She led me back to the table. I glanced over my shoulder at the entrance. “Fred will be here eventually,” she said. “He called a few minutes ago. He’s stuck in some kind of traffic tie-up on the freeway. Can I get you something, coffee or tea? It’s a little too early to order lunch.”
“Coffee would be fine,” I said.
She waved down a waiter and I ordered coffee. As soon as the waiter had left, she sat up straight, folded her hands on the edge of the table, and studied my face. “How much did Fred tell you?” she asked.
“Not much,” I admitted, probably sounding as grumpy as I felt. I’ve never liked being jerked around like a puppet by the whim of some invisible puppeteer.
“Did he mention that I’m not Bonnie Jean Dunleavy anymore?”
“No,” I said. “As a matter of fact, he didn’t.”
“That’s all right,” she said. “He made it clear that if you were going to know about any of this, it would have to come from me directly. He didn’t want to run the risk of violating my privacy. My name is Sister Mary Katherine now. I joined a convent-the Order of Saint Benedict-right out of high school. Now I’m mother superior of a small convent over on Whidbey Island.”
“He made no mention of that, either,” I said.
“It’s a long story,” she said. “Are you sure you have time?”
I thought about Harry waving me out of his office. “I’m at your disposal,” I told her.
“My folks married young. Daddy was eighteen and Mama was sixteen when they eloped. They left their disapproving families behind in Pennsylvania and came west. Neither of them had a high school diploma. In fact, I didn’t realize until after my father died that he had never learned to read. With benefit of hindsight, I suppose he was dyslexic, but I doubt people knew much about dyslexia back then. My mother covered for him as best she could, but he moved from one menial job to another and finally ended up working as a mechanic. By the time I graduated from eighth grade, I must have attended twenty different schools. That meant I was always behind academically, and the older I got, the further I fell behind.”
“It must have been tough,” I offered.
She nodded. “It was. Everybody thought I was stupid. Eventually I thought so, too. The summer before my freshman year, we were living in Seattle. My mother was working as a maid at one of the motels on Aurora, and my dad had a temporary summertime job working for a logging company over near Randle.
“I’m not sure how Mother did it, but somehow she wangled a scholarship for me to attend a weeklong CYO camp outside Leavenworth. We’d never had enough money for me to go to camp before, and I was thrilled. My parents’ fifteenth wedding anniversary was on Saturday while I was away at camp. My mother drove all the way to Randle by herself so she and my dad could celebrate. They planned to have a picnic lunch up on Mount Rainier, but they never made it. On their way there they were hit head-on by a runaway logging truck that came careening around a sharp curve. They both died instantly.”
She told the story with only a trace of sadness, with the poise that comes from having adjusted to a long-ago tragedy, but hearing about the deaths of Bonnie Jean Dunleavy’s parents certainly explained the sad expression that had been captured so clearly in her high school yearbook photo.
“Because I was away at camp, I had no idea what had happened. Mother and I, and occasionally my father, attended Christ the King Church up on Phinney Ridge. The priest there, Father Mark, had taken an interest in us, and he was the one who had made it possible for me to attend camp. When word of the accident reached him, Father Mark came all the way to Leavenworth to tell me what had happened and to bring me back home. Realizing no one would be there at our apartment to take care of me, Father Mark had one of the camp counselors, Maribeth Hogan, leave camp to come be with me. She was there through the funeral and stayed for the remainder of the summer. Not surprisingly, we’ve been friends ever since.”
“You were lucky to have people like that in your life,” I said.
“More than lucky,” she replied. “As I said earlier, my parents came from Pennsylvania. They were pretty much estranged from both sides of their families. None of the relatives from back there bothered to come out for the funerals, but when the logging truck’s brakes were found to be faulty and it looked like there would be a sizable insurance settlement, those very same relatives-my father’s mother and my mother’s two brothers-descended on Seattle like a swarm of locusts, all of them bent on going to court to be declared my legal guardian. Father Mark came to see me and asked if I wanted to live with any of those relatives. I told him I didn’t even know them. The last thing I wanted to do was go all the way across the country to live in a strange place called Pittsburgh where I knew no one. Fortunately, Father Mark listened to me. I also think he suspected that my relatives were far more interested in laying hands on the insurance money than they were in looking after my welfare. He got in touch with Catholic Family Services. They placed me in a foster home in Ballard.
