Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 101, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 610 & 611, March 1993

Under the pseudonym Monica Quill, author Ralph McInerny has created one of the most entertaining of all clerical sleuths. Sister Mary Teresa Dempsey, Emtee (M.T.) to the two other remaining sisters of the Order of Martha and Mary, is a habited, overweight, stickler for correct grammar, with an endearing share of faults, and a head for sleuthing. If you haven’t encountered her before, it’s our pleasure to introduce her in the case of Miss Butterfingers...

1

By the second day, there was no doubt that the man was following her; he showed up in too many places for it to be a coincidence, but Kim let another day go by before she mentioned it to Joyce and Sister Mary Teresa. “Tell him to knock it off,” Joyce said, drawing on pre-convent parlance. “Ignore him,” Emtee Dempsey said. But Kim found it impossible to follow either bit of advice. Joyce offered to go with her, but then it was hard to say what Joyce would do for several hours in the Northwestern library. And then suddenly one day there was the man, sitting in the reading room, looking about as comfortable as Joyce would have.

To feel compassion for a pest was not the reaction Kim expected from herself. Now, after days of seeing that oval face, expressionless except for the eyes, whenever she turned around, she felt a little surge of pity.

She settled down to work, driving the man from her mind, and was soon immersed in the research that, God and Sister Mary Teresa permitting, would eventually result in her doctoral dissertation. When she went to consult the card catalogue, she had completely forgotten her pursuer, and when she turned to find herself face to face with him, she let out an involuntary cry.

“Don’t be frightened.” He looked wildly around.

“I am not frightened. Why are you following me?”

He nodded. “I thought you’d noticed.”

“What do you want?”

“I know you’re a nun.”

Well, that was a relief. The only indication in her dress that she was a religious was the veil she wore in the morning when the three of them went to the cathedral for Mass, but of course Kim didn’t wear a veil on campus.

“Why not?” Sister Mary Teresa had asked. As far as the old nun was concerned, the decision taken by the order to permit members either to retain the traditional habit, as Emtee Dempsey herself had done, or to wear such suitable dress as they chose was still in force, no matter that the three of them in the house on Walton Street were all that remained of the Order of Martha and Mary. The old nun was the superior of the house, but would never have dreamt of imposing her personal will on the others. She had subtler ways of getting what she wanted. Of course, when it came to the rule, it was not a matter of imposing her will but that of their founder, Blessed Abigail Keineswegs, the authoress of the particular path to heaven they all had chosen when they were professed as nuns in the order.

“I think it has a negative effect on people.”

“Perhaps a dissuasive effect is what a young woman your age might want from the veil, Sister.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

“Indeed.”

The day Emtee Dempsey lost an argument would be entered in the Guinness Book of Records. What had been particularly annoying about the young man was the possibility that he did not know she was a nun and would ask for a date, and then the explanation would be embarrassing. What a relief, accordingly, to learn that he knew her state in life.

“What is it you want?” She spoke with less aloofness. If he knew she was a nun, perhaps he was in some trouble and thought she might be of help.

“Oh, I don’t want anything.”

He looked intelligent enough; he was handsome in a way, dark hair, tall, nice smile lines around his eyes. Still, you never know. People with very low IQs don’t always look it.

“You can’t just follow people around. Would you want me to call a policeman?” The ragtag band of campus guards would not strike fear in many, but they looked like real policemen and as often as not that was enough.

“I am a policeman.”

“You are!” Kim stepped back as if to get a better look at him. “Chicago or Evanston?”

“Chicago.”

“I can check up on that, you know. What’s your name?”

“Your brother doesn’t know I’ve got this assignment. If you tell him, the whole point of it will be lost.”

The allusion to Richard dispelled her scepticism. “What are you talking about?”

“There’s been a threat against his family. You’re part of his family.”

“Who threatened him?”

“Does it matter? We’re taking it seriously.”

“But his wife and kids are the ones you should be looking after.”

“We are.”

“Nobody is going to harm me.”

“I hope you’re right. The reason I’ve been so obvious about following you is to let anyone who might try anything know that I’m around.”

It seemed churlish to object to this and silly to ask how long it would continue.

“You didn’t tell me your name.”

“That’s right.” His grin was like a schoolboy’s. Well, nuns brought out the boy in men, Kim had long been aware of that. Despite her age, she was often addressed as if she were the nun who had once rapped the knuckles of a now middle-aged man. It wasn’t necessary that she know her guardian’s name, not if she couldn’t call Richard and verify that he was a policeman.

After she knew why he was always around, his presence was more distracting rather than less. She felt self-conscious taking notes, every expression was one that might be observed. Within fifteen minutes, she closed her notebook and gathered up her things. All the way out to the Volkswagen bug and on the drive home to Walton Street, she assumed he was just behind her. Now that she knew he was following her, she couldn’t find him. But at least she could tell Emtee Dempsey and Joyce what was going on.

“Oh, that’s a relief,” Joyce said sarcastically. “There’s only a threat on your life and all along we thought it was something serious like a persistent Don Juan.”

“He said Richard doesn’t know?” Emtee Dempsey asked.

“That’s right.”

“But why wouldn’t he be told? Why don’t you call him?”

“What if our phone is tapped?”

Emtee Dempsey tried to look outraged but was actually delighted at the thought of such goings-on. “And if we invite Richard to come over, the young man will of course assume you are going to tell him.”

But Richard stopped by the next day unasked. He was ebullient and cheerful, turned down a beer twice before accepting one, sat in the study and looked around expansively.

“It’s nice to stop by here when you’re not interfering in my work.”

“Richard, I have never interfered in your work,” Sister Mary Teresa said primly.

His mouth opened in feigned shock and he looked apprehensively toward the ceiling. “I am waiting for a flash of lightning.”

“I do not need dramatic divine confirmations of what I say.”

“That isn’t what I meant.”

“What are you working on now?”

He shook his head. “Nothing important, but I would still rather not let you know.”

“Very well. And how is your lovely family?”

“I think Agatha, my oldest, has a vocation.”

“Really! What makes you think so?”

“No one can tell her a thing, she already knows it all.”

“Richard!” Kim said.

He grinned. “Maybe it’s just a stage she’s going through.”

“It must be very difficult for a child to have a father in the police force,” the old nun said.

Richard’s smile faded. “Why do you say that?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Your work takes you among such unsavory elements. It must sometimes be difficult to protect your family from all that.”

Kim gave Sister Mary Teresa a warning glance.

“I never bring my work home.”

“Does it ever follow you there?”

“How do you mean?”

“Oh, I think of all the malefactors you have brought to justice. I imagine not all of them are grateful to you.”

He laughed. “Sister, there are even some who resent it.”

“That’s my point.”

“What is?”

Sister Mary Teresa hesitated. She had promised Kim she would not tell Richard that he and his family were being provided protection by his colleagues. She had come within an eyelash of saying it already, and she was obviously trying to think what further she could say without breaking her promise.

“Who are some of your victims who might seek revenge?”

“Sister, if I worried about things like that I’d have entered a monastery rather than the department.”

“Of course you wouldn’t worry about it. I don’t suggest that for a moment. Certainly not worry about your own safety. But just for the sake of conversation, if you had to pick someone who is in jail because of your efforts, blames you, and might want to avenge himself, who would it be?”

Richard adopted the attitude of the man of the world telling a house of recluses what was going on outside their walls. Emtee Dempsey was fully prepared to play the naive innocent in order to keep Richard talking.

