A Demon Summer (40 page)

“How old is she?” Max asked.

Dame Petronilla looked startled. “Do you know, I'm not quite certain. She's simply always been here, like the stone carvings. May we expect you in the infirmary around four, then, Father?”

The bell rang for prayer. Immediately she left without waiting for his answer.

*   *   *

Max came to the bench carved into the side of the hill, its center worn by the posteriors of who knew how many generations of nuns and visitors to the nunnery. The bench was in the shade of an overhanging tree, and today afforded a splendid view over the scurrying river below, the fields beyond, and the distant hills. The outline of another tor, its ancient purpose unknown, could clearly be seen as the sun drew shadows on the hill, highlighting concentric terraces.

He could hear the sound of bleating sheep coming from the pasture, acting as a counterpoint to the chanting of the nuns, the sweet sounds mingling as they were carried faintly to him on a breeze. Both songs were mournful today, strident and anxious. What was known was changing. What the future held was unknowable. He thought sadly of the rubble that was all that was left of Nether Monkslip's own abbey. Of how nearly Monkbury Abbey had missed the same fate. Noah of Noah's Ark Antiques lived now in the only building that had been spared, the abbot's lodge. Noah had turned it into a showcase.

Everything changing, and the future unknowable. The folly of man was in thinking he could know the future, could account for every unforeseen event, never taking the cataclysmic into account.

Max reviewed what he'd learned, turning it over in his mind, deciding how best to approach the matter, knowing what he now knew. For there was no question that he had been dealing with two different-colored threads here. The treasure in the crypt: the nun's secret. The attempted poisoning and now death of Lord Lislelivet.

Surely the two things were connected. Surely?

For sure.

His eyes rested on the tor in the distance. Just visible along the top were the faint edges of the ruins of a monastery, twin to the nunnery. Tors were an early example of public works projects: the ancients seemed to like hauling earth and stone about. Probably the tor he now sat atop was a burial mound for some forgotten king or wealthy family. The secrets of all these places in England—archeologists were just now scratching the surface, literally, of what the ancients had left behind. The nunnery was not far away from the Cerne Abbas Giant, a hillside chalk drawing of a naked man, another mystifying project of the always-busy ancients. Was it their idea of a joke—a sort of early graffiti? A fertility symbol? A marker for something or someone buried beneath?

The black and white sheep, as if in some unspoken agreement, began to shamble in his direction. Max thought again of the ewe who had taken on another's lamb as her own. He smiled at the recollection, then paused. His mind struggled to make a connection—his mind leaping from Cerne Abbas to the lost little sheep. Sheep, lambs—black and white. Nuns … robed in black and white. Except the nuns of Monkbury had added the splash of purple to their ensemble.

Cerne Abbas.

What
? It was something the novice had told him, that sad story of the lamb's panic.

He sat quietly, trying to still his mind. Awena was of course a devotee of meditation, of cultivating, as it were, the art of doing nothing. He supposed it was a matter of finding that “thin place” she had described. It seemed to him it was all another name for what he had done all his life: when he couldn't see the solution, he would sometimes put it aside, sleep on it, or work on something mindless and repetitive, as removed from thought as he could get. Let his unconscious mind reveal the connections his racing mind could not stop to see.

But his mind would not cooperate. His eyes, refusing to stay shut, roved across the faces of the black-faced sheep, and his mind was soon making a game out of noticing their differences. They had ceased their desperate baa-ing for the most part, and having determined that Max was neither a source of food nor entertainment, they drifted to the further end of the field.

Max stood and stretched. It would soon be time for his meeting with Cotton. As he walked back up the hill and past the small forest glen, he saw the novice, Rose Tocketts, in the herb garden, near the rows of berry bushes. She was humming a tune as she worked—a chant he recognized from one of the Divine Offices. She looked up as he approached.

She stood and wiping her gloved hands said, “Well, I guess this is providential. I was wondering whether to tell you. And here you are.”