“Adelaide Rodgers, my foster mother, had entered a convent as a young woman but had been forced to drop out after only two years. Her mother had taken sick, and she’d had to go back home to help look after her younger brothers and sisters. These days you hear lots of horror stories about what goes on in foster homes, but Adelaide was wonderful. She was a loving, pious woman who went to Mass every Sunday and who lived her faith every single day. She believed in living frugally. She worked as a teller in a bank, but she sewed all her own clothing, and she taught me to do the same.
“Adelaide never used a dime of my insurance settlement. She said it was a nest egg for me to use when I was ready to go to college. She invested my money right along with her own. Over the years my nest egg grew to surprising proportions, and so did hers. Adelaide never officially adopted me. I don’t think it was possible for single women to adopt in those days, but as far as she was concerned, I was her daughter. When she died a number of years ago, she left me a small fortune and a farm she had inherited up on Double Bluff Road on Whidbey Island. She left me the property and the money but with an important request. She asked that I use both the property and the money to found a convent in her mother’s memory-which I did. It’s called the Convent of Saint Benedict.”
“Double Bluff Road. Isn’t there a country club somewhere around there?” I asked. “I think I went there for a conference once.”
Sister Mary Katherine-I had to teach myself to think of her as Sister Mary Katherine and not Bonnie Jean- smiled and nodded. “Useless Bay Country Club,” she said. “They’re neighbors of ours. We like to think of ourselves as the Useful Useless Bay Country Club.”
A nun cracking jokes and referring to her convent as a country club? That came as a bit of a surprise. “How did you go from Ballard High School to Mother Superior?” I asked.
“As I said, because I changed schools so much, I was way behind academically by the time I reached high school. Even with Adelaide’s nightly tutoring sessions, college prep courses were far beyond my abilities, but I was a star in Miss Breckenridge’s home ec classes.”
Miss Lola Breckenridge-I hadn’t thought of her in years. Even now it seems ironic that the woman in charge of Ballard’s home ec department had been an old maid. She was a tall, bony, yet imposing creature who dressed impeccably in designer-style fashions that she sewed herself. And she was tough. Boys who got crosswise with Miss Breckenridge in study hall or the cafeteria soon wished they hadn’t. A word from her to some misbehaving boy’s coach would have even star athletes benched for that week’s game.
“Home ec was great. Because of what I had learned from Adelaide, I could sew circles around the other girls. Miss Breckenridge even let me come in before and after school to use the machines. Next to Adelaide, Miss Breckenridge was the best thing that ever happened to me. I may not have been able to make sense of algebra or geometry, but if I could sew well, I knew I’d be able to support myself.”
“That’s what my mother did,” I put in. The admission surprised me. “She was a seamstress and a single mother. That’s how she supported us the whole time I was growing up.”
Sister Mary Katherine looked thoughtful. “That’s interesting,” she said.
Just then Freddy Mac came hurrying up to the table. “Sorry I’m so late,” he said, taking a seat. “Traffic on the freeway was horrendous. By the time I realized there was an accident at Southeast Eighth, I couldn’t get off. I had to wait it out. What have I missed?”
“Nothing much,” Sister Mary Katherine said. “I’ve been filling Mr. Beaumont in on some of my background.”
“Beau,” I interjected.
She smiled. “And I was just getting to you, Fred,” she added. “By the time I was a sophomore, Adelaide was worried that I was focusing all my energies on home ec. She wanted me to try my hand at something else. That’s how I wound up following Fred here around while he tried to teach me how to be a photographer. Despite his very
