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Sister Mary Scholastica got the almost irresistible urge to chuck her lesson, abdicate her responsibilities, sit down on the nearest desk and tell her postulants, “You want to know how to be a nun? Well, listen to that, there. That’s a nun. That’s a real nun. Not one of these wimpy little political angels that keep showing up on television.” Actually, she might as well have done just that. Since Reverend Mother General had started to get thoroughly exasperated, Scholastica certainly hadn’t gotten any teaching done. First, she’d found herself thanking God that the young man involved—probably in his forties and at least a monsignor—was fifty miles away in the relative safety of the Chancery in Colchester. Then she’d started to wonder what was the matter. Reverend Mother General was a dragon, but she didn’t usually chomp at the bit in her eagerness to tear the Cardinal Archbishop into certified Irish confetti. Reverend Mother General knew how to pick her spots. Finally, Scholastica began to worry about what she had been worrying about all morning, because as soon as her mind began to stray from whatever task was at hand that was what she did. It was now quarter to twelve on the morning of Thursday, February 21, and the schedule was not being adhered to. Scholastica was teaching her class on Principles of Interior Silence, just the way she was supposed to be according to the agenda Sister Alice Marie had drawn up in September. Out there in front of her, crammed into the tiny desks that had been designed for large college lecture halls, twenty-one of her twenty-two postulants were listening to it. And that, of course, was the problem. There were twenty-one. There were supposed to be twenty-two. Brigit Ann Reilly was missing.
    Missing.
    Across the hall, Reverend Mother General was reading someone the riot act. From the tone of her voice, it was probably John Cardinal O’Bannion himself. Scholastica tucked stray wisps of hair under the edge of her veil and wondered what it was she was supposed to do in a situation like this. It wasn’t as if she’d done anything wrong. Somebody had to go to the library every day. Scholastica had thought it would be a good idea to send Brigit, because Brigit was getting claustrophobic. Some postulants were like that. Scholastica had been like that herself. Postulants were young and newly away from home and lonely and not entirely sure they should have gotten themselves into all this. You had to be careful with them or you ended up destroying their vocations before God had had a chance to test them. Still, one of the things Scholastica was supposed to determine was who among the postulants was responsible and who was not. What did Brigit’s disappearance say about that? Did it matter that Brigit had been going to the library, without incident, every day except Sunday since the first of the year?
    There was a sharp click from the other side of the hall, the sound of a phone being not quite slammed, because Reverend Mother General never slammed phones. Across the classroom, postulants giggled, hiding their mouths behind their hands. Scholastica shook her head at them and smiled.
    “Don’t laugh,” she said, “wait until you’re out on mission somewhere and your bishop decides he wants you to teach catechism standing on your head. Bishops may be our shepherds, but they’re also crazy, and they get crazier the higher up the hierarchy they get. When you run into one who’s gone entirely off his nut, you’re going to wish you had Reverend Mother’s talent for—argumentation.”
    “Argumentation,” someone repeated in the back of the room. There were more giggles, and a few of the girls covered their faces entirely, so they wouldn’t be too obvious in their mirth. Scholastica had no idea why. She was hardly the gorgon Postulant Mistress of legend. She scanned the faces before her and came to a halt at the one with no amusement in it at all: Neila Connelly, Brigit Ann