Кэти Райх - Death Du Jour

The old nun studied the grid for a very long time, lenses millimeters from the page.

“She’s not there,” she boomed.

“Excuse me?”

“She’s not there.” A knobby finger tapped the rectangle. “That’s the wrong place.”

Father Ménard returned at that moment. With him was a tall nun with heavy black eyebrows that angled together above her nose. The priest introduced Sister Julienne, who raised clasped hands and smiled.

It wasn’t necessary to explain what Sister Bernard had said. Undoubtedly they’d heard the old woman while in the corridor. They’d probably heard her in Ottawa.

“That’s the wrong place. You’re looking in the wrong place,” she repeated.

“What do you mean?” asked Sister Julienne.

“They’re looking in the wrong place,” she repeated. “She’s not there.”

Father Ménard and I exchanged glances.

“Where is she, Sister?” I asked.

She bent to the diagram once again, then jabbed her finger at the southeast corner of the church. “She’s there. With Mère Aurélie.”

“But, Sis–”

“They moved them. Gave them new coffins and put them under a special altar. There.”

Again she pointed at the southeast corner.

“When?” we asked simultaneously.

Sister Bernard closed her eyes. The wrinkled old lips moved in silent calculation.

“Nineteen eleven. The year I came here as a novice. I remember, because a few years later the church burned and they boarded it up. It was my job to go in and put flowers on their altar. I didn’t like that. Spooky to go in there all alone. But I offered it up to God.”

“What happened to the altar?”

“Taken out sometime in the thirties. It’s in the Holy Infant Chapel in the new church now.” She folded the napkin and began gathering coffee things. “There was a plaque marking those graves, but not anymore. No one goes in there now. Plaque’s been gone for years.”

Father Ménard and I looked at each other. He gave a slight shrug.

“Sister,” I began, “do you think you could show us where Élisabeth’s grave is?”

“ Bien sûr .”

“Now?”

“Why not?” China rattled against china.

“Never mind the dishes,” said Father Ménard. “Please, get your coat and boots on, Sister, and we’ll walk over.”

Ten minutes later we were all back in the old church. The weather had not improved and, if anything, was colder and damper than in the morning. The wind still howled. The branches still tapped.

Sister Bernard picked an unsteady path across the church, Father Ménard and I each gripping an arm. Through the layers of clothing, she felt brittle and weightless.

The nuns followed in their spectator gaggle, Sister Julienne ready with steno pad and pen. Guy hung to the rear.

Sister Bernard stopped outside a recess in the southeast corner. She’d added a hand-knitted chartreuse hat over her veil, tied under her chin. We watched her head turn this way and that, searching for markers, getting her bearings. All eyes focused on the one spot of color in the dreary church interior.

I signaled to Guy to reposition a light. Sister Bernard paid no attention. After some time she moved back from the wall. Head left, head right, head left. Up. Down. She checked her position once more, then gouged a line in the dirt with the heel of her boot. Or tried to.

“She’s here.” The shrill voice echoed off stone walls.

“You’re sure?”

“She’s here.” Sister Bernard did not lack self-assurance.

We all looked at the mark she’d made.

“They’re in little coffins. Not like regular ones. They were just bones, so everything fit into small coffins.” She held her tiny arms out to indicate a child-size dimension. An arm trembled. Guy focused the light on the spot at her feet.

Father Ménard thanked the ancient nun and asked two of the sisters to help her back to the convent. I watched their retreat. She looked like a child between them, so small that the hem of her coat barely cleared the dirt floor.

I asked Guy to bring the other spotlight to the new location. Then I retrieved my probe from the earlier site, positioned the tip where Sister Bernard had indicated, and pushed on the T-bar handle. No go. This spot was less defrosted. I was using a tile probe to avoid damaging anything underground, and the ball-shaped tip did not pass easily through the partially frozen upper layer. I tried again, harder.

Easy, Brennan. They won’t be happy if you shatter a coffin window. Or poke a hole through the good sister’s skull.

I removed my gloves, wrapped my fingers around the T-bar, and thrust again. This time the surface broke, and I felt the probe slide into the subsoil. Suppressing the urge to hurry, I tested the earth, eyes closed, feeling for minute differences in texture. Less resistance could mean an airspace where something had decomposed. More could mean that a bone or artifact was present underground. Nothing. I withdrew the probe and repeated the process.

On the third try I felt resistance. I withdrew, reinserted six inches to the right. Again, contact. There was something solid not far below the surface.

I gave the priest and nuns a thumbs-up, and asked Guy to bring the screen. Laying aside the probe, I took up a flat-edged shovel and began to strip thin slices of earth. I peeled soil, inch by inch, tossing it into the screen, my eyes moving from the fill to the pit. Within thirty minutes I saw what I was looking for. The last few tosses were dark, black against the red-brown dirt in the screen.

I switched from shovel to trowel, bent into the pit, and carefully scraped the floor, removing loose particles and leveling the surface. Almost immediately I could see a dark oval. The stain looked about three feet long. I could only guess at its width since it lay half hidden under unexcavated soil.

“There’s something here,” I said, straightening. My breath hung in front of my face.

As one, the nuns and priest moved closer and peered into the pit. I outlined the oval with my trowel tip. At that moment Sister Bernard’s escort nuns rejoined the flock.

“It could be a burial, though it looks rather small. I’ve dug a bit to the left, so I’ll have to take this portion down.” I indicated the spot where I was squatting. “I’ll excavate outside the grave itself and work my way down and in. That way we’ll have a profile view of the burial as we go. And it’s easier on the back to dig that way. An outside trench will also allow us to remove the coffin from the side if we have to.”

“What is the stain?” asked a young nun with a face like a Girl Scout.

“When something with a high organic content decays, it leaves the soil much darker. It could be from the wooden coffin, or flowers that were buried with it.” I didn’t want to explain the decomposition process. “Staining is almost always the first sign of a burial.”

Two of the nuns crossed themselves.

“Is it Élisabeth or Mère Aurélie?” asked an older nun. One of her lower lids did a little dance.

I raised my hands in a “beats me” gesture. Pulling on my gloves, I started troweling the soil over the right half of the stain, expanding the pit outward to expose the oval and a two-foot strip along its right.

Again, the only sounds were scraping and screening. Then,

“Is that something?” The tallest of the nuns pointed to the screen.

I rose to look, grateful for an excuse to stretch.

The nun was indicating a small, reddish-brown fragment.

“You bet your a–. That sure is, Sister. Looks like coffin wood.”

I got a stack of paper bags from my supplies, marked one with the date, location, and other pertinent information, set it in the screen, and laid the others on the ground. My fingers were now completely numb.