added Father Steven's name to the list. In his role as confessor, he would have talked to all of these women. The relationship between priest and penitent is as sacred as that between attorney and client, but he might have picked up something he would be willing to share. Anyway, I knew nothing about the man. Maybe he was a more significant player than I had imagined. Maybe-