Read Sisters of Sorrow for Free Online

Elizabeth?” A child’s voice called out of the drainage pipe. Anna gasped. The voice from the pipe continued, “Sister Elizabeth, I’m nearly finished.”
    “What is taking so long?” the sister called. “You ought to have been done an hour ago!”
    Anna gaped around the inside of the cistern. She held a hand in front of her face and stared at it .
    I am here. I am not in the pipe. She clapped the hand over her mouth and thought. I am not speaking, as the voice continued.
    “There is a branch stuck in the grate, Sister Elizabeth. It’s stuck real good, but I almost got it.”
    That’s a boy’s voice, Anna realized, that’s a boy’s voice, but Sister Elizabeth is too dense to notice.
    “Well, I am much too busy to come checking up on you every ten minutes. If you want to miss dinner, that’s just fine by me. I’m sending a troop of boys down to haul this mess out of here. If you are not finished by the time they arrive, you will spend the night in this hole.”
    “Oh, I’m quite sure I’ll be done by then.”
    “Humph,” Sister Elizabeth’s shoes clacked away. The door screeched, and the bolts clicked into their holes.

Chapter 4
    Curiosity had driven Anna through the gap to eavesdrop on Abbess McCain. Curiosity had often overpowered her better judgment, and she wore the scars to prove it. But now, with her nerves as tight as piano wire, her wits as frayed as her old shawl, and every ounce of adrenaline spent, curiosity held no power over her.
    None at all.
    She had no interest in discovering whose voice had answered Sister Elizabeth from the pipe. If she went to her grave without ever knowing, that would be fine with her – so long as it wasn’t today.
    “I wouldn’t really have done it,” she said to her reflection in the dark water. Her face peered out of the pool at her. It seemed to float below the surface. In the sallow glow of her miner’s lamp, her skin was sickly yellow, it alternately distended and shrunk with the slow ripples.
    That’s what you would have looked like after she drowned you, her mind replied. Just like little Ephraim.
    Anna didn’t say anything to that. She didn’t think anymore, either. She reverted to the quasi-catatonic state that typified the little ones in her care. No questions, no forethought, no introspection, just do the next thing that must be done.
    The next thing that must be done was simple. She slid through the gap into the drainage chamber, surprised to see that nothing had changed. Every aspect of the room stood exactly as she had left it. Though she had been in the cistern for mere minutes, Anna felt as if she hadn’t been here, in the drainage chamber, for a very long time. Not since she was a little girl.
    Memory came to her one bit at a time.
    What must I do, now?
    Retrieve the trowel and gunnysack.
    Where are they?
    At the end of the drainage pipe.
    Is there a boy in the pipe?
    I don’t think so.
    She bent to the pipe and crawled inside. The echoes and whispers and mist danced around her, but she didn’t notice. Over and over in her mind, she saw Sister Elizabeth being crushed and dismembered by the torrent of water, saw her being propelled in a crumpled ball through the narrow pipe. It horrified her now. She was weak and sick with the dread of what she had nearly done. Her body ached in every joint, worse than she could remember ever aching. Her head pounded and her knees bled.
    By the time she reached the grate, she was too spent to be startled. The blockage was gone. Her sack, which had been half-full, now lay flat and neatly folded beside her trowel. Anna tried to make sense of what she was seeing. Someone else had to be in the pipe. That was the only possible explanation, a young boy. How was it that neither she nor Sister Elizabeth had seen him?
    “He must have come through the grate.” Echoes of her whisper hissed through the pipe. “It must not be secure.” A glimmer of hope re-ignited the life in her eyes. The mist had condensed heavy