She reached in one of the deep pockets of her skirts and pulled out an object. The keen young eyes in the square face looked at him apprehensively.

“What do you make of this, Father?”

*   *   *

A few minutes later, Max sat beside her on a wooden bench that ran along one side of the tool shed in the garden.

“It is my turn this week to act as chambress,” she said, pulling off her canvas garden gloves to reveal tanned, work-hardened hands. “To some degree we have all taken over the function of the chambress, a full-time position which has been eliminated until the number of new recruits to the abbey increases. Which may, of course, be never. The nuns take turns, under the loose supervision of the cellaress, in taking care of the nuns' cells. Beyond simple day-to-day making of the beds and so on, each sister is responsible for daily maintenance of her own room—and the guest-mistress is responsible for taking care of the guest rooms.”

She hesitated, until he said, “Go on.”

“You see, it's just that … more and more, the nuns have to take care of their own things, as I say. But there are certain items of clothing that are collected by whoever is acting as chambress. Aprons, things like that. It makes much more sense to just chuck them all together and wash them as one batch.”

“Okay. And you found this in an apron?”

“In a pocket. It's a lucky thing I search the pockets or we'd have had smelly wash water staining everything.”

Max leaned toward her. Because this was of course the crux of the matter.

“Is there any way to tell whose apron it was?”

“Not really. They are one-size-fits-all things, and they tend to get used by whomever. It is forbidden to start thinking of any object as ‘mine,' anyway. We own nothing. That's the deal. It is never ‘my' apron or ‘her' apron but an apron belong to the nunnery.”

“So it is difficult to say who was wearing it last?

“That's right.” She was wringing the garden gloves in her hands, twisting them back and forth. This was as far from the sturdy, practical young woman he had met previously as could be. She was frightened, agitated. “I shouldn't be telling you this,” she said. “I should have cleared it with the abbess.”

“But you didn't.” He looked at the object she had found, which he held in the palm of his hand. It was a cigarette butt, a filtered iteration of a popular brand. “Where did you find the apron?”

“Hanging on a peg with several others. There is a hallway just outside the infirmary.”

Meaning, someone who was not a nun had found their way into the cloistered area beyond the infirmary. Unless he was to believe one of the sisters had taken up smoking? Not entirely impossible, he guessed, although it begged the question of from where she had got hold of the packet of cigarettes. He played out the different scenarios in his mind. Someone offering a nun a cigarette? A nun walking into a shop and buying a packet? It was nonsense. Much more likely that someone had gained access to the cloister from outside. And that would be one of the guests in the guesthouse, none of whom he had seen holding a cigarette.

That didn't mean none of them did. It only meant he hadn't seen them doing it.

And of course there was Xanda, with the habit he'd encouraged her to quit.

It was weird. Definitely, it was weird.

“Why
didn't
you ask the abbess about this?” he asked. Her face flushed a bright red, and he had his answer. “You were not sure who to trust in the abbey, not anymore, were you? Even Abbess Justina.”

“Yes!” she cried out, in what was nearly a wail. “And I'm sure it's too wrong of me to be thinking that way. The abbess, after all! But I don't know what to think any more—what to think, or who to believe. I've just been dithering, back and forth—what to do? And since you came here ‘new,' so to speak, and couldn't have had anything to do with these goings on, it just seemed best to talk to someone about it who was completely neutral. You do see?”

“Of course I do. Calm yourself, Sister Rose. I think you acted quite correctly, under what are unusual circumstances.” Given the parameters under which she lived, her every waking moment mapped out by one rule or another, Max thought it little short of a miracle that she retained the ability to think for herself, listening to her own instincts. How many others in the monastery would have done the same, thoroughly indoctrinated as they were after following the Rule for years?

Max looked at the cigarette butt. In and of itself, it didn't mean a lot. And there was also the possibility it had found its way into the pocket by innocent means. That someone had handed it to a sister, and she had pocketed it. That she had found it lying about, and picked it up.