“The difficulty would be ruling anyone out,” he said. “It’s fairly routine for a crook after the verdict is in to turn and threaten any and every cop who was in the investigation. This is especially true if you appear in court during the trial. Some even send letters once they’re settled in at Joliet.”

“Threats?”

“Kid stuff.”

“But that’s another crime, isn’t it?”

“Sister, if we brought charges for every crime that’s committed I wouldn’t be able to drop by for a social visit like this.”

“You are a very evasive man, Richard.”

“Thank you.”

“You have managed not to name one single criminal who might actually seek to do you harm because you were instrumental in his arrest.”

“I’ll give you one.”

“Good.”

“Regina Fastnekker.”

“The terrorist!”

“Miss Butterfingers.”

Regina Fastnekker was the youngest daughter of a prominent Winnetka family whose fancy it was to be an anarchist. A modern political theory class at De Paul had convinced her that man and human society are fundamentally corrupt, reform is an illusion, and the only constructive thing is to blow it all up. Something, Regina knew not what, would arise from the ashes, but whatever it was, it could not be worse than the present situation, and there was at least a chance it might be better. On the basis of a single chemistry class, Regina began to make explosives in the privacy of the apartment she rented in the Loop. Winnetka had become too irredeemable for her to bear to live with her parents anymore. It was when one of her bombs went off, tearing out a wall and catapulting an upstairs neighbor into eternity, that Regina confessed to several bombings, one a public phone booth across the road from the entrance to Great Lakes Naval Base. When she was arrested, Regina’s hair was singed nearly completely off and that grim bald likeness of her was something she blamed on Richard. In a corrupt world, Regina nonetheless wanted to look her best.

“You’re part of the problem, cop,” she shouted at him.

“Sure. That’s why you’re going to jail and I’m not.”

“Someday,” she said meaningfully.

“Someday what?”

“POW!”

Emtee Dempsey’s eyes rounded as she listened. “How much longer will she be in jail?”

“How much longer? She was released after two years.”

“When was that?”

“I don’t know. A couple months ago.”

“Richard, won’t you have another beer?” Emtee Dempsey asked, pleased as punch. “I myself will have a cup of tea.”

“Well, we can’t have you drinking alone.”

Having found out what she wanted, Emtee Dempsey chattered on about other things. It was Richard who returned to the subject of Miss Butterfingers.

“In court she screamed out her rage, threatening the judge, everyone, but when she pointed her finger at me, looking really demented, and vowed she’d get me, I felt a chill. I did. Nonetheless, she was a model prisoner. Got religion. One of the Watergate penitents spoke at Joliet and she was among those who accepted Jesus as their personal savior.”

“Then her punishment served her well.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, that cancels out Regina Fastnekker,” Joyce said when Richard had gone.

“We could make a methodical check,” Kim said.

“Or you could insist that your guardian angel tell you who has threatened Richard and his family. I should think you have a right to know if you have to put up with him wherever you go.”

“I’ll do it.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t insist on it when you talked with him.”

Kim accepted the criticism, particularly since she was kicking herself for not finding out more from... But she hadn’t even found out his name.

2

The next day two things happened that set the house on Walton Street on its ear, in Emtee Dempsey’s phrase. At five in the morning, the house reverberated with a tremendous noise and they emerged from their rooms into the hallway, staring astounded at one another.

“What was that?” Joyce asked, her eyes looking like Orphan Annie’s.

“An explosion.”

As soon as Emtee Dempsey said it, they realized that was indeed what they had heard. The old nun went back into her room and picked up the phone.

“It works,” she said, and put it down again. “Sister Kimberly, call the police.”

Joyce said, “I’ll check to see...”

“No.” Emtee Dempsey hesitated. Then she went into Kim’s room which looked out over Walton Street. They crowded around her. What looked to be pieces of their Volkswagen lay in the street, atop the roof of a red sedan, and shredded upholstery festooned the powerlines just below their eye level.

“Now you know what to report.”

Kim picked up her own phone and made the call.

They were up and dressed when there was a ring at the door. Their call had not been necessary to bring the police. Emtee Dempsey was pensive throughout the preliminary inquiry, letting Kim answer most of the questions. At ten minutes to seven she stood.

“We must be off to Mass.”

“Maybe you better not, Sister,” one of the policemen, Grimaldi, said. He wore his salt-and-pepper hair cut short and his lids lay in diagonals across his eyes, giving him a sleepy, friendly look.

“It is our practice to attend Mass every morning, Sergeant, and I certainly do not intend to alter it for this.”

When he realized she was serious, he offered to drive them to the cathedral and Emtee Dempsey was about to refuse when the drama of arriving at St. Matthew’s in a squad car struck her.

“Since we might otherwise be late, I agree. But no sirens.”

He promised no sirens, thereby, Kim was sure, disappointing Emtee Dempsey.

It was, to put it mildly, a distracting way to begin the day. As it happened, their emerging from a police car at the cathedral door was witnessed by a derelict or two, but otherwise caused no sensation. Once inside, Emtee Dempsey of course put aside such childishness. It was not until Richard joined Grimaldi later that Emtee Dempsey brought up Miss Butterfingers.

Richard squinted at her. “All right, what’s going on? How come you ask me about her yesterday and today your car’s blown up?”

“Richard, you introduced her into the conversation. I may have asked a thing or two then, but if I ever heard of the young woman before, I had forgotten it. Are you suggesting that she...”

“Aw, come on.”

“Sergeant Grimaldi, has the lieutenant been told of the concern about him and his family?”

Grimaldi looked uncomprehending.

“Perhaps you weren’t aware of it.” She turned to Kim. “I think you will agree, Sister, that I am no longer bound by my promise.”

“Of course not.”

“Richard, your colleagues have been assigned to look after you and your family. Even Sister Kimberly has had an escort these past days.”

Richard glared at Grimaldi, who lifted his shoulders. Richard then got on the phone. Emtee Dempsey’s initial attitude was a little smug; clearly she enjoyed knowing something about the police that Richard did not know. But her manner changed as the meaning of Richard’s end of the conversation became clear.

“There’s been no protective detail assigned to my family. Where in hell did you get such a notion?”

Emtee Dempsey nodded to Kim.

“A man has been following me for several days. Two days ago I had enough and asked him what he was doing. He said he was a policeman.”

“A Chicago policeman?”

“Yes.”

“What’s his name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Didn’t you ask? Didn’t you ask for his ID?”

“No, Richard. And I didn’t call you up and ask what was going on either. At the time, I was relieved to learn why he was following me.”

“Relieved that I was supposedly threatened?”

“Well, I was relieved to think that Mary and the kids...”

“I don’t suppose he’ll be following you around today,” Richard broke in, “but I guarantee you a cop we know about will be.”

“You want Sister to keep to her regular routine?”

“Sister Mary Teresa, I want all of you to follow your regular routines. And if anything relevant to this happens, I want to know about it pronto.”

“An interesting use of the word, Richard. In Italian it means ready. It’s how they answer the phone. Pronto,” she said, trilling the r. “You, on the other hand, take it in its Spanish meaning.”

There was more, much more, until Richard fled the study. At their much delayed breakfast, the conversation was of the car. Joyce thought their insurance covered bombing. “Unless it’s considered an act of God.”

“Sister, a bombing is always an act of man. Or woman.”

The newspaper lay on the table unattended throughout the meal. After all, the news of the day had happened in their street.

“I’ll want to speak to Katherine about this. We don’t want her to learn of it from someone at the paper. What is in the paper, by the way?”

