J. Jance - Long Time Gone

The convent’s several buildings, nestled in a slight hollow, looked old and European. Thick hay-bale walls were covered with whitewashed stucco. The roofs were covered with red clay tiles. The centerpiece of the place was a tiny chapel, no bigger than a two-car garage.

As I stopped beside what appeared to be the main building, the door to the chapel opened and Sister Mary Katherine stepped out. She was dressed in an old-fashioned flowing habit.

“I was saying prayers for Elvira Marchbank,” she said. “If you’ll come in and wait for a few minutes, I’ll change into civilian clothing for our drive into town.”

She led me into the main building and left me seated on a couch in front of a cheerfully crackling fire. The fire may have been cheerful, but I wasn’t. Not telling Sister Mary Katherine to stay away from Elvira Marchbank had been a serious error on my part. I hadn’t mentioned it because it hadn’t seemed necessary. It never occurred to me that Sister Mary Katherine would want to have anything to do with the woman who had helped murder her friend, Mimi. I understood that my refusing to give Paul Kramer information about the cold case I was working hadn’t caused Elvira’s death, but it was likely that she had been killed because I was working the Mimi Marchbank case.

One way or the other, that made what had happened my fault. But even with all that free-floating guilt, somehow the warmth of the fire got to me. I was dozing in front of it when Sister Mary Katherine opened a heavy wooden door and reentered the room. She was wearing the same skirt, blouse, and cardigan she had worn the first time I saw her. “Ready?” she said.

I nodded and stood.

“It’ll be a long time before the next ferry,” she announced. “We could just as well drive around.”

“How long will it take us to get to downtown Seattle from here?”

“Two hours or so. Maybe more, depending on traffic.”

I called Detective Jackson and gave him our ETA. Then, once we were in the Taurus, I waited until we had left the convent grounds before I lit into her. “What were you thinking?” I demanded. “Why on earth did you go see Elvira?”

Sister Mary Katherine seemed totally unperturbed by my question. “I didn’t do the right thing when I was a girl,” she returned. “I wanted to talk to Elvira about it. I wanted to know if she was sorry for what she’d done-and she was.”

I could just imagine how hearing that would go over with the Seattle PD detectives. “So you actually spoke to her about Mimi’s murder?”

“Yes, of course I did. I already told you that. I went up to the door and knocked. When she opened it and I told her who I was, she invited me in and we had tea.”

“How civilized. You sip tea and talk murder.”

“We sipped tea, and I prayed with her,” Sister Mary Katherine corrected. “I believe Elvira was glad to see me-glad to have a way to put what she and Albert had done behind her.”

This was not going to go over at all well with my fellow detectives. “When did you leave?” I asked.

“About three-thirty,” Sister Mary Katherine said, “but I didn’t kill her, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I may not be thinking that,” I grumbled back at her, “but other people will be. Like the Seattle homicide detectives working the case, for instance. I don’t know about the time of death, but if you were one of the last people to see her-”

“I’m not a detective,” she interrupted. “I’m a woman of God. Once I remembered what had happened, I admit, my first reaction-my very human reaction-was to want to see Elvira Marchbank punished for what she did. But after I left you at the Westin, I came to my senses. My real purpose in life is saving souls, not in seeing that the guilty go to prison. In the case of Elvira’s soul, I think I may have been of some help.”

“She confessed to you, then?” I asked.

“Certainly not,” Sister Mary Katherine responded. “I’m a nun, not a priest. She’s an Episcopalian, you know.”

“So she didn’t come right out and admit to you that she helped murder Madeline Marchbank, but she said she was sorry?”

“She didn’t have to say she did it. I know she did it,” Sister Mary Katherine said, verbally underscoring the word know . “I saw her do it, remember?”

We rode for some time in silence. I tended to believe that Sister Mary Katherine was telling the truth, that she had gone to Elvira’s house in hopes of saving the woman’s soul. I doubted my former colleagues in the homicide section of Seattle PD would see things in that same light.

“I’m sorry if what I did disappointed you,” she added finally. “We seem to be working at cross-purposes here. Tell me, who exactly are we meeting with once we get to town?”

“We’re meeting with four Seattle PD homicide detectives. Two of them are assigned to Elvira’s case. The other two are working Madeline’s.”

“They’ve reopened it?”

“Yes.”

Sister Mary Katherine sighed. “But Elvira’s dead. So that will finally be the end of it.”

“Probably,” I agreed. “For Madeline’s homicide, anyway. Closing a case with a dead defendant isn’t nearly as difficult as convicting a live one. Detectives don’t have to develop evidence that will hold up in court, and they don’t have to prove culpability ‘beyond a reasonable doubt.’ In Elvira’s case, however, it seems likely that you may have been one of the last people to see her alive. That means you may be considered a person of interest, if not a possible suspect. You probably shouldn’t go to this meeting without counsel.”

“I have counsel,” she said firmly.

“If you’re thinking of me as counsel, you need to know I don’t count. You should have an attorney present. Maybe your friend at the archbishop’s office could help.”

“Our Father in Heaven is my counsel,” Sister Mary Katherine declared. “He’s all I need.”

It would have been rude of me to mention the number of vehicles I’ve seen hauled away from accident scenes to wrecking yards while still proudly displaying their “God is my copilot” bumper stickers. So I kept my mouth shut and kept driving.

Heavy snowfall followed by two days of warm drenching rain had brought every river in western Washington above flood stage. As we drove east toward Mount Vernon, the fields on either side of the road were inundated with water, making it seem as if we were on a causeway rather than a highway. Living in the city, it’s easy to forget that out in the hinterlands people often have to resort to sandbags in order to wage hand-to-hand combat with Mother Nature.

Just north of Marysville, my cell phone rang. “We’ve got a problem,” Kendall Jackson told me. “Captain Kramer wants to see you ASAP.”

“Since Sister Mary Katherine and I are already on our way to meet with you, that should be easy to arrange.”

“Not as easy as you think,” Kendall responded. “It’s about Wink Winkler.”

“What about him?”

“He’s been reported missing. From his retirement home in West Seattle. According to the person who called it in, he left in a cab shortly after talking to you-left and never came back.”

I thought about the bulldog-faced woman at the nursing home to whom I had given my card. With that card and with Wink Winkler having at one time been the lead investigator in the Madeline Marchbank homicide, it hadn’t taken long for Kramer to connect the dots. I was connecting the same dots. If Winkler had disappeared after talking to me, then in some way I didn’t yet understand, I was probably responsible for that disappearance. No wonder Kramer was on the warpath.

“Tell him I’m on my way. I’ll see him when I get there.” I hung up the phone.