Or even, that someone had planted it in the pocket to incriminate, thought Max. A much darker and more sinister explanation, that. The thought of a betrayer dwelling among these innocents was disturbing.

“Thank you, Sister Rose,” he said. “You were right to tell me.”

“There's more, though! The night of the murder, I had the night watch. To wake the others for prayer, you know. I went for a walk by myself, trying to stay awake—I'd fallen asleep earlier and was terrified of doing it again. And I saw someone running. A nun. Running through the cloister garden.”

“And? Yes?”

“We don't run. We're forbidden to run.”

“I see.” And Max did begin to see. “Running away from the well?”

She nodded. “And there was one other occasion. It was just odd, that time … outside the church.
Out
side.”

“What?”

Reluctantly she told him, adding, “I must tell the abbess all this.”

“I would much rather you didn't.”

He got a look much like the look Eve might have given the devil as he held out a delicious red apple for her inspection. Tempting as it was, Eve just wasn't
quite
sure …

“You obviously don't understand,” she said at last. “I'm on probation here, and I'm the worst case they've seen in years. Well, me, and maybe one other. But I'm nearly always the last to get to the choir for the canonical hours. I'm nearly always late to chapter meetings. I burned the bread the other day—three entire loaves.” Her lip trembled. “I've been punished for these things, countless times. And still I screw up.”

“Punished how?”

She bent her head and shrugged, not able to look at him. “Made to eat my meals alone. Excluded from sitting in the warming room as the others sit having their tea and embroidering. That sort of thing.” She hesitated, murmuring: “It gets lonely. But the more I try to do better, the worse I seem to get.”

Today we would call it bullying, he thought. Cutting someone out of the herd—in this case, to “correct” their misbehavior. But whatever the reason, the end result was to make a person feel small, and isolated, and alone. It was a glimpse into the way of life he had not really seen before and did not much like.

What would Jesus do?
Certainly not this.

“I must tell.” She rose and started to walk away from him. But turning, she added, “Tomorrow morning, in chapter. I must tell. It would be a serious fault to hide this from the abbess or my sisters. Good day, Father. I hope you catch whoever did this.”

He felt as if he had been given a deadline.

But sometimes, he realized, a deadline, inexorably closing in, focuses the mind in a wonderful way.

He rose and walked back to the guesthouse, now late for his meeting with Cotton. But the delay had been worth it.

*   *   *

“Among the last things you'd expect to find in a nunnery, isn't it?”

Max sat with Cotton in the guesthouse's living area, case notes spread before them on a low coffee table. They were alone, the guests having been banished to the kitchen. Max had made one further stop on the way, to look in on Dame Meredith.

He had handed the cigarette end over to Cotton.

“That or a spliff,” Cotton had replied.

“Xanda smokes,” Max told him. “For what it's worth, so does Lady Lislelivet.”

“Forensics should be able to help with a DNA analysis,” Cotton said, before sending it off with one of his constables for examination.

They sat now, looking at the forensic evidence to date.

“Whoever it was left no traces,” Cotton was saying. “Probably wore gloves. Although with this type of killing—no knife or weapon—traces are thin on the ground. There were signs of a scuffle at the top of the stairs leading from the cloistered area to the crypt. We may get something there, but we expect to find the victim's traces, not the killer's. The doorway to the stairs is hidden, by the way, in the back of a utility closet. No one was meant to find that crypt in the normal way of things.”

“Rather interesting, that.” He paused, and Cotton waited in hope that Max would tell him what he found so interesting about it. But he waited in vain.

“Do you remember the timetable I drew up?” Max asked him. “I've made a few additions and changes that I think may interest you.”

Cotton took the sheet of paper. He studied it for a long while, his eyebrows inching up and up as he read. He handed it back.

“That
is
interesting,” he said. “One for the books, in fact. But—you're sure?”