When the address numbers got large enough to read, he saw he had been right. Matt smiled to himself. Maybe the lack of yard bric-a-brac had given the place away. It was too neat, too stripped down to the essentials. No matter the architectural style, every convent had that in common, that bare, clean, dustless feel. Rectories, on the other hand, no matter how modern, always broadcast an air of fusty, bachelor disorder on the brink of becoming unmanageable.
He entered a small courtyard edged in sun loving, white-and-magenta periwinkles and rang a doorbell.
Despite its modest exterior, the place was large enough to swallow all sound of the bell. Waiting at a convent door always felt like waiting for the Wicked Witch to open the Halloween portaclass="underline" which nun would come? Grade-schoolers at St. Stanislaus all had their favorites--and their mortally feared.
The broad wooden door swung open with an energetic swoosh that sucked hot air past Matt. A figure was framed in shadow.
"Matthias, Sister Seraphina greeted him with robust delight. "Come in."
Just before he stepped over the threshold, an unseen lurker darted past, a dusty yellow cat big enough to tap his knee with the tip of its tail.
"Peter!" Seraphina admonished in a fond tone no thirteen-year-old hardened case would heed. "You're a pretty pushy gatekeeper. Did he get hair all over you?" she asked Matt. She turned to conduct him to the visitors' parlor, and
Matt found himself expecting something: the billiard-ball click of oversizcd rosary beads. But that memory came from his earliest grade-school days. Nuns no longer wore robe and rosary and wimple. Still, Sister Seraphina had been in uniform--a black habit with white touches at the headdress---when he had made her acquaintance in the fourth grade. He secretly dreaded seeing her without her charismatic costume.
He had more than twenty Years to bridge; seeing her aged would be bad enough.
The dim hall was paved with quarry tile. She led him to a small room floored in the same dull red color, with interior wooden shutters drawn against the heat.
"Sit down. Would you like some lemonade? Iced tea?"
"The tea would be great."
She was gone before he'd had a good chance to look at her. Perhaps she felt the need of intervening props as much as he did. Her voice's sprightly tone had been familiar, but forced.
He looked around, and then sat down in a carved wooden chair of mismatched Queen Anne-Hispanic style, upholstered in maroon velvet. Convent furniture was never new, if a convent had been constructed in the fifties or sixties; its furnishings had once been new: blond, uncompromising lines that hinted at the Scandinavian but were too plain to pretend to a style that required a capital letter. If the convent was older than thirty or forty years, it was filled with hand-me-downs from the wealthier parishioners or some ecclesiastical rectory.
This chair appeared to be an escapee from the latter, but in one factor it was the quintessential convent chair, whatever its age: it was bare-armed and -legged, and hard-seated to sit on.
Still, it suited this warm climate and this Spanish atmosphere. Sister Seraphina did not.
She returned quickly with a tray bearing a pitcher of iced tea, two glasses, a saucer of fresh-cut lemons and a sugar bowl with spoon. Matt rose to help her install it on a desktop, then captured a lemon slice for his tea. The small wooden table next to his chair had no such frippery as a coaster, but it did have a doily with a solid center and an elaborate, airy edging that stood up like a clown's ruff. On this he placed his sweating glass, which now echoed his own condition, and confronted the past in the person of Sister Seraphina O'Donnell.
She was summing him up as well, he saw, so they simply sat and did so until her mouth folded tight to avoid a laugh, and he sipped his tea, Strong as shellac. He squeezed more lemon into it.
"You haven't changed," he began.
"All my ex-students say that," she noted complacently.
"They assume I must be ninety by now."
"You look great," he said.
"How do you know? How could you tell what I looked like before with the habit?"
"Do you miss it?"
She paused, and then shook her head. At least she still wore glasses, the frames as effacing as ever. Her hair was white with accents of gray, permed and cut into the modest Social Security, old-ladies' style that is easy and inexpensive to maintain.
She wore a silver crucifix inset into a largish wooden cross on a thin chain around her neck. Other than that, her dress was ordinary, though Matt thought he detected a thrift-shop look; A-line khaki cotton skirt; short-sleeved, blue-striped polyester blouse; low-heeled, sensible shoes that might not be real leather; no rings, no earrings.
For a moment, the outfit seemed oddly familiar. He puzzled to place it, and then smiled: a dead ringer for Lieutenant C.R. Molina's low-key, workaday garb. Trust a nun to find another uniform when her order did away with the dramatic medieval habit she was used to.
He took two more sips from his sweaty glass, and then set it down on the circle of doily for good. "So, Our Lady of Guadalupe isn't as tranquil as it looks. How did you get here?"
"Retirement," she said with a curl of her mouth.
Matt was startled to note the faint, pale sheen of lip gloss. As happened to many older women, white hair brought out the color of her eyes, hazel-green. The deep-rose lip gloss complemented the new color scheme. It wasn't vanity, merely a desire to look reasonably healthy at an age when everyone wrote you off.
"So many parochial schools in Chicago have closed," she went on. "The convents have become old-nuns' homes. At least here I can do 'community organization' work. But I'm out of the teaching game, and high time."
"Is Saint Stan's school closed?" Matt asked.
"Not yet. But there aren't nuns enough to staff it. All lay teachers nowadays, and even though they still accept substandard wages, it costs so much to keep it going . . ." She shifted on her chair, a hard-seated side chair with faded brocade upholstery. "Our Lady of Guadalupe is in the midst of a major fund drive to underwrite some renovation, and the grade school. It's vital to the parish, to the neighborhood?'
He nodded. His thigh muscles were beginning to feel the strain of the demanding chair. Catholic churches depended on their parishioners to underwrite everything --~if the parish were poor, it was endangered. St. Stan's served a large, working-class neighborhood, but everybody who was Polish was Catholic back then, and the widows' mites poured in until the statue of the Virgin loomed above a mass of shining candles.
"What's the problem?" he asked.
She fidgeted again on her chair, "I know you work nights and getting you out in the afternoon is an imposition, Matthias--"
"It's no trouble," he assured her, adding, "and I go by just 'Matt' now."
Her face froze. The ex-teacher was about to insist that the student would be called by his full and formal name. But those days were gone with the habit and the wimple.
"Matt," she repeated meekly. He wasn't fooled. "Well, Matt-- she enunciated the terminal t's like a machine gun spitting bullets "--some very odd things are happening since our fund drive began."
"Odd?"
"Disturbing," she corrected herself. She folded her hands on her lap--khaki-colored hands, plain, the nails virtually unnoticeable. "There have been noises outside the convent at all hours, even lights in the neighborhood, flashlights, all of it bright enough or loud enough to awake us, and alarm us."
"Kids," he diagnosed quickly. "Probably just hanging out, but it could be gang activity, or drug deals."
"Right next to the church?"
"Sorry, Sister Seraphina, but kids these days would do drugs in the sanctuary if they thought it was a safe place."
"It used to be." she commented sadly, "All those adorable little altar boys, growing up to be lookouts or drug runners."