Joyce had taken the sports page and Kim, standing, was paging through the front section when she stopped and cried out.

“That’s him!”

“He,” Emtee Dempsey corrected automatically, coming to stand beside her.

The picture was of a young man, smiling, confident, embarking on life. Perhaps a graduation photograph.

His name was Michael Layton. He had been found dead after an explosion in a southside house. He had been missing for five years. He was the man who identified himself as a policeman in the Northwestern library.

3

Katherine Senski caught a cab from her office at the newspaper and was in the house within half an hour of Emtee Dempsey’s call, but of course there was far more to discuss now than the mere blowing up of their automobile. The street had been cordoned off, to the enormous aggravation and rage of who knows how many drivers, while special units collected debris and the all but intact rear end of the car, which seemed to have gone straight into the air, done a flipflop, and landed in their customary parking place.

“Dear God,” Katherine said. “They might be out there collecting pieces of you three.”

“Nonsense,” Emtee Dempsey said.

A first discovery was that the device had not been one that would have been triggered by starting the car. This conclusion was reached by noting the intact condition of the rear of the car.

“But aren’t such devices hooked up to starters, to motors?”

“The motor was in the rear end,” Joyce explained.

“Oh,” Katherine said, but the three nuns were suddenly struck by that past tense. Their Volkswagen bug was no more.

They had just settled down at the dining room table with a fresh pot of coffee when Benjamin Rush arrived. The elegant lawyer stood in the doorway, taking in the scene, and then resumed his usual savoir faire.

“It is a relief to see you, as the saying goes, in one piece, Sister. Sisters.”

They made room for him, but of course he refused coffee. He had had the single cup that must make do until lunchtime. Joyce brought him a glass of mineral water, which he regarded ruefully, not interrupting Emtee Dempsey’s colorful account of Kim’s being followed, her confronting the man, their attempt to get information from Richard. And then this morning. By the time she got to the actual explosion, it might have been wondered how she could keep the dramatic line of her narrative rising, so exciting the preliminary events were made to sound. Kim found herself wishing she had actually behaved with the forthrightness Emtee Dempsey attributed to her when she confronted her supposed police escort in the Northwestern library. Emtee Dempsey had the folded morning paper safely under one pudgy hand, clearly her prop for the ultimate revelation. But there was so much to be said before she got to it.

“Regina Fastnekker! Do I remember that one,” Katherine said. “My pretrial interviews?” She looked around the table. “I was nominated for a Pulitzer, for heaven’s sake.”

“Do you still have them?”

Katherine smiled sweetly. “My scrapbooks are up to date, thank you.”

Benjamin Rush wanted to know where Regina was now. Katherine, to her shame, had not followed further the Fastnekker saga once the girl had been safely put away. Emtee Dempsey told them of the woman’s supposed prison conversion.

“ ‘Supposed’ in the sense of ‘alleged.’ I do not mean to express scepticism. Some of the greatest saints got their start in prison.”

“I won’t ask you how many lawyers have been canonized,” Mr. Rush said and sipped his mineral water.

Katherine said, “Conversion isn’t a strong enough word for the turnaround that girl would have needed. I have seldom talked with anyone I considered so, well, diabolic. She seemed to have embraced evil.”

“ ‘Evil be thou my good,’ ” murmured Emtee Dempsey.

“Who said that?”

“Milton’s Satan, of course, don’t tease. I must read every word you wrote about her, Katherine. I suppose the police will know where she now is.”

“I suspect they may be talking with her right now.”

“The bombing is in her style,” Rush said. “Ominously so. It is why I came directly here. Katherine will know better than I that the Fastnekker crowd had a quite unique modus operandi. There was always a series of bombings, the first a kind of announcement, defiant, and then came the big bang. What I am saying is that, far from being out of danger, you may be in far more danger now than before the unfortunate destruction of your means of transportation. If, that is, we are truly dealing with Regina Fastnekker and company.”

“Company? How many were there?”

“It’s all in my stories,” Katherine said. “I wonder why I didn’t read of her big conversion.”

“If it is genuine, she might not have wanted it to be a media event.”

“Well, you have certainly had some morning. But, as Benjamin says, the excitement may be just beginning. I suggest that you go at once to the lake place in Indiana.”

“No, no, no,” Rush intervened. He thought that for them to be in such a remote place, where the police were, well, local, far from taking the nuns out of danger, might well expose them fatally.

“We have to assume that you are being watched at this very moment.”

“Isn’t it far more likely that the next attempt will be on Richard’s family?”

Katherine said, “I wonder who that phony policeman was?”

That was Emtee Dempsey’s cue. “I was coming to that,” she said, unfolding the paper. “This is the man.”

“But that’s Michael Layton,” Mr. Rush said in shocked tones.

“Ah, you know him.”

“Sister, that boy, that young man, disappeared several years ago. Vanished into thin air.”

“That’s in the story, Benjamin.”

“But I know the Laytons. I knew Michael. I can’t tell you what a traumatic experience it was for them.”

Emtee Dempsey turned to Katherine. “Was this young man part of Regina Fastnekker’s company?”

“That’s not possible,” said Mr. Rush.

“Why on earth would he impersonate a policeman?”

“Sister Kimberly, please call your brother and tell him that Michael Layton was the one following you around of late.”

It was Katherine who summed it all up, despite the evident pain it caused Benjamin Rush. Alerted by what the young man following Sister Kimberly had said, Emtee Dempsey had coaxed from Richard his belief that Regina Fastnekker was more likely than anyone else to seek to do him harm after she was released from jail. She had masked her intention by undergoing a religious conversion while in prison, and some time had elapsed since she had regained her freedom. Richard himself had been lulled into the belief that Miss Butterfingers had gotten over her desire for revenge. She chose to strike where it would be least expected, at Richard’s sister. Accordingly, one of the gang followed Kim around and, when confronted, disarmingly claimed to be part of a police effort to protect Richard’s family. This morning, their automobile was blown up, a typical first move in the Fastnekker modus operandi.

By this point in Katherine’s explanation, Emtee Dempsey had plunged her face into her hands. But Benjamin Rush took it up.

“Michael was then killed for warning Sister Kimberly that she was in danger.” The lawyer’s spirit rose at the thought of his friends’ son exhibiting his natural goodness at such peril to his life.

“What a tissue of conjecture,” Emtee Dempsey observed, looking around at her friends. “In the first place, we have no reason at all to think that Michael Layton was connected with this Fastnekker terrorist gang.”

“Of course we don’t,” Benjamin Rush said, switching field.

“Nor do we have any reason to think this is the work of the Fastnekker gang. The idea that her religious conversion was a ploy must deal with the fact that she tried to keep it quiet.”

“The sneakiest publicity of all,” Joyce said.

“Salinger,” Kim agreed.

“What?” Emtee Dempsey looked at her two young colleagues as if they had lost their minds. But she waved away whatever it was they referred to. “We know only two things. First, that a young man named Michael Layton, who had been missing for years, who was lately following Sister Kimberly and claimed to be a policeman when she spoke to him, is dead. Second, we know that our automobile has been destroyed.”

“Our insurance company will probably suspect us of that,” Joyce said.

Benjamin Rush rose. “You are absolutely right, Sister. I have entered into this speculative conversation, but I must repeat that I cannot believe Michael Layton could possibly be involved in anything wrong or criminal. Let us hope that the police will be able to cast light on what has happened.”

