Meg O'Brien - The Final Kill

Abby’s hands were poised over the second boot, but she sat back on her heels.

“You’ve been a nun for almost fifty years, Helen. Since you were twenty-five. And you cracked a pretty strict whip when I was in school. Are you telling me now that it’s a bad thing to follow rules?”

“I’m telling you he shouldn’t have brought them here,” she said, frowning. “Not those FBI people. He broke your trust.”

Abby pulled the other boot off and Helen winced. “Ouch! Don’t take it out on my poor feet, child! I’m just telling you what you already know.”

Mornings in Carmel Valley could be cold, especially when there was fog, as there was today. Helen’s foot, when Abby took off the mended black cotton sock, was icy. She took it in her hands to rub it. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to tug so hard. But, Helen, when you were Marti’s and my teacher, you never talked like this. You were so…” Abby searched for the right word. “Religious.”

She thought it best not to tell her that Marti and she sometimes called her a “mealy moral mouth.”

The truth was, though they’d feared Helen then for her strictness, she was the best teacher they’d ever had. Deep down, they loved the valuable things she’d taught them. When she moved from St. Joseph’s High to the motherhouse, where Abby and Marti were training as nuns, they felt a healthy combination of anxiety and excitement.

Helen didn’t let them down. Despite her brusque attitude, Abby and Marti had always suspected their teacher had a heart of gold. She would sneak peanut butter and jelly sandwiches out of the motherhouse kitchen for them in the late afternoons, when their stomachs were growling and dinner wasn’t for another two hours.

And were they ever hungry. Aside from attending college classes all day to become teachers, they were still nuns, and had to follow all the rules demanded of the other sisters: up at 4:00 a.m. for prayers, Mass at six, scrubbing floors, taking turns in the community laundry…. The work of keeping up a large Gothic-style “mansion” that housed one hundred and fifty nuns, five stories and 1930s tile floors that needed polishing every week, never ended.

“My dear girl,” Helen said irritably, interrupting Abby’s thoughts, “religion doesn’t make you blind and dumb. At least, it shouldn’t. Do you think I got to be this old without knowing what people are all about?”

“Of course not,” Abby said. “I guess I’m just surprised that you’re—”

“What, jaded? Nuns don’t have a right to get jaded? Lordy me, girl, it’s been years since I’ve made the sign of the cross right— ‘in the name of the Father, the Son,’ and all that—instead of just saying one, two, three, four. You get burned out! And you should know that better than most. It’s not like we haven’t been through this all before.”

“But you’re still a good person, Helen. And, in your own way, a good nun.”

“Ha. In my own way, huh? Well, thank you—I think. My point is that you don’t have to be religious to be good, girl. That’s where some of those churches get it all wrong. God loves us all, and he’s not about to let the people he loves go to hell just because they didn’t say a certain set of words in front of a certain kind of preacher and get water dumped all over their heads.”

Abby smiled. “Tsk-tsk, Sister Helen Marie. You sound more like a renegade every day.”

“Well, maybe I’ve been hanging around you too long,” she grumped.

Abby took a cup of green tea and went into her office, debating whether she should put aside her anger and hurt of the night before and call Ben. She could at least ask if they’d caught whoever had committed the Highland Inn murder.

In the end, she decided it wouldn’t be wise to show too much interest. Ben wouldn’t even have to wonder why she’d asked; he’d know right away that she’d lied through her teeth the night before, and that Alicia and Jancy had been here.

Rubbing the weariness lines in her forehead, Abby wondered if she should call social services to see what her options were with Jancy. But even that she waffled about. Instead, she called a private investigator she often used when relocating abused women. Bobby had helped her out many times when she’d had to have a violent husband tracked to make sure she and Paseo didn’t relocate his battered wife anywhere near him.

She started out by asking him to look for Allie, and gave him certain information about her that she didn’t think the police or FBI had. With any luck, that might help him—and her—to get to Allie first.

Jancy came down to the kitchen around ten, and Binny buzzed Abby over her office intercom to let her know. Since Binny was already busy getting lunch started, Abby put her phone calls aside and scrambled up some eggs for Jancy. She’d insisted she wasn’t hungry, so Abby tossed some cheese, onions and roasted garlic cloves into the eggs, thinking the aromas might tempt her to eat. It worked. When Abby asked her if the eggs tasted okay, she shrugged and kept on eating—gargantuan praise from a teenager.

Abby sat across from Jancy at the wooden worktable and drank a fresh cup of green tea.

“Don’t you eat?” Jancy asked.

“I did, at six o’clock this morning,” Abby said.

“Do you ever sleep?”

“Sure. Not much last night, though. How about you?”

Again, Jancy shrugged. “I kept hearing noises, like real loud footsteps on the ground. I thought maybe it was bears.”

Abby smiled. “We don’t have bears around here. You probably heard the horses.”

At this, Jancy’s eyes lit up. It was easier to see that they were a brilliant green, now that most of the makeup had worn off.

“You have horses here?”

“Four of them. Do you like to ride?”

“I love it!” But her smile turned to a frown. “I guess I won’t be here that long, though, huh? You’ve got to find somebody else to take me.”

“One day at a time,” Abby said. “Let’s see how it goes.”

She washed up their dishes, and Jancy surprised her by offering to dry. After that, Abby invited the girl to join her while she practiced for her black belt in Kenpo.

“What the heck is Kenpo?” Jancy asked.

“It’s a form of martial arts. I need to work on it every morning, if I’m ever going to get that belt.”

“You’re not going to practice on me, are you?” Jancy said somewhat cautiously.

“Well, I hadn’t planned on it, but since you’re here…” From her expression, Abby wasn’t sure if Jancy knew she was kidding.

They went down the hall to the gym Abby had installed, and found Davis Bowen, her Kenpo teacher, waiting patiently in a meditative state in front of the small rock fountain he’d urged her to include in her remodeling plans. His own house was high on a hill above Clint Eastwood’s Mission Ranch Inn, and the view along the coastline was drop-dead gorgeous. Davis also had flowers and three different fountains in his courtyard.

“We need all the beauty we can get in this world,” he’d told Abby long ago. “I think if everyone lived surrounded by nature and beauty, there would be no wars.”

“Same thing if everyone got a massage every day,” Abby had reminded him, smiling.

“Ah, yes…another one of my dreams for creating peace on earth.”

She left Jancy with Davis and went to the locker room to change into her white gi and brown belt. She’d made her way to brown fast, pouring her angry energies into working up from blue after Marti was murdered and she herself had nearly fallen to the same fate. If anyone ever came after her again, she swore, they wouldn’t stand a chance. “First black belt” had stumped her so far, though.

Jancy watched her work out with Davis awhile, but a few minutes later, when Abby turned toward where she’d been, she saw her in front of the fountain instead. She was in a lotus position, palms up and resting on her knees, eyes closed.