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“Nah, don’t call it that,” he argued. “Let’s say instead, that between the three of us…we just might get somewhere. Let’s start with that desk woman, Sarah. You think she’s up and around, yet? Let’s go pester her and see. She talked first, and she might talk the most. Or then again, she may clam right up at the sight of me. We won’t know until we give it a shot.”
Sister Eileen knew where Sarah’s quarters were, so she led them there—to the first floor, where the girl lived in an oversized suite almost big enough to call an apartment. She knocked, quietly the first time, louder the second time, and with true insistence on the third round.
From within, there was no answer—not even a sleepy mumble telling them to come back later.
The nun pressed her ear to the door, very near to the crack; and Juan Rios couldn’t quite shake the suspicion that she was sniffing again, trying to catch the scent of whatever waited on the other side. She regarded the two men with an instant of gold in her big brown eyes, a flash of light like a glimmering seam in a boulder. “Something’s wrong.”
“Truer words were never spoken, ma’am.”
“No, something new—something else. She’s in there, I can sense it,” she said vaguely. “But she isn’t moving. She isn’t breathing. I don’t smell any blood, but I don’t think she’s alive.” Before either of her companions could argue with her, or wonder aloud how she knew all that, she declared, “We have to open this door!” She tried the knob, wrestling it back and forth until a loud snap announced that it’d broken in her hands.
The Ranger drew his gun, but the nun told him to, “Put it away—just help me, she’s in there alone.”
Before the padre had a chance to listen, before he could even come to stand beside her, she shoved her shoulder against the door: once, twice, a third time in very quick succession…each blow sounding heavier than it looked. And before the men could lend her aid, the door collapsed inward with a crash—it banged against the wall and ricocheted, then stopped against her foot as she flung herself inside.
The Ranger and the padre looked wide-eyed at one another, and then at the door. The jamb had been smashed to splinters, and a long fault line had cracked the main panel almost in two.
But there was no time to comment upon the little nun’s strength.
Not when Sarah swung from a long cotton belt, fastened around her neck, tied around a heating pipe that ran along the ceiling. Not when her feet dangled over the nightstand from which she’d leaped.
No one moved.
No one thought for a moment that the girl was still alive; no one’s neck makes an angle like that, while the neck’s owner is alive to remark it. No one soils herself until her body’s fluids drip from the tips of her toenails so the rug is a soggy mess, not if they plan to account for it later.
She was wearing a nightdress and nothing else. Not even a bow in her hair.
Juan Rios closed the door behind them, and the Ranger nodded with approval. No one else needed to see this.
“I can’t believe it,” the nun said, never taking her eyes off the swaying corpse.
Korman could. “From what you’ve told me, it makes perfect sense. It looks like the poor girl had enough, that’s all—and this is the simplest death yet. Or it’s the most ordinary one, anyhow, if your descriptions can be believed.”
But the padre stood with the nun. “No, I don’t believe it either. Say what you will, some measure of cour
age is needed to fling yourself into the afterlife; and this girl had not one drop of courage to her name. You see, it isn’t simple, it isn’t…” he came closer to the corpse, and examined it as closely as he dared, at a distance. “It isn’t easy to break your neck, not like this. All she did was tie a little slip…” he drew it in the air with his finger, pointing at the spot where it dug in deep against her throat.
Now the Ranger looked too, and now he agreed. “You’re right. Hell, I’m not even sure that ribbon, or whatever it is…I don’t think it’s strong enough to break her. Strangle her, sure—but it’d be one hell of a yank to jerk her neck apart like that.”
“We should cut her down,” the nun fretted, looking for some handy blade to perform the task. “Are there any scissors, any knives…?” But no one saw any. “I suppose I could climb up and untie it…”
“Don’t,” the Ranger told her. “Don’t, there’s no point. She’s beyond help.”
“She’s not beyond dignity,” Sister Eileen snapped.
“Neither was Constance Fields, but I folded her in two and buried her behind the bushes,” Juan Rios said. “I don’t know if Sarah did this herself, or if it wasn’t her own idea. But whatever has harmed her, it did so without the mess it made of Mrs. Fields. We owe the dark forces a small measure of thanks for that, at least.”
She all but snarled at him. “What a disgusting thought.”
The wind agreed, chiming in with a fierce whistle that tore around the drains, and hissed through the cracks around the windows.
Korman pleaded, “Ma’am, we don’t have time to lay her out. We have another dozen people to speak with, and a hurricane to brace for. I won’t pretend there’s any chance we’ll make it off the island, but there’s plenty of hope we can hunker down and get ready for what’s coming.”
“As if we’re any safer inside these walls, then outside them.”
“One deadly threat at a time, if you please,” he persisted. “One we can prepare for, and one we can’t even understand. Let’s do what we can for the former, and work on the latter as we go. If the place is still standing tomorrow morning—”
“I will bring Sarah down. I will lay her out,” the nun cut him off. “Whether there’s any need or not. She was not a brave girl, but she was a decent one.”