4

It was not only those on Walton Street who were reminded of the Fastnekker gang by the exploding Volkswagen. An editorial in the rival of Katherine’s paper expressed the hope that Chicago, and indeed the country, was not on the threshold of a renewal of the terrorism of a decade ago. Readers were reminded of the various groups, including that led by Regina Fastnekker, and the fear was stated that the destruction of the car was only a prelude to something worse. How many like the unfortunate Michael Layton, products of good homes, having all the advantages of American society, suddenly dropped from sight only to turn up, incredibly, as terrorists? The editorial immediately added that there was absolutely no evidence of any connection of Layton with any terrorist efforts, though the explanation he had given of following a member of a Chicago policeman’s family and the fact that he had been found in a building that had exploded from unknown causes would doubtless prompt some to make that connection. Lieutenant Richard Moriarity had led the investigation that resulted in the successful prosecution of Regina Fastnekker.

Katherine Senski threw the paper down on Emtee Dempsey’s desk and fell into a chair. “That is completely and absolutely irresponsible. It is one thing to sit among friends and try to tie things together, but to publish such random thoughts in a supposedly respectable newspaper, well...” She threw up her hands, at a loss for words.

But Katherine’s reaction was nothing to that of Benjamin Rush. Under his distinguished snow-white hair, his patrician features were rosy with rage.

“It is an outrageous accusation against a man who cannot defend himself.”

“Perhaps the Layton family will sue.”

“I am on my way there now. That is precisely what they want to do. Alas, I shall advise them not to. The editorial cunningly fends off the accusation of libel by qualifying or seeming to take back what it had just said. When you add the First Amendment, there simply is no case. Legally. Morally, whoever wrote this is a scoundrel. I now understand the feelings of clients who have urged me to embark on a course I knew could end only in failure. One wants to tilt at windmills!”

“You will be talking to the Laytons today?”

An immaculate cuff appeared from the sleeve of Benjamin Rush’s navy blue suit as he lifted his arm, and then a watch whose unostentatiousness was in a way ostentatious came into view. “In half an hour. I have come to ask you a favor. Actually, to ask Sister Kimberly.”

“Anything,” Kim said. No member of the Order of Martha and Mary could be unaware of their debt to Benjamin Rush. He had saved this house at the time of the great dissolution and had insured that an endowment would enable the order to continue, in however reduced a form.

“It would be particularly consoling for the Laytons if they could speak to someone who saw Michael as recently as you have.”

The request made Kim uneasy. What if the Laytons wished to derive consolation from the fact that it was a nun who had spoken to their son? Kim herself had wondered if he had not perhaps thought that she could be of help, directly or indirectly, in some difficulty.

“I should tell you that while Melissa Layton is quite devout, her husband Geoffrey is a member of the Humanist Society and regards all religion as a blight.”

“Find out which of them the son favored, Sister.”

Having already agreed to help Mr. Rush, there was nothing Kim could do, but she was profoundly unwilling to talk to grieving parents about a son they had not seen in years and to whom she had spoken only once, in somewhat odd circumstances. Mr. Rush’s car stood at the curb where the Volkswagen had always been, but the contrast could not have been greater. Long and grey with tinted glass, it seemed to require several spaces. Marvin, Mr. Rush’s chunky driver, opened the door and Kim got in, and with Mr. Rush at seemingly the opposite end of the sofa, they drove off in comfort to the Laytons.

On the way, Mr. Rush told her a few more things about the Lay-tons, but nothing could have prepared her adequately for the next several hours. Kim had somehow gotten the impression that the Laytons would be Mr. Rush’s age, which was foolish when she considered that the son had been closer to her age, but Mrs. Layton was a shock. She was beautiful, her auburn hair worn shoulder length, her face as smooth as a girl’s, and the black and silver housecoat, floor length, billowed about her, heightening the effect she made as she crossed the room to them. Kim felt dowdy in her sensible suit, white blouse, and veil, and it didn’t help to remind herself that her costume befitted her vocation. Melissa Layton tipped her cheek for Mr. Rush’s kiss and extended a much braceleted arm to Kim.

“Sister.” Both hands enclosed Kim’s and her violet eyes scanned Kim’s face. “Ben assured us that you would come.”

Geoffrey Layton rose from his chair, nodded to Rush, and gave a little bow to Kim, but his eyes were fastened on her veil.

“Come,” Mrs. Layton said. She had not released Kim’s hand and led her to a settee where they could sit side by side. “Tell me of your meeting with Michael.” And suddenly the beauty was wrenched into sorrow and the woman began to sob helplessly. Now Kim held her hand. Mrs. Layton’s tears made Kim feel a good deal more comfortable in this vast room with its period furniture, large framed pictures, and magnificent view.

Mrs. Layton emerged from her bout of grief even more beautiful than before, teardrops glistening in her eyes, but composed. Mr. Layton and Mr. Rush stood in front of the seated women while Kim told her story.

“How long had he been following you around?”

“For several days.”

“That you know of,” Mrs. Layton said.

“Yes. I spoke of it with the other sisters. At first it was just a nuisance, but then it became disturbing. We decided that I should talk to him. On Wednesday morning...”

“Wednesday,” Mrs. Layton repeated, and her expression suggested she was trying to remember what she had been doing at the time this young woman beside her had actually spoken to her long-lost son.

“He said he knew I was a nun.”

“Of course,” said Mr. Layton.

“I do not wear my veil when I go to Northwestern.”

“Why not?”

“I just don’t.”

“Could he have seen you with it on?”

“I suppose.”

“But what did he say?” Mrs. Layton asked. Kim was aware that another woman had come into the room, her hair and coloring the same as Mrs. Layton’s, though without the dramatic beauty. Mrs. Layton turned to see what Kim was looking at. “Janet, come here. This is Sister Kimberly who talked with your brother Michael.”

The daughter halved the distance between them, but as Kim talked on, answering questions that became more and more impossible, about the Layton son, Janet came closer. The parents wanted to know what he looked like, how he acted, did she think he was suffering from amnesia, on and on, and from time to time when Kim glanced at Janet she got a look of sympathy. Finally the younger woman stepped past Mr. Rush.

“Thank you so much for telling us about your meeting with Michael.” Comparing the two women, Kim could now see that, youthful as Mrs. Layton looked, she looked clearly older than her daughter, who made no effort to be attractive.

The Laytons now turned to Mr. Rush to insist that he bring suit against the editorialist who had slandered their son. Janet led Kim away.

“There’s coffee in the kitchen.”

“Oh good.”

“You realize that all this is to put off the evil day. We have not seen Michael’s body. It is a question whether we will. As a family. I certainly intend to.”

There was both strength and genuineness in Janet Layton, and Kim could see, when they were sitting on stools in the kitchen sipping coffee, that with the least of efforts Janet could rival her mother in beauty. If she didn’t, it was because she felt no desire to conceal her mourning.

“You’re a nun?”

“Yes.”

“I wanted to be a nun once. I suppose most girls think of it.”

“Very briefly.”

“What’s it like?”

“Come visit us. We have a house on Walton Street.”

“Near the Newberry?”

“Just blocks away. Do you go there?”

She nodded. “What is so weird is that I also use the Northwestern library. What if I had gone there Wednesday?”

“I hope I made it clear that your brother seemed perfectly all right to me. But then I thought he was the policeman he said he was and that changed everything. He looked the part.”

“It’s cruel after years of thinking him dead to find out he was alive on Wednesday, in a place I go to, but now is truly dead.” Her lip trembled and she looked away.

