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again, and looked out his window again. He had to get going. Fitzsimmons might be right. There might be no flood in the long run. Even Fitzsimmons didn’t think Michael ought to be taking chances. Michael leaned against the window glass, squinted out, and cursed to purgatory the idiot who had built an art deco replica of the St. George campanile right in his line of sight. What kind of neighborhood had this been all those years ago, when it was first put up?
    He was about to give it all up when he saw it, what he would later think of as The Strange Thing. She was coming down Beckner Street from the direction of Clare Avenue, seemingly headed for the parish church. Michael had never seen her before, but he knew what she was. With the long black dress and that tight sided black head covering, there was only one thing she could be, a postulant from the Motherhouse up the hill. Michael found himself feeling caught, half-paralyzed. One of the things he had been intending to do was to call back Reverend Mother General and tell her he would need those vans after all. Now he wondered if he had to. Maybe she had misunderstood him and sent the vans as soon as they’d hung up earlier. On the other hand, maybe this postulant had nothing to do with vans. Postulants and novices from the Sisters of Divine Grace came down here every Wednesday to teach literacy classes and tutor high-school students who were having trouble with their work. Michael never saw them, because Wednesday was when he went out to visit the prison and then stopped in at the county hospital on his way back to town. Maybe this postulant was one of those, and she was here on some errand about books or writing supplies.
    The idiocy of this idea—the stupidity of thinking that any of the nuns up there would send a child out into this storm just to check on something that could as easily have been checked on by phone—struck him at the same time that he lost sight of the girl. She had been walking rapidly, holding the umbrella stiffly, directly over her head, and she had passed out of his range. She was too close now to be seen unless he stood on the church’s front steps. He turned away from the window, left the office and strode out into the vestibule. All of a sudden he had taken a positive dislike to this entire situation. There was something about her being out there like that alone that made him cold. He wanted to get hold of her and give her a talking to.
    The church’s front doors were great double oaken things with cast-iron handles instead of knobs. Michael grabbed both the handles at once and swung both the doors inward, feeling his biceps ache the way they had when he’d been twenty-odd and in boot camp. Then he stepped out into the rain, and stopped.
    To the left of him, Hernandito and a half dozen other boys were huddled together under the plastic awning of Number 36, apparently getting ready for their apartment-to-apartment search. To the front of him, Beckner Street shot through the rain to Clare Avenue, empty. To the right of him, the steps to Number 37 were empty. For a moment, Michael thought he saw something black fluttering in the crack between Number 37’s door and the frame it hadn’t quite been shut into, but that might have been imagination, or wind. The storm was getting worse and there was a great deal of wind.
    What bothered Father Michael Doherty was that the postulant he’d been watching for he didn’t know how long had disappeared, completely, as if he’d made her up.

[5]
    “I F I WERE YOU, young man,” Reverend Mother General was saying, “I would sit very still in my chair and listen very carefully to what I was about to hear. I am going to repeat myself exactly once more. Try to get it through your thick head that Cardinal Archbishops may come and Cardinal Archbishops may go, but I will be here forever.”
    Standing at the front of the small classroom directly across the hall from Reverend Mother General’s open office door,