LITMIR.BIZ

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and a white kerchief held back her wispy gray curls. For the second time this week, Abby thought she looked as if she was losing weight, and Binny of all people didn’t need that. She made a mental note to talk her into getting a checkup.

      “You already do too much around here,” Binny said in the voice she saved for a quiet reprimand. “Didn’t I see you mucking out the stalls the other day?”

      Abby smiled. “Oh, and what? I’m supposed to be above that?”

      “No, you’re supposed to save your energy for your real work,” she said.

      “Binny—”

      “That’s all I’m sayin’. That and no more.”

      Abby rolled her eyes and sighed. No one at the Prayer House was supposed to talk about Paseo unless absolutely necessary—a firm rule that kept everyone from slipping and saying something in front of the wrong people. Binny, though, was past the age where she followed rules.

      And speaking of breaking rules, where was Helen?

      “Have you seen Sister Helen?” Abby asked, cutting into a juicy ripe strawberry and popping half into her mouth.

      “Not since last night when your visitors came,” Binny said.

      This wasn’t at all like Helen. Abby was beginning to get worried. She was debating whether to rouse the other women and start a search party when Helen appeared on the back porch, wiping her boots on the bristles of the mud scraper.

      “Where have you been?” Abby demanded, her voice rising with anxiety. “I was worried!”

      “Oh, you were, were you? I seem to remember saying the same thing to you a few hundred times at St. Joseph’s High. I guess that makes us almost even now.”

      Helen sat on the wooden bench next to the kitchen door and tugged off her wellies, the knee-high boots that she always wore for mucking about in the stables. Abby couldn’t fathom why she’d been out there at this early hour. She was about to ask when Helen’s face creased with pain as she tried to get one of the heavy rubber boots off.

      “Here, let me do that,” Abby said. Helen flicked her a grateful smile and leaned back, sighing.

      “I used to dream of a handsome young man pulling my skates off for me,” she said dreamily as Abby tugged at the first boot. “Down at the pond on my parents’ farm, that was. There would be a fire for us to warm our hands, and he’d be wearing a navy-blue sweater and a bright red scarf. We’d be sipping hot cider, and when he looked at me with those eyes—” She groaned. “Oh, Lordy, those eyes.”

      “Helen!” Abby couldn’t help it; she giggled. “I never knew that. Were you in love with this guy?”

      “Ha. More like in love with my dream of him. Sometimes our dreams are better than the real thing, you know.”

      “You think so?”

      “Of course. In our dreams, a man can be anything. In real life, he’s just another human being like the rest of us. Warts and all.”

      She gave Abby a pointed look.

      “Are we talking about Ben now?” Abby asked, sighing. She knew Helen had reservations about Ben—or rather, Ben and her as a couple. She’d always thought he would let Abby down one day. And of course, he had. Today.

      “He just wanted to make sure we were safe,” Abby said, half in an attempt to convince herself.

      “I doubt that. Following the rules, he was. Always following the rules.”

      Abby’s hands were poised over the second boot, but she sat back on her heels.

      “You’ve been a nun for almost fifty years, Helen. Since you were twenty-five. And you cracked a pretty strict whip when I was in school. Are you telling me now that it’s a bad thing to follow rules?”

      “I’m telling you he shouldn’t have brought them here,” she said, frowning. “Not those FBI people. He broke your trust.”

      Abby pulled the other boot off and Helen winced. “Ouch! Don’t take it out on my poor feet, child! I’m just telling you what you already know.”

      Mornings in Carmel Valley could be cold, especially when there was fog, as there was today. Helen’s foot, when Abby took off the mended black cotton sock, was icy. She took it in her hands to rub it. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to tug so hard. But, Helen, when you were Marti’s and my teacher, you never talked like this. You were so…” Abby searched for the right word. “Religious.”

      She thought it best not to tell her that Marti and she sometimes called her a “mealy moral mouth.”

      The truth was, though they’d feared Helen then for her strictness, she was the best teacher they’d ever had. Deep down, they loved the valuable things she’d taught them. When she moved from St. Joseph’s High to the motherhouse, where Abby and Marti were training as nuns, they felt a healthy combination of anxiety and excitement.

      Helen didn’t let them down. Despite her brusque attitude, Abby and Marti had always suspected their teacher had a heart of gold. She would sneak peanut butter and jelly sandwiches out of the motherhouse kitchen for them in the late afternoons, when their stomachs were growling and dinner wasn’t for another two hours.

      And were they ever hungry. Aside from attending college classes all day to become teachers, they were still nuns, and had to follow all the rules demanded of the other sisters: up at 4:00 a.m. for prayers, Mass at six, scrubbing floors, taking turns in the community laundry…. The work of keeping up a large Gothic-style “mansion” that housed one hundred and fifty nuns, five stories and 1930s tile floors that needed polishing every week, never ended.

      “My dear girl,” Helen said irritably, interrupting Abby’s thoughts, “religion doesn’t make you blind and dumb. At least, it shouldn’t. Do you think I got to be this old without knowing what people are all about?”

      “Of course not,” Abby said. “I guess I’m just surprised that you’re—”

      “What, jaded? Nuns don’t have a right to get jaded? Lordy me, girl, it’s been years since I’ve made the sign of the cross right— ‘in the name of the Father, the Son,’ and all that—instead of just saying one, two, three, four. You get burned out! And you should know that better than most. It’s not like we haven’t been through this all before.”

      “But you’re still a good person, Helen. And, in your own way, a good nun.”

      “Ha. In my own way, huh? Well, thank you—I think. My point is that you don’t have to be religious to be good, girl. That’s where some of those churches get it all wrong. God loves us all, and he’s not about to let the people he loves go to hell just because they didn’t say a certain set of words in front of a certain kind of preacher and get water dumped all over their heads.”

      Abby smiled. “Tsk-tsk, Sister Helen Marie. You sound more like a renegade every day.”

      “Well, maybe I’ve been hanging around you too long,” she grumped.

      Abby took a cup of green tea and went into her office, debating whether she should put aside her anger and hurt of the night before and call Ben. She could at least ask if they’d caught whoever had committed the Highland Inn murder.

      In the end, she decided it wouldn’t be wise to show too much interest. Ben wouldn’t even have to wonder why she’d asked; he’d know right away that she’d lied through her teeth the night before, and that Alicia and Jancy had been here.

      Rubbing the weariness lines in her forehead, Abby wondered if she should call social services to see what her options were with Jancy. But even that she waffled about. Instead, she called a private investigator she often used when relocating abused women. Bobby had helped her out many times when she’d had to have a violent husband tracked to make sure she and Paseo didn’t relocate his battered wife anywhere near him.

      She

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