“He just disappeared?”

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak for a moment. “One day he left the house for school and never came back. No note, no indication he was going. He took nothing with him. He just ceased to exist, or so it seemed. The police searched, my parents hired private investigators. My father, taking the worst thing he could think of, suspected the Moonies. But not one single trace was found.”

“On his way to school?”

“Chicago. He was an economics major.”

“How awful.”

“I don’t know how my parents bore up under this. My mother of course never lets herself go physically, but inside she has been devastated. It is the first time my father confronted something he couldn’t do anything effective about. That shook him almost as much as the loss of Michael.”

“Mr. Rush says your mother is very devout.”

“Let me show you something.”

They went rapidly through the house, which was far larger than Kim’s first impression of it. On an upper floor as they came down a hallway stood a small altar. There was a statue of perhaps three feet in height of Our Blessed Lady and a very large candle in a wrought-iron holder burning before it. Janet turned and widened her eyes significantly as she indicated the shrine.

“Mother’s. For the return of her lost son.”

There was nothing to say to that. Janet went into a room and waited for Kim to join her.

“This is just the way it was when he disappeared. Michael’s room. Maybe now Mother will agree to...”

No need to develop the thought. No doubt Mrs. Layton would consider it an irreverence to get rid of her son’s clothes and other effects, even though she knew now he was dead. A computer stood on the desk, covered with a clear plastic hood. A bookshelf the top row of which contained works in or related to economics. The other shelves were a hodgepodge, largely paperbacks — mysteries, westerns, science fiction, classics. Michael Layton had either unsettled literary tastes or universal interests.

“The police checked over this room and the private investigators Daddy hired also looked it over. They found no indication Mike intended to leave, and of course that introduced a note of hope. That he’d been kidnapped, for instance. But no demands were made. Every investigation left us where we’d been — with something that made utterly no sense.”

“It must have been awful.”

“I am glad the waiting is over, after all these years. Does that sound terrible?”

“No.”

“I wanted you to see this. I wanted you to know that there are no clues here.”

Kim smiled. “You’ve heard of Sister Mary Teresa?”

Janet nodded.

As they went downstairs, Kim reflected that if Janet was right, and why wouldn’t she be, the explanation for Michael Layton’s murder would have to be sought in what he had been doing in the years since he left his home for the last time. And no one seemed to know where on earth he had been.

5

“Miss Butterfingers is going to call on us,” Joyce whispered when Kim returned to Walton Street.

“Wow.”

“Just what I said to Emtee Dempsey.”

“Yes,” Sister Mary Teresa said, when Kim went into the study and asked about the impending visit. “Miss Fastnekker called half an hour ago and asked if she might come by. I am trying to read these articles of Katherine’s before our visitor arrives. Here are the ones I’ve read.”

Kim took the photocopies and began to read them as she crossed to a chair. What a delight they were. This was Katherine at the height of her powers, the woman who had been the queen of Chicago journalism longer than it was polite to mention. Reading those old stories acquainted Kim with the kind of person she preferred not to know. The Regina Fastnekker Katherine had interviewed intensively and written about with rare evocative power was a prophet of doom, an angel of destruction, a righteous scourge of mankind. At twenty-two years old, she had concluded that human beings are hopelessly corrupt, there is nothing to redeem what is laughingly called civilization. Any judgment that what she had done was illegal or immoral proceeded from a system so corrupt as to render the charges comic. Katherine described Regina as a nihilist, one who preferred nothing to everything that was. It was not that the world had this or that flaw, the world was the flaw.

“I am glad you don’t have possession of hydrogen weapons,” Katherine had observed.

“Atomic destruction is the solution. Inevitably one day it will arrive. I have been anticipating that awful self-judgment of mankind on itself by the actions I have taken.”

“Who appointed you to this destructive task?”

“I did.”

“Have you ever doubted your judgment?”

“Not on these matters.”

“From the point of view of society, it makes sense to lock you up, wouldn’t you say?”

“Society will regret what has been done to me.”

Katherine had clearly been as awed as Kim was now that a woman who had done such deeds, who had killed by accident rather than design, should continue to speak with such conviction that she was somehow not implicated in the universal guilt of the race to which she belonged.

“You are employing a corrupt logic,” Miss Butterfingers had replied.

Katherine had concluded that the only meaning “corrupt” seemed to have was “differing from Regina Fastnekker.”

“What a sweetheart,” Kim commented when she had finished.

“We must not forget that this was the Regina of some years ago. On the phone she seemed very nice.”

“Did you tell her the police would know if she visited us?”

“I saw no reason to say such a thing.”

Emtee Dempsey had invited Regina to come to Walton Street on the assumption that she was now a changed woman, radically different from the terrorist so graphically portrayed by Katherine Senski in her newspaper stories. If she was wrong, if Regina had been behind the blowing up of the Volkswagen and if her custom was to announce a serious deed by a lesser one, Emtee Dempsey could be inviting their assassin to visit. She did not have to wonder what Richard would say if asked about the advisability of admitting Regina to their home.

The woman who stood at the door when Kim went to answer the bell wore a denim skirt that reached her ankles and an oversize cableknit sweater; her hair was pulled back severely on her head and held with a rubber band. Pale blue eyes stared unblinkingly at Kim.

“I have come to see Sister Dempsey.”

There was no mistaking that this was Regina Fastnekker, despite the changes that had occurred in her since the photos that accompanied Katherine’s stories. Kim opened the door and took Regina down the hall to the study. Her back tingled as she walked, as if she awaited some unexpected blow to fall. But she made it to the study door without incident.

“Sister Mary Teresa, this is Regina Fastnekker.”

The old nun did not rise but watched closely as her guest came to the desk. Regina put out her hand and the old nun stood as she took it.

“Welcome to our home.”

“I must tell you that I consider the Catholic Church to be the corruption of Christianity and that it is only by a return to the gospels that we can be saved. One person at a time.”

“Ecclesia semper reformanda.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You express a sentiment as old as Christianity itself. Do you know the story of the order St. Francis founded?”

“St. Francis is someone I admire.”

“I was sure you would. Francis preached holy poverty, personifying it, calling it Lady Poverty, his beloved. After his death, his followers disputed what this meant. Could they, for example, own a house and live in it, or did poverty require them to own absolutely nothing and rely each day on the Lord to provide? Did they own the clothes they wore, since of course each one wore his own clothes?”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“It is possible to make Christianity so pure that it ceases to be.”

“It is also possible to falsify it so much that it ceases to be.”

“Of course.”

“You sound as if you had won an argument.”

“I wasn’t sure we were having one. I am told that you have become a Christian.”

“That makes it sound like something I did. It was done to me. It is a grace of which I am entirely unworthy.”

“Do you know Michael Layton?”

The sudden switch seemed to surprise Regina. She rearranged her skirt and pushed up the sleeve of her sweater.

“I knew him.”

“Before your conversion?”

“Before I went to prison, yes.”

“Have you any idea who killed him?”

“I came here to-tell you that I have not.”

“Have you seen him since you were released?”

“That is the question the police put to me in a dozen different ways.”

“And how did you answer?”

“Yes and no.”

“How yes?”

“I saw his photograph in the paper.”

“Ah.”

“It is my intention always to tell the truth, even when it seems trivial.”

“An admirable ideal. It is one I share.”

