I tried again. "When you went to the motherhouse this weekend, did the Reverend Mother General tell you about the deed restrictions that Sadie had brought to her attention?"
Mother Winifred put the tea things on the table and sat down beside me. "Deed restrictions?" she asked, perplexed.
I spoke to Olivia. "Knowing that Sadie was the main obstruction in your plan, you stopped by her place last night to change her mind. Isn't that true?"
Olivia looked up as if she were about to speak, but she continued to cling to her silence.
I took the boarding pass out of my pocket and laid it on the table in front of her. She glanced at it. A moan escaped her lips and her face went white.
"I found this at Sadie's," I said. "Just outside the kitchen door."
"Yes, I was there," she said, almost inaudibly. I could hear Mother's sharp intake of breath.
"Thank you," I said gently. "Now, tell us what happened."
Olivia was chewing on her lower lip. The silence thickened. Outside the window, a chickadee piped his penetrating four-note whistle. On the hot plate, the kettle was beginning to hum.
Mother Winifred spoke, her voice calm and unexpectedly firm. "You must tell us what happened, Olivia, and what you know. Answer the question, please."
Olivia glanced at Mother with faint surprise. She hesitated, then lifted her head. "It wasn't quite the way you say." Her voice was taut with the effort required to keep
it from trembling. "I know Sadie Marsh. I know that when she says something, no matter how stupid, she sticks by it."
"So you weren't trying to change her mind," I said.
"I told Reverend Mother General that seeing Sadie wasn't going to do any good, but she instructed me to try to talk reason into her. I obeyed. But Sadie had already made up her mind. She wouldn't listen."
Mother Winifred had sat forward on the chair. Both of us were totally captured by Olivia's thin, reedy voice. "What time did you arrive?" I asked.
"I flew into Austin about seven-thirty and telephoned to make sure she would be there. I drove straight from the airport. I got there about nine-thirty. She was ready for bed."
Beside me, Mother stirred. The kettle was beginning to whistle faintly, but I don't think she heard it. "What time did you leave?" I asked.
She moistened her lips with her tongue. ' 'About a quarter to ten. It didn't take long for her to make her position clear. I could see that nothing I could say would change her mind." The blotches grew brighter, and color suffused her neck. "But I had promised Reverend Mother General to give it my best effort, so I did."
"What did you say?"
Her voice seemed to strengthen. "I tried to get her to see that she was making a mistake. I told her that the retreat center would bring a new life to St. Theresa's, that it would contribute jobs and revenue to the local economy." She stopped, cleared her throat. "I told her to think carefully before she closed off those possibilities, because once closed, they couldn't be opened again."
"How did she respond?"
"How do you think?" she asked bitterly.
"Just tell us, Sister," Mother said.
"She laughed." Olivia looked down at her clasped fingers and loosened them until they began to shake, then
pressed them tight again. Her voice had thinned to a thread, each word pulled out of herself with an obvious effort. "She said that after the board meeting there'd be no hope of developing a retreat center here. She said that… the only way to stop her was to… kill her."
Olivia's last sentence paralyzed Mother Winifred and me in absolute, horrified attention. Into that frozen silence, the kettle poured its shriek like the cry of the dead. Blindly, Mother Winifred got up and groped toward it.
I spoke, not so much from a desire to hear the truth as to get the awful, bloody business done with. "What happened then?''
"Then?" Olivia looked at me, her eyes opaque, staring, behind her glasses. "It was over. I left."
"You… left?"
"Yes, I left. What else could I do?" She raised her clasped hands to her breast, speaking with weary despair. "I drove back here."
"That's when I saw you?"
"Yes. I went to my room and tried to sleep, but I couldn't. When everyone went to breakfast, I went to the chapel to pray."
"For forgiveness, I trust." Mother Winifred's voice was ragged. Her hand shook as she poured hot water from the kettle into the teapot.
"For forgiveness?" Olivia cried wretchedly. Half-imploring, half-rebellious, she lifted her eyes toward heaven. "I was praying for guidance! What in the name of Christ am I to do with my life? Does He mean me to dig in the dirt for the rest of my days?" Her voice shattered and she wrapped her arms around herself, bending forward, rocking back and forth. "If anyone should pray for forgiveness, it's Sadie Marsh. She thwarted God's plan for this place!"
"Olivia, Olivia," Mother remonstrated softly. "Only human plans can be thwarted. His, never."
Olivia raised her head. Her eyes were filled with tears and her chin was trembling. If I had not seen that bloody body lying in the straw, had not seen how ruthlessly Sadie sad been struck down, I would have felt pity for her. She seemed so utterly destroyed, less a criminal than a victim jf her own high expectations, her hopes for a dream that – ould never be real.
And now that her defense against the truth had been breached, we had come almost to the end. There was only:he admission left, only her final confession. For that-
I took the card out of my pocket, unfolded it, and held it out. "What is this, Olivia?"
She glanced at it, then away. "It's a cross," she said helplessly. Her voice cracked.
"It's your cross, isn't it?"
"Mine?" She wiped her eyes with her sleeve. "No, of course not. Why would I have a cross like that?"
"Why-?" I looked down. I'd been in a hurry when I picked up the cross, and I'd put it in my pocket without examining it closely. Now I did, and saw what I hadn't seen before.
In the center of the cross was an emblem. On the emblem were two letters, a K and a C, elaborately intertwined. K and C. The Knights of Columbus.
F. Lee Bailey once said that you should never ask a witness a question you didn't already know the answer to. "If you do," he said, "you deserve whatever the hell you get."
I had known the answer to my question. I had been absolutely confident that Olivia would say, "Yes, that's my cross." But I had been wrong, disastrously wrong, wrong again. I looked down at the cross. There were two people who might have worn it, and neither of them were in this room.
I cleared my throat. ' 'So you… you had nothing to do with the assault on Sadie Marsh?" It was less a question than a bewildered statement of the unthinkable truth that was just beginning to dawn on me.
"The assault?" Olivia's gasping perplexity was even greater than mine.
"Tom Rowan and I found her this morning in the barn at the M Bar M. She had been hit on the head and left for dead."
"Dead!" Olivia half-rose. Her face registered both profound distress and a fierce, undisguised hope. ' 'Sadie Marsh is dead!"
"No," I said. "At least, she wasn't when the ambulance took her to the hospital. But she has severe head wounds. She may not live."
She sank back weakly. "Did she-? Did the board-?"
"Look at the old deed?" I shook my head. "She didn't make it to the meeting. Somebody tried to kill her to keep her from talking."
Her voice was thick, her eyes staring. "Somebody-But who-? Why-?"
I shook my head, swallowing hard, painfully. "I don't know. Not yet." I could guess who, but I didn't want to. I'd been wrong so many times in the last few days. I could only pray I was wrong this time too.