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dollars.”
    I agreed to the bet, despite the fact that my vibes told me not to, and began my work. I heard Bill walking around in our little morgue, and I felt nervous as I waited for him to arrive. I decided to call my brother Gerhard. I finished the paragraph I was working on and dialed the phone, one eye on the doorway.
    “Hello?” Gerhard answered almost urgently after two rings.
    “Hello, big brother,” I said brightly.
    “Oh, hi Madeline.” His disappointment was obvious. “What's new?”
    “Not much. Listen, I want you to come over tonight. And I want you to bring your new girlfriend, and her daughter.”
    There was silence in response to this. Finally Gerhard gave me his best attempt at subterfuge. “Girlfriend?” he asked.
    “Yeah. You know, the one you admitted to seeing two months ago,” I said dryly.
    “Oh, right. I guess I meant, 'daughter?'”
    “Cut it out, Gerhard, I don't have the time. Bring your girlfriend and her little girl, and I'll make something nice. And Fritz and Jack will be there, too. And I should probably invite Mom and Dad, don't you think?”
    A hissing sound, like a deflating basketball, came from the receiver. “You shouldn't play the investigative reporter with me, Madeline,” Gerhard said with wounded dignity.
    “I didn't investigate. Fritz saw you at the mall. Now will you share them, or do we have to storm your place?” I spied Bill in the doorway, holding some printouts. We were in the process of putting our morgue on computer. Webley enters the modern age.
    “Yeah, okay, I'll ask if she's available,” my brother said sulkily.
    “Great. I'll call the others. Seven o'clock,” I said, blowing an audible kiss and ringing off before he could change his mind.
    Bill came forward and pulled up a chair. “Here's what we have, Maddy. There was certainly no lack of coverage. Boy, if this ends up being something, it's going to turn the town on its—” he broke off to begin reading.
    I looked at the very first story covered, by a reporter named Rick Astor. I jotted his name on a pad. He must have been the “young man" Sister Francis spoke of. If I could find him, I'd talk to him first. The date of the story was May 2; Joanna had died on May 1 st . The story said that Sister Joanna had been struck and killed instantly, at dusk. The car, according to Sister Mary Francis, had not had its headlights on, and the driver had been difficult to see. Sister Francis had been in the doorway, calling something to Sister Joanna, when the incident occurred. “I saw the car coming,” Sister Francis admitted, “but I thought it was a parishioner coming to drop off flowers for the Mary altar. In spring the parishioners donate pots of flowers, to offset the cost of the landscaping for our May display. We'd had several visitors that day.”
    Sister Francis went on to testify that it had all happened so fast she hadn't been able to act quickly enough. She felt responsible, because she'd called to Sister Joanna, who had stepped away from the pond to hear her better, and was therefore easier for the car to strike as it squealed around the circular drive.
    “She flew into the air,” Sister Francis said, “and her head hit the cement edge of the pond as she came back down.” Sister Francis rushed to call paramedics and Father Thomas Fahey, a close friend of Sister Mary Joanna.
    I jotted down the name Father Fahey; obviously he was someone crucial to the investigation, and, if I could believe Sister Francis, its suppression? Astor's article was full of potential starting points. Finally, I read something I hadn't known: Sister Joanna is survived by her parents, Abel and Rebecca Yardley, and one brother, Jeremy, 14, of Mosston.
    Mosston was just west of Webley. So Joanna hadn't traveled very far when she'd joined her religious order. I had just finished making visits to Mosston for physical therapy on my wounded shoulder, at Assissi Hospital. Now it looked like I'd be going back to our little