There was not a trace of irony in Emtee Dempsey’s tone, doubtless because she felt none. Her ability so to speak that she did not technically tell a lie, however much others might mislead themselves when listening to her, was something Kim tried not to be shocked at. Whenever they discussed the matter, the old nun’s defense — if it could even be called a defense — was unanswerable, but Kim in her heart of hearts felt that Emtee Dempsey should be a good deal more candid than she was.

“The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” she had reminded the old nun.

“A noble if empty phrase.”

“Empty?”

“What is the whole truth about the present moment? Only God knows. I use the phrase literally. Since we cannot know the whole truth we cannot speak it.”

“We can speak the whole truth that we know.”

“Alas, that too is beyond our powers. Even as we speak, what we know expands and increases and we shall never catch up with it.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Only by what you say, my dear, and I am afraid that does not make much sense.”

“I didn’t invent the phrase.”

“You have at least that defense.”

But now, speaking to Regina Fastnekker, Emtee Dempsey seemed to be suggesting that she herself sought always to tell the whole truth. If they were alone, Kim might have called her on this. But at the moment, she watched with fascination the alertness with which Regina listened to the old nun. In her articles, Katherine had described the ingénue expression Regina wore when she pronounced her nihilistic doctrines. Her beliefs might have changed, but her expression had not. Now she looked out at the world with the innocence of one who had been saved by religious conversion, but nonetheless, however much she had changed, Regina Fastnekker was still on the side of the saved.

“What I have come to tell you is that I did not blow up your car, and I have no intention to harm you.”

“I am glad to hear that.”

“I tell you because it would be reasonable to think I had, given my sinful past. I am still a sinner, of course, but I have chosen Jesus for my personal savior and have with the help of His grace put behind me such deeds.”

“You have been blessed.”

“So have you. If I had not been converted I might very well have conceived such a scheme and put it into operation.”

“And killed me?”

“The loved ones of those who put me in prison.”

“A dreadful thought.”

Regina said nothing for a moment, and when she spoke it was with great deliberateness. “I have never killed anyone. I do not say this to make myself seem less terrible than I was. But I never took another’s life.”

“I had thought someone died when an explosion occurred in your apartment.”

“That is true.”

“And you were the cause of that explosion.”

“No. It was an accident.”

“You express yourself with a great deal of precision.”

“Praise the Lord.”

Seldom had the phrase been spoken with less intonation. Regina put her hands on her knees and then rose in an almost stately manner.

“I challenge you to accept the Lord as your savior.”

“My dear young lady, I took the vows of religion nearly fifty years ago. I took Jesus as my spiritual spouse, promising poverty, chastity, and obedience. But I take your suggestion in good grace and shall endeavor to follow your advice.”

Regina Fastnekker, apparently having no truth, however trivial, to utter, said nothing. She bowed and Kim took her to the door.

“Thank you for visiting us.”

“Did you too take those vows?”

“Yes. But not fifty years ago.”

Regina Fastnekker’s smile was all the more brilliant for being so rare. Her laughter had a pure soprano quality. Lithe, long-limbed, her full skirt lending a peculiar dignity to her passage, she went across the porch, descended the steps, and disappeared up the walk.

6

Two days later, in the Northwestern University library, Kim looked up from the book she was reading to find Janet Layton smiling down on her.

“Can we talk?” she whispered.

Kim, startled to see the sister where she had had such a dramatic encounter with the brother, got up immediately. Outside, Janet lit up a cigarette.

“There is something I should have told you the other day and didn’t. In fact I lied to you. I have known all along that Mike was still alive.”

“You did!”

“He telephoned me in my dorm room within a month of his disappearance. The first thing he said was that he did not want my parents to know of the call.”

“And you agreed?”

“I didn’t tell them. I don’t think I would have in any case. You would have to know how terribly they took Mike’s disappearance, particularly at the beginning. If I had told them, they would have wanted proof. There was none I could give. And of course I had no idea then that it would turn into a permanent disappearance. I don’t know that he himself thought so at the time.”

“What did he want?”

“He wanted some computer disks from his room.”

She had complied, putting the disks in a plastic bag and the bag in a trash container on a downtown Chicago corner. She walked away, as she had been instructed, but with the idea of hiding and watching the container. She took up her station inside a bookstore and watched the container. Clerks asked if they could be of help and she shook her head, her eyes never leaving the container. After an hour, the manager came and she moved to a drugstore, certain her eyes had never left the container. After four hours of vigil, she was out of patience. She decided to take the disks from the container and wait for another phone call from her brother. The plastic bag containing the disks was gone.

“I felt like a bag lady, rummaging around in that trash, people turning to look at me. But it was definitely gone. Someone must have taken it within minutes of my putting it there, while I was walking away.”

“And your brother called again?”

“Months later. I asked him if he got the disks. He said yes. That was all. His manner made me glad I’d done what I had.”

Before leaving the disks in the container, Janet had made copies of them. She opened her purse and took out a package.

“Would you give these to Sister Mary Teresa?”

“You should give them to the police.”

“I will leave that up to her. If that’s what she thinks should be done with them, all right.”

“Did you read the disks?”

“I tried to once. I don’t know what program they’re written on, but I typed them out at the DOS prompt. They looked like notes on reading to me. The fact that Mike wanted them means only that they were important to him. Frankly, I’d rather not admit that I’ve heard from Mike over the years. My parents would never understand my silence.”

Kim had difficulty understanding it herself, Emtee Dempsey, on the other hand, found it unsurprising.

“But of course it would have been unsurprising if she told them too. Singular choices do not always have moral necessity. There were doubtless good reasons for either course of action and she chose the one she did.”

“What will you do with them?”

“What the young lady suggested. Study their contents. Can you print them out for me?”

Before she did anything with the disks, Kim took the same precaution Janet had and made copies of them. There were three disks, of the five-and-a-half-inch size, but only two were full, the third had only twelve thousand bytes saved on it. Running a directory on them, Kim jotted down the file names.

BG&E.one

BG&E.two

TSZ.one

TSZ.two

TSZ.tre

That was the contents of the first disk. The second was similarly uninformative.

PENSEES.UNO

PENSEES.DOS

PENSEES.TRE

The third disk had one file, AAV.

The files had not been written on Notabene, the program Kim preferred, nor on either Word or WordPerfect. Kim printed them from ASCI and began reading eagerly as they emerged from the printer but quickly, as Janet had, found her interest flag. Michael Layton seemed to have devised a very personal kind of shorthand. “Para fn eth no es vrd, pero an attempt para vanqr los grads.”

Let Emtee Dempsey decipher that if she could. The fact that Michael Layton wrote in a way difficult, if not impossible, to follow suggested that the disks contained information of interest. The old nun spread the sheets before her, smoothing them out, a look of anticipation on her pudgy face. Kim left her to her task.

The old nun was preoccupied at table and after night prayers returned to her study. At one in the morning, Kim came downstairs to find Emtee Dempsey brooding over the printout. She looked up at Kim and blinked.

“Any luck?”

“You are right to think that decoding always depends on finding one little key. Whether it is a matter of luck, I do not know.”

“Have you found the key?”

“No.”

“I couldn’t make head nor tails of it.”

“Oh, the first two disks present no problem. They are paraphrases of Nietzsche.”

“You mean you can understand those pages?”

“Only to the degree that Nietzsche himself is intelligible. The young man paraphrased passages from the mad philosopher and interspersed his own comments, most of them jejune.”

“How did you know it was Nietzsche?”

“Beyond Good and Evil. Thus Spake Zarathustra.”

“And the second is Pascal?”

