followed, heads down, gingerly navigating the lumpy ground. Their white veils spread in identical arcs across the backs of their black wool coats. Penguins. Who’d said that? The Blues Brothers.
I turned off the mobile spotlights and fell in step, eyes to the ground, amazed at the fragments of bone embedded in the dirt floor. Great. We’d dug in the one spot in the entire church that didn’t contain burials.
Father Menard pushed open one of the doors and, single file, we exited to daylight. Our eyes needed little adjustment. The sky was leaden and seemed to hug the spires and towers of all the buildings in the convent’s compound. A raw wind blew off the Laurentians, flapping collars and veils.
Our little group bent against the wind and crossed to an adjacent building, gray stone like the church, but smaller. We climbed steps to an ornately carved wooden porch and entered through a side door.
Inside, the air was warm and dry, pleasant after the bitter cold. I smelled tea and mothballs and years of fried food.
Wordlessly, the women removed their boots, smiled at me one by one, and disappeared through a doorway to the right just as a tiny nun in an enormous ski sweater shuffled into the foyer. Fuzzy brown reindeer leaped across her chest and disappeared beneath her veil. She blinked at me through thick lenses and reached for my parka. I hesitated, afraid its weight would tip her off balance and send her crashing to the tile. She nodded sharply and urged me with upturned fingertips, so I slipped the jacket off, laid it across her arms, and added cap and gloves. She was the oldest woman that I had ever seen still breathing.
I followed Father Menard down a long, poorly lit hallway into a small study. Here the air smelled of old paper and schoolhouse paste. A crucifix loomed over a desk so large I wondered how they’d gotten it through the door. Dark oak paneling rose almost to the ceiling. Statues stared down from the room’s upper edge, faces somber as the figure on the crucifix.
Father Menard took one of two wooden chairs facing the desk, gestured me to the other. The swish of his cassock. The click of his beads. For a moment I was back at St. Barnabas. In Father’s office. In trouble again. Stop it, Brennan. You’re over forty, a professional. A forensic anthropologist. These people called you because they need your expertise.
The priest retrieved a leather-bound volume from the desktop, opened it to a page with a green ribbon marker, and positioned the book between us. He took a deep breath, pursed his lips, and exhaled through his nose.
I was familiar with the diagram. A grid with rows divided into rectangular plots, some with numbers, some with names. We’d spent hours poring over it the day before, comparing the descriptions and records for the graves with their positions on the grid. Then we’d paced it all off, marking exact locations.
Sister Elisabeth Nicolet was supposed to be in the second row from the church’s north wall, third plot from the west end. Right next to Mother Aurelie. But she wasn’t. Nor was Aurelie where she should have been.
I pointed to a grave in the same quadrant, but several rows down and to the right. “O.K. Raphael seems to be there.” Then down the row. “And Agathe, Veronique, Clement, Marthe, and Eleonore. Those are the burials from the 1840s, right?”
“
I moved my finger to the portion of the diagram corresponding to the southwest corner of the church. “And these are the most recent graves. The markers we found are consistent with your records.”
“Yes. Those were the last, just before the church was abandoned.”
“It was closed in 1914.”
“Nineteen fourteen. Yes, 1914.” He had an odd way of repeating words and phrases.
“Elisabeth died in 1888?”
“
It didn’t make sense. Evidence of the graves should be there. It was clear that artifacts from the 1840 burials remained. A test in that area had produced wood fragments and bits of coffin hardware. In the protected environment inside the church, with that type of soil, I thought the skeletons should be in pretty good shape. So where were Elisabeth and Aurelie?
The old nun shuffled in with a tray of coffee and sandwiches. Steam from the mugs had fogged her glasses, so she moved with short, jerky steps, never lifting her feet from the floor. Father Menard rose to take the tray.
“
The nun nodded and shuffled out, not bothering to clear her lenses. I watched her as I helped myself to coffee. Her shoulders were about as broad as my wrist.
“How old is Sister Bernard?” I asked, reaching for a croissant. Salmon salad and wilted lettuce.
“We’re not exactly sure. She was at the convent when I first started coming here as a child, before the war. World War II, that is. Then she went to teach in the foreign missions. She was in Japan for a long time, then Cameroon. We think she’s in her nineties.” He sipped his coffee. A slurper.
“She was born in a small village in the Saguenay, says she joined the order when she was twelve.” Slurp. “Twelve. Records weren’t so good in those days in rural Quebec. Not so good.”
I took a bite of sandwich then rewrapped my fingers around the coffee mug. Delicious warmth.
“Father, are there any other records? Old letters, documents, anything we haven’t looked at?” I wriggled my toes. No sensation.
He gestured to the papers littering the desk, shrugged. “This is everything Sister Julienne gave me. She is the convent archivist, you know.”
“Yes.”
Sister Julienne and I had spoken and corresponded at length. It was she who had initially contacted me about the project. I was intrigued from the outset. This case was very different from my usual forensic work involving the recently dead who end up with the coroner. The archdiocese wanted me to exhume and analyze the remains of a
