commotion. By now, the area inside and outside Reverend Krieg’s room was awash with police personnel taking pictures, measuring, taking notes. She moved directly to Krieg and the two detectives.
“What’s going on here?” she demanded almost as if she were addressing an unruly second grader.
“Maybe you could tell us,” said Tully. The response drew a sharp glance from Koznicki, whose parochial school background made it difficult to relate to nuns with anything but deference.
Marie ignored the insinuation. “What is that?” She sniffed. “It smells like gasoline.”
“It is,” Tully said. He fished a paper from an inside pocket and studied it for a moment. “What are you doing up here, sister? You’re scheduled for a class now.”
“I. . I forgot and left my notes in my room. I was just coming up to get them.”
“Well,” Tully said, “luckily you’ll find your papers intact. If we hadn’t stopped the Reverend from lighting his cigar, this gasoline could have become a lethal bomb.”
Marie shuddered. “Again? This was another attempt on his life?”
Tully nodded. “Uh-huh. By the way, Sister, did you know Krieg smoked?”
“Did I?” She crinkled her nose as if catching a foul odor. “Of course. How could anyone live in these quarters and not smell the cigar smoke? It was not here yesterday morning-but then neither was the Reverend Krieg. He was staying at a hotel. But he stayed with us last night and this morning the odor permeated everything. Of course I knew he smoked. So did everyone else who stayed in this section of the building.” She paused in thought a moment. “Lieutenant, what sort of question was that? Are you accusing me of something? Of trying to murder Reverend Krieg?”
Tully regarded her coolly. “Sister, you will know without a doubt if I accuse you of anything. This is a homicide investigation and we’re going to pursue it. Along the way, we’re gonna ask questions. Some of them may sound offensive. If you take offense, that’s your problem.” His voice softened only slightly. “If it helps any, you are definitely not the only one who is going to be questioned before this is over.”
Tully and Koznicki moved to one side. They consulted with each other, checked on the progress of the investigation of Krieg’s room, and agreed on a statement that would be released to the press.
Meanwhile, Sister Marie remained where she had been standing. She felt shaken. She also felt guilty. The guilt began tugging at her memory, calling her back to another era.
Then she noticed that Father Koesler had been standing nearby all this time. She approached him. “I wonder,” she said, “if you would be kind enough to take the class I’m supposed to have now?”
“Really,” he began to protest, “I’m not. .”
“I think you can handle it quite nicely, Father. It just has to do with the use of real police in researching a mystery novel. I know this is your forte. You’ve done a lot of that, or so I’ve heard. I mean, you’ve had lots of contact with the police. Even now. .” She didn’t complete the thought.
“You’re upset, Sister. That’s understandable. But I guess I can wing it with some hints about getting the cooperation of the police-even if it’s for a novel. They really are very helpful to writers by and large.”
“Thank you very much. I appreciate it.” Marie pinched her forehead.
The headache was pronounced. She slowly descended the stairs to the main floor, and worked her way through the crowded corridor. She entered the now empty chapel and knelt in the rear pew.
The Gothic interior of the chapel was so traditional, even with the altar placed just inside the sanctuary instead of at the rear wall. Religious statues and paintings abounded. It put her in mind of her home parish in Detroit. She had spent a lot of time there, too.
She was eighteen again, in church, and feeling guilty.
21
Thursday before First Friday. How often had she done this? Marie Monahan had plenty of time before it was her turn to go to confession. Let’s see, approximately eight times each scholastic year for, since she’d begun going to confession in the second grade, eleven years. So, eighty-eight times.
As far as she could recollect, it was Saint Margaret Mary who had the vision during which Jesus promised grand spiritual rewards to those who “made” the first Fridays.
The idea was to go to Communion on nine consecutive first Fridays and all the promises Jesus made to Saint Margaret Mary were yours. Somehow, someone must have dismissed the magical number nine, for she, Marie Monahan, and her classmates had completed nine consecutives long ago. Like so many Catholic devotions, the first Fridays had become a quasi superstition. If nine first Fridays were good, a limitless number of first Fridays was infinitely better.
The confessions, of course, were necessitated by the Communions. No one in the world could have foretold then, in 1960, what would be accomplished by the Second Vatican Council, to begin the following year. One of Vatican II’s achievements would be the divorcing of confession from Communion. Catholics would be advised that they could go to Communion without first going to confession practically forever as long as they did not commit a mortal sin. Just when they got used to going to confession only infrequently, if ever, a later Pope would emphasize the necessity of individual frequent confession, and put confession and Communion back together again. After Vatican II, the casual Catholic was frequently confused.
The eighty-eight confessions Marie had just carefully computed by no means approached the total number of times she’d been to confession to date. Sometimes she would confess every week or every other week. And always, always, the same thing: disobedience, angry thoughts, inattentiveness in school, gossip. Venial sins, imperfections.
There were times when she suspected she might find some other sins if she examined her conscience differently. But she had been taught by the nuns how to examine her conscience when she was in the second grade. Never having been given an update, she retained a child’s approach to confession. In this she was not unlike many, if not most, adult Catholics.
The inside joke to all this was that by her peers she was considered to be “wild.”
“Wildness” meant something considerably different in a parochial school of 1960 and prior than it would some thirty years later. Marie was a starter on the girls’ basketball and softball teams. She was a cheerleader. She was a tomboy. Her tight-knit circle of girlfriends tended to be boisterous. Worse, they were forever testing the dress code limits of “Marylike” modesty. As often as they could get away with it, they’d be mischievous and roll their waistbands until their school uniform skirts hung well above the knee. Or they’d “forget” to fasten the top buttons on their blouses, leaving a fraction of a bra exposed. Around them at all times the vigilance of the nuns was ever required.
Marie Monahan was never in the running as the sodalist selected to crown the Blessed Mother’s statue on May Day.
And yet, with all of that, to her knowledge, she had never in her life committed a mortal sin.
Probably the simplest mortal sin possible to a Catholic would be the deliberate missing of Sunday Mass. The next most commonplace would be a grand dinner of meat on a Friday. After that, things got complicated. Stealing an article of significant value or lots of money would do it. Or killing someone, of course.
Possibly the classic mortal sin-and this was far more the venue of males-was almost any sexual sin anyone could imagine.
The gravity of sin, in those days, was measured by three criteria: the matter, the intention, and the circumstances. Matter: the difference, say, between ten cents and ten dollars. Intention: inadvertence, force, or fear could limit responsibility. Circumstances: participation in a “just war” justified killing. Sexual sins did not admit parvity of matter. Thus whatever the intention or circumstance, one embarked on a sin of sexual nature with serious, grave, mortal matter.
But Marie Monahan had never committed a sexual sin.