“Unfortunately no. The thoughts are young Layton’s, thoughts of unrelieved tedium and banality. Do you know the Pensieri of Leopardi? Giacomo Leopardi?”

“I don’t even know who he is.”

“Was. His work of that name is a collection of pessimistic and misanthropic jottings, puerile, adolescent. If a poet of genius, however troubled, was capable of writing such silliness, we should not perhaps be too harsh with young Layton.”

“What is on the third disk?”

She shook her head. “Those few pages are written in a bad imitation of Finnegan’s Wake, a kind of macaronic relying on a variety of languages imperfectly understood. I had hoped that the first disks would provide me with the clue needed to understand the third, but so far this is...”

An explosion shook the house, bringing Emtee Dempsey to her feet. But Kim was down the hall ahead of her and dashed upstairs. As she came into the upstairs hall, she saw that a portion of the left wall as well as her door had been blown away. The startled face of Joyce appeared through plaster cloud.

“Strike two,” she said.

7

Sister Mary Teresa wanted to take a good look around Kim’s room before calling the police, although why the neighborhood had failed to be shaken awake by the explosion was explained by the incessant street racket that did not really cease until three or sometimes four in the morning. The explosion of Kim’s computer would have been only one noise among many to those outside, however it had filled the house. The wall that had been blown into the hall was the one against which Kim’s computer had stood.

“Why would it do a thing like that?” the old nun asked.

“I’ve never heard of it before.”

“Was it on?”

“I never turn it off.” Kim explained the theory behind this.

They puzzled over the event for perhaps fifteen minutes before Kim called Richard, relying on him to alert the appropriate experts. They came immediately, a tall woman with flying straight hair and her companion whose thick glasses seemed to have become part of his face. They picked around among the debris, eyes bright with interest. This was something new to them as well.

“Computers don’t blow up,” the girl said.

“There had to be a bomb.” Behind the thick lenses her companion’s eyes widened.

“When did you last use the machine?”

“I printed out some disks.”

“Any sign of them?”

They were in the plastic box that had bounced off the far wall and landed on her bed. She opened it and showed them the five disks it contained.

“Five!” she exclaimed. “There are only five.”

“Only?”

She showed them the three copies she had made, and two of the disks she had been given by Janet Layton. And then she remembered.

“I left the third in the drive.”

“Can a computer disk be a bomb?” Emtee Dempsey asked.

Her question brought amused smiles to the two experts. The girl said, “Anything can be a bomb.”

“Michael Layton delivered his second bomb,” Emtee Dempsey said. “Posthumously.”

“Janet Layton gave them to me,” Kim reminded her.

“Yes. Yes, she did.”

Richard came and kept them up until three going over what had happened. Kim let Emtee Dempsey tell the story she herself had heard from Janet Layton. She went over in her mind the conversation she had had with Janet at the Layton home and then what she had said at Northwestern that afternoon. If Janet had told her the truth, the disks she had given Kim were copies of those her brother made, rather than his originals. If one of those disks had been made into a bomb, it had to have been by Janet. But why?

“I’ll ask her why. And I don’t intend to wait for daylight either.”

The next time Kim saw Janet Layton was under police auspices. The violet eyes widened when Kim came in.

“Oh.”

“I’m alive.”

“Thank God.”

She rose and reached a hand across the table. Mastering her aversion, Kim took the hand. Janet turned to Richard.

“Why didn’t you tell me she was unharmed?”

“I don’t talk to people who don’t talk to me.”

Janet talked now. What she had told Kim was true as far as it went; well, almost. She had not, years ago, made copies of the disks her brother asked her to bring, but everything else had happened as she had said.

“Regina told me to tell you what I did.”

“Regina Fastnekker!”

Janet nodded. “After Michael’s death, she called me. She asked me if I remembered delivering some computer disks to Michael long ago. Of course I did. She said she had them and felt they might help solve the mystery of Michael’s death. She asked if I would pass them on to you with just the message I gave you. You could decide, or Sister Mary Teresa could decide, what to do with them.”

Richard made a face. “She knew she could rely on the nosiness of you know who.”

But he was on his feet and heading out of the room. “I’m going to let you go,” he said to Janet.

“Come with me,” Kim said. There was no substitute for Emtee Dempsey’s hearing this story from Janet herself.

But the old nun merely nodded impatiently as Janet spoke. Her interest was entirely in Regina Fastnekker. Katherine, having heard of the second explosion on Walton Street, hurried over, but Janet stayed on, far from being the center of attention. Katherine was almost triumphant when she heard the news that the supposedly converted Regina Fastnekker had used Janet to deliver a second bomb to Walton Street.

“The brazen thing,” she fumed, a grim smile on her face.

“You think she blew up our car?”

“Of course. Your car, Michael Layton, and very nearly Sister Kimberly. Oh, I never believe these stories of radical conversion. People just don’t change character that easily.”

“She denied it, Katherine.”

“It’s part of her new persona. But the gall of the woman, to use the same pattern she always used before.”

“As if she were drawing attention to herself.”

“More insolence,” Katherine said.

Regina Fastnekker denied quite calmly through hours of interrogation that she had killed anybody. Richard, when he brought this news to Walton Street, regarded it as just what one would expect.

“But she does talk to you?”

“Talk?” He shook his head. “She goes on and on, like a TV preacher. How she has promised the Lord to tell the truth and that is what she is doing.”

“I suppose you have gone over the place where Regina lives?”

Richard nodded. “Nothing.”

“And this does not shake your confidence that she is responsible for these bombings?”

“You know what I think? I think she sat in prison all those years and planned this down to the minute. But she wasn’t going to risk being sent to prison again. She would do it and do it in a way that I would know she had done it and yet would not be able to prove she had.”

“Can you?”

“We will. We will.”

Katherine wrote a feature on the Backsliding Miss Butterfingers, in the words of the header. The veteran reporter permitted herself some uncharacteristic forays into what made someone like Regina Fastnekker tick. Prison may not breed criminals, her argument ran, but it receives a criminal and releases him or her worse than he or she was before.

“Wouldn’t ‘he’ be sufficient?”

“I’ve told you of our manual of style?”

“Style is the man,” Emtee Dempsey purred. “Would you be allowed to write that?”

Katherine seemed to be blushing beneath her powdered cheeks. “ ‘Style is the woman’ is the way it will appear in my tomorrow’s article.”

“Et tu, Katherine? Didn’t Regina take credit for what she had done when she was arrested before?”

“She did.”

“And now she continues to deny what she is accused of?”

“ ‘I have not touched a bomb since I left prison.’ That’s it verbatim.”

“Gloves?”

“I thought of that. Something in the careful way she speaks suggested that I do. ‘As far as I know I have never been in the vicinity of an explosive device since leaving prison.’ ”

“What does she say about what Janet Layton told us?”

“She denies it.”

“How?”

“She says it is a lie.”

“Verbatim?”

“Verbatim.”

“Hmmm.”

The following morning when they were returning from St. Matthews on foot, creating a sensation, Emtee Dempsey suddenly stopped and clapped her hands.

“Of course!” she cried, and began to laugh. When she set off again, it was almost skippingly, and her great starched headdress waggled and shook. Joyce and Kim exchanged a look. The mind is a delicate thing.

Emtee Dempsey bounded up the porch steps and inside removed the shawl from her shoulders.

“First breakfast, then call Richard.”

“Why not ask him for breakfast?” Joyce said facetiously.

