Lovely, Dark, and Deep Read Online Free PDF

baking.”
    She looked up with a half smile. She was really muscling that spoon around, and I had a sudden vision of my mother, flour-specked but ever-lovely, making German breads and cakes in the warm kitchen of my childhood.
    “I could never make that; I'd drop dead,” said Sister Francis ominously. “Severe nut allergy, ever since I was a child.”
    “Oh, my,” I said. I had a vague recollection, now, of her revealing this fact in study hall long ago. We never got to study in her study hall, because she had told stories almost constantly. I remember few of them, just the ones that got the biggest laughs, like the one she told about her farmer neighbor who was killed by a flying cow in a tornado. It wasn't supposed to amuse us, but of course it did.
    “That's a shame, missing out on walnuts,” I said.
    She chuckled. “Still get chocolate. Who needs nuts?” She began shaping her dough into cookies and setting them on a pan. The lasagna was nowhere to be seen; she'd efficiently refrigerated it, I supposed, since the lovely smell of baking pasta was not wafting through the air.
    “Sister, I've been talking to Sister Moira about the late Sister Joanna. I'll be looking into some aspects of her death, I guess you might say—”
    “About time someone did,” Francis said, clicking metal spoons together as she flicked blobs of dough on the baking sheet.
    “Really?” I asked. “Why do you say that?” I sat down at the kitchen table.
    “I felt at the time that she got short shrift. I watched the girl die, and then to see the police close it all up so quickly—well, it seemed strange to me. Of course, Father Fahey felt it was all too harmful. He wanted them all to go away, felt they were upsetting us, that nothing good could come of dragging it out, and he had that last fellow sent packing, I believe.”
    “What fellow?” I asked.
    “Oh, a reporter from the local paper.”
    “The Wire ?” I asked, intrigued.
    “I suppose. I don't really remember. He asked us a lot of questions, asked if we didn't think it was fishy, her death, and didn't we think it strange that Father Fahey wanted to hush it all up.”
    “Did you think it was strange?”
    'Her death, yes. Not Father Fahey. He had our best interests in mind. The reporter, he was digging for grudges amongst the religious. Father Fahey said there was nothing to find here, and he should take his suspicions into the criminal world."
    “Ah.” This story was getting more interesting by the minute, and I was already starting to frame my argument to Bill for letting me use newspaper time to pursue it.
    I dug out my notebook and began to write. “Sister, can you tell me what happened that day?”
    The cookies were shaped, and she opened the oven and slipped the pans inside. Then she did a curious thing: she stayed where she was, staring through the oven window, as though frozen. I wondered if she'd even heard me. I was about to repeat myself when she answered.
    “It was an evening in May,” she said. Apparently, she was seeing it again, ten years in the past, but forever there in her memory. “It was warm and fragrant. Joanna loved to tend the flowers around the pond, to feed the fish, care for the lilies on the water. She saw it as her daily devotional. She was out there then, caring for them rather—feverishly, almost—and I watched her for a bit, out the door. She was like a daughter to me.”
    Sister Francis cleared her throat and turned back toward me. “I called out to her—Joanna! She turned, surprised, and started walking back toward the convent. I hadn't taken much notice of the car; they'd been coming all day to drop off their donations, and she didn't take notice, either, just began walking gracefully toward me, though her expression wasn't serene, and then the car was there, much faster than we knew, and it made a horrible thump—”
    Francis sat down, winded. “It could have been an accident, but that sort of violence seems like what it is,