capable mentoring, I never made the grade in the photojournalism arena, but he and I became good friends. We still are.”
The waitstaff, which had made itself scarce while there were just two of us, began hovering the moment the third member of our party showed up. They refilled coffee cups and took food orders. As soon as they disappeared once again, Sister Mary Katherine resumed her story.
“By the time I was a junior in high school, I knew I wanted to be a nun. With my sewing abilities, joining the Benedictine order was a natural.”
That one stumped me, and Sister Mary Katherine must have realized it. “How much do you know about the Catholic Church?”
“What I don’t know fills volumes,” I told her.
“Traditionally Benedictine nuns serve the church by sewing-making altar cloths and vestments for priests. That’s what we do up on Whidbey, too. Saint Benedict’s is a small convent. Twelve nuns and two lay sisters. We sew and we pray. For much of the day and night we live in self-imposed silence so we can spend our time with our hearts and minds focused on God rather than chatting endlessly about the weather. And that brings me to why we’re here.”
I have to admit I had been wondering. Nothing in Sister Mary Katherine’s story hinted at any wrongdoing, and she certainly didn’t strike me as a potential murderess.
“We’re supposed to maintain certain hours of silence,” she continued. “About a year ago I broke the silence by waking up screaming in the middle of the night. As I said, Saint Benedict’s is small. Having the mother superior roust everyone out of bed by screaming her head off was unsettling. I knew I’d had a nightmare, a terrible nightmare, but I couldn’t remember any of it. I had no idea what the dream was about. Eventually everyone returned to their own rooms, and we all went back to sleep. A few weeks later it happened again-exactly the same way. It’s gone on like that for months now. I started avoiding going to sleep at night because I was afraid of having the dream and disturbing everyone else, but having a sleep-deprived mother superior is almost as bad for a convent as having one who wakes everybody up screaming like a banshee.
“One of my younger nuns, Sister Therese, was a psychology major in college. She suggested that perhaps the reason I couldn’t remember the dream was that it had its origins in some terribly traumatic event in my past. Whatever had happened was so horrific that I had suppressed it, but now it was attempting to surface again via the dream. Sister Therese also suggested that I consider using hypnosis. She thought that remembering what the dream was about might make it go away.” Sister Mary Katherine looked at Fred, who beamed back at her. “Fortunately for me, I had a good friend who just happened to be a hypnotherapist.”
Our food came then. Fred and I both tucked into steak sandwiches. Sister Mary Katherine had a Caesar salad, which made me wonder if it was possible Benedictine nuns were also semi-vegans.
“So you went to see him?” I asked.
“Not right away,” she replied. “People tell me I’m stubborn, and I guess it’s true. I assumed the nightmare had to have something to do with the deaths of my parents. Being orphaned at such a young age was pretty much the defining moment of my life. It seemed reasonable to me that if that’s what it was, I could do what needed to be done on my own. If I thought about what happened to them long enough and hard enough-if I meditated and prayed about it-the nightmare would eventually reveal itself. But that didn’t happen, and unfortunately the screaming didn’t stop, either. Finally the sisters staged a small revolt. The entire convent signed a petition asking me to do something about it. And I did. Three weeks ago I came to Seattle and had my first official appointment with Fred. I think it worked because the trust I felt for him back in high school makes it easy for me to trust him now.”
“And?” I asked.
Sister Mary Katherine put down her fork and peered at me through those thick lenses of hers. “The nightmare isn’t about my parents,” she said. “According to what I told Fred while I was under hypnosis, sometime when I was very young, I may have witnessed a murder.”
A chill ran down my back. “You actually saw it happen?”
“I believe so, but we’re not sure. Under hypnosis I seem to remember looking out through a window and seeing a man murder the woman who lived next door to me.” She turned to Fred. “Did you bring the tapes?” she asked.
Nodding, Fred reached into his briefcase and pulled out three separate videotapes. “I often tape sessions so I can go back through them and look for things I might have missed the first time-facial expressions, nervous tics, that sort of thing,” he explained. “In cases of repressed memories, I usually do several sessions. Bringing painful memories to the surface is a lot like peeling an onion. Often more substantial details are recalled with each subsequent session.”
“When Fred told me about this, my first thought was that I’d made the whole thing up, that it was nothing but a childhood fantasy,” Mary Katherine resumed. “If I had really seen such an awful thing-a man and a woman stabbing someone to death-how was it possible for me to have forgotten it completely?”
“Man and woman?” I repeated. “So there were two of them?”
“Yes. And the dead woman’s name was Mimi.”
“No last name?” I asked.
Sister Mary Katherine shook her head. “No, just Mimi.”
I took my notebook out of my pocket and wrote down that one name: Mimi.
“Whereabouts did she live?”
“That’s the thing. I have no idea,” Mary Katherine answered. “We moved around so much when I was little that I really don’t know, but I’m assuming it was somewhere here in Washington.”
“It’s still possible that you did make it up,” I suggested mildly.
“Perhaps,” Mary Katherine said, “but I don’t think so. When Adelaide died and I was going through her things, I found several boxes with my name on them. They contained the few paltry belongings I brought with me when I came to live with Adelaide. Catholic Family Services had attached a complete inventory sheet. Inside one of the boxes, I found this.”
Mary Katherine reached into a briefcase-size purse and extracted a slim book, which she passed over to me. It was a much-read volume of Watty Piper’s classic children’s book,
“Look inside,” Sister Mary Katherine said.
On the inside cover I found an inscription written in fading blue ink. “For Bonnie, Merry Christmas. Love, Mimi.”
“I got rid of most of the rest of the things, but I kept the book and a few photos. I always wondered who Mimi was. I thought maybe she was some friend or relative of my parents. Clearly we had been close once, or she wouldn’t have given me such an expensive gift. And I thought it was odd that I never heard from her after my parents died. As soon as Fred told me what I had said under hypnosis, I knew why. Mimi was dead long before my parents died. So I asked Fred to see if he could find any record of a woman named Mimi being stabbed to death. I wanted to know whether or not the people who did it were ever caught and punished. I felt I owed her that much.”
I glanced at Fred. “Any luck?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I guess I’m better at being a hypnotherapist than I am at being a detective. That’s your job, not mine.”
“And how exactly did this particular case get to be my job?” I asked.
“That’s my fault,” Sister Mary Katherine said at once. “Fred was the one who knew you worked in that new investigative unit in the attorney general’s office.”
I made a mental note not to call us the SHIT squad in the good sister’s presence.
“Before Father Mark retired from Christ the King, he had a young assistant priest named Father Andrew who moved up into the diocese office years ago. Father Andrew is now the new archbishop’s right-hand man. He was a huge help to me personally when I was starting Saint Benedict’s and needed to cut through mounds of red tape.”
She stopped talking as if she had said enough, but I still didn’t get it.
Obligingly, Freddy Mac clued me in. “Years ago, Father Andrew Carter and Ross Connors played football together at O’Dea High School.”