“No. Afterward. Let’s try for ten o’clock, and we want everyone here. The Laytons, Katherine, Regina Fastnekker, and of course Richard.”

“Regina Fastnekker is under arrest.”

“That is why we must convey the invitation through Richard.”

“He is not going to bring a mad bomber to the scene of the crime.”

“Nonsense. I’ll talk to him if necessary.”

“I’ll talk to her,” Richard said, “but it’s not necessary, it’s impossible, as in it necessarily can’t happen. I am not going to help her put on one of her amateur theatricals.”

“You have every reason to object,” Emtee Dempsey said, already on the phone in her study. “But wouldn’t you like to clear this matter up?”

“Only what is obscure can be cleared up. This is simple as sin. We have the one responsible for those bombings.”

“There’s where you’re wrong, Richard.”

“How in hell can you know that?”

“The provenance of my knowledge is elsewhere. I realized what had happened when we were returning from Mass less than an hour ago.”

“Not on your life, Sister Mary Teresa. And I mean it.”

With that outburst, Kim was sure the old nun had won. Richard had to bluster and fulminate but it was not in his nature to deny such a request. Too often in the past, as he would never admit, such a gathering at Walton Street had proved a breakthrough. When he did agree, it was on his own terms.

“I will be bringing her by,” he said, as if changing the subject. “I want her to see that upstairs bedroom and what’s left of the computer.”

“That’s a splendid idea. Ten o’clock would be best for us.”

Mr. Rush agreed to bring the Laytons, and wild horses could not have kept Katherine away.

8

Benjamin Rush introduced the Laytons to Sister Mary Teresa, who squeezed the grieving mother’s hand while Geoffrey Layton tried not to stare at the old nun’s habit. He looked around the room as if fearful of what signs of superstition he might find, but a man who could get used to the shrine in the hallway of his own house had little to fear on Walton Street. Katherine swept in, a glint in her eye. At the street door she’d whispered that she couldn’t wait to see how Emtee Dempsey broke the shell of Miss Butterfingers.

Kim said nothing. It was unnervingly clear that Emtee Dempsey meant to exonerate the convicted terrorist. Katherine might soon be witnessing the first public embarrassment of her old friend, rather than another triumph. Janet was in the kitchen talking with Joyce, so Kim answered the door when Richard arrived. Regina Fastnekker stood beside him, hands joined in front of her, linked with cuffs, but her expression was serene. Behind them were two of Richard’s colleagues, Gleason and O’Connell, shifting their weight and looking up and down the street. Kim stepped aside and they trooped in.

“Okay if we just go upstairs?”

“The others are in the living room.”

Richard ignored that and proceeded up the stairs with his prisoner. O’Connell leaned close to Kim. “Who’s here?”

“I’ll introduce you.”

Gleason tugged O’Connell’s arm and shook his head warningly. They would stay right where they were.

When Richard came into the living room, one hand on Regina’s elbow, he feigned surprise at the people gathered there.

“I’m here for an on-site inspection of the bombing,” he announced to the far wall.

Mrs. Layton was staring with horror at Regina Fastnekker and her husband looked murderously at the expressionless terrorist. Regina had an announcement of her own.

“Your automobile was blown up by Michael Layton,” she said to Sister Mary Teresa.

“Get her out of here!” Geoffrey Layton cried. “Better yet, we’ll go.”

“Wait,” Emtee Dempsey said. “Let us hear what Regina has to say.”

She repeated, “Michael Layton blew up your car. I called him as soon as I heard of it on the news.” She moved closer to the old nun. “He despised me for being born-again. He meant to force my hand.”

Geoffrey Layton sneered. “He blew up their car and then blew up himself and then blew up the sisters’ computer? Is that your story?”

“Did you kill Michael Layton?” Sister Mary Teresa asked Regina.

“No.”

The old nun shifted her hands on the arms of the chair. “Did you do anything that resulted in the death of Michael Layton?”

Regina started. But she did not answer. She looked warily, almost fearfully at the old nun.

“I know you express yourself with great precision,” Emtee Dempsey said. “One who has vowed always to tell the truth must be most precise in what he says. I ask you again. Did you do anything that...”

“Yes!”

A smile broke out on Richard’s face and he looked as if he might actually hug Emtee Dempsey.

“But you didn’t murder him?”

“No.”

“Richard, let our guest sit down so that she can speak at her leisure.”

But Regina shook her head. She preferred to speak standing. “Michael blew up your car, using skills we had learned together. This consisted in planting the device and from a distance activating it. After Michael’s phone call, I drove past his house with a transceiver set at the appropriate frequency.”

“And there was an explosion.”

“Yes.”

“So you killed him!” Richard said.

“No. He killed himself. That radio signal could only harm him if he intended to harm someone else. If a man fires at another and his gun backfires and kills him, has his intended victim killed him or has he killed himself?”

It was a discussion that went on for some time. The general consensus in the room was that Regina was lying, blaming a dead man.

“That’s how she planned it,” Geoffrey Layton said with disgust.

Benjamin Rush sat sunk into himself. Nothing Geoffrey Layton could say would restore his son’s honor.

Emtee Dempsey rose and went to Mrs. Layton who was looking around almost wildly, as if she could not at all understand what was going on. Kim felt much the same way. Her eye met Janet’s and she went to her. How awful this must be for her. But Janet did not want to be consoled.

“I’m leaving,” she said, and started for the kitchen door.

“Wait, my dear.” Surprisingly, Emtee Dempsey was at Kim’s side. She took Janet’s hand authoritatively and led her to Regina.

“Regina Fastnekker,” she said, “did you give this girl computer disks to pass on to me?”

Regina looked surprised for the second time.

“No.”

“You are not dissembling, are you?”

Regina peered at Janet. “Is that how it was done?”

Janet lunged at Regina, who lifted her manacled hands and staved off the blow. By then Emtee Dempsey had again grasped Janet’s wrist and Richard had come to her assistance.

“We’re talking about the device that blew up the computer?”

“She’s the one,” Janet screamed, trying to free herself. “She ruined Michael’s life and he waited for her while she was in jail and out she comes a religious freak. No more terrorism for Miss Butterfingers.”

Janet threw back her head and began to howl in frustration. Her father seemed to age before their eyes and Mrs. Layton recoiled from the spectacle of her out-of-control daughter. Benjamin Rush tried to calm Janet, but she lowered her shoulder and bumped him away, very nearly sending him to the floor. That’s when O’Connell and Gleason came in and subdued her. It seemed a good idea to unshackle Regina and put the cuffs on Janet. Katherine Senski stood, looked around the room, and asked if she could use the study. She had a story to write.

But her story was incomplete until two days later when a defiant but subdued Janet told of rigging the disks in order to turn suspicion firmly on Regina. The woman had ruined Michael’s life and Janet was sure she had killed him as well. By continuing with her brother’s plan, she hoped to send Regina Fastnekker back to prison.

That, as it turned out, was her own destination, however postponed it would be, given the legal counsel her parents hired for her defense. She released a statement saying that she regretted that anything she might have done had threatened the nuns on Walton Street. But by then she had reverted to her story that Regina Fastnekker had persuaded her to deliver the disks.

Questioned about this at the mall where she was urging shoppers to repent and be saved, Regina would say only, “When I was a child I spoke as a child, but now that I have become a man I have put away the things of a child.”

Emtee Dempsey asked Katherine if her paper’s policy would necessitate altering the scriptural passage cited by Miss Butterfingers, but her old friend pretended not to hear.