Missing Sisters -SA Read Online Free PDF Page A

made signs of please . If everyone could lip-read as well as she could, Alice thought smugly, the world would run very smoothly.

    “What is it, Alice?”

    “Father Laverty?”

    “Father Laverty? Is that what you’re trying to say? He just left. You might catch him in the parking lot if you hurry.”

    Alice hurried. The side door slammed behind her. Father Laverty’s little Volkswagen beetle was parked there. He must still be inside. Maybe he’d been in the men’s room on the first floor. He was the only one who ever used it. Alice often wondered who cleaned it, if anyone.
    Nuns were too sensitive even to think about a men’s room, but there it was.

    Music and cash envelope in hand, Alice headed back to the side door. But, with Saturday security measures, it had locked behind her. She picked her way through the snow mush in the parking lot around to the front door. No one answered the bell. Well, Sister Frank had the headphones on, of course. And the girls weren’t allowed to answer the door…. Besides, they’d probably all left for the movie theater. Where had Sister Isaac Jogues gone? Maybe she was running a bath to wash Ruth Peters.

    Alice rang and rang, beginning to feel the cold. She had on an oversized blue cardigan, a nun’s reject sweater, which hung like a tunic over her hips, but even so. The air bullied her into shivering. Then she remembered the kitchen door and had gone around another corner of the building and down the unshoveled steps before she realized—yes—the steps were unshoveled because Sister Vincent de Paul was gone. Sister Vincent de Paul wasn’t there. Through the window of the locked door, the kitchen looked cold and dark, and the blue pilot lights were like squat vigil candles in their cast-iron cage. It was send-out-to-Neba’s-for-submarine-sandwiches for sure tonight.

    Maybe Father Laverty had a key. She’d wait by his car for him to come out. But when she ran around again to the parking lot, the little rusty heap of Volkswagen was gone.

    Gone! And without the music for the boys at Saint Mary’s!

    Now Alice was in trouble for being outside the school without permission—Sister Frank’s bored directions wouldn’t stand up as approval. Alice knew this from experience. And she would get yelled at, also, for going outside without her coat in February. And for not completing the task assigned her—to deliver the music and money to Father Laverty. As if everyone wasn’t already cross at her for stalling the Harrigans, for annoying and disappointing them.

    How hard it is to be good, Alice thought as she began to stride down the street away from the school. She didn’t hope for the fame of sainthood as Naomi Matthews did. She just wanted to tiptoe around the occasions of terrible sin, if she could manage it. Yet the world kept shuffling itself in ways that shoved her forward in the wrong directions. Like being spun through a revolving door and falling into the wrong company on the other side. “You’re not bad, Alice,” Sister John Bosco would say. “Not a bad girl in any instance. Not bad behavior. But unfortunate.
    At times unthinking. Were you thinking?”

    She was thinking! She was always thinking! As she caught the bus for downtown, paying with some change from the money envelope, Alice thought: I’m always at work in my brain. I just am thinking about the other side of things, not the way nuns think.

    Troy seemed today like a city built out of sand or salt, half dissolved in the opposing forces of weather. The redbrick factories and mills; the brownstone town houses; the formal buildings of Russell Sage College all pulled away from the sidewalks as if fearful of catching something from their unsavory neighbors. The whole city wobbled on the edge of the great steel Hudson River and threatened to go lurching in. Or maybe it was the sleet starting to fall that gave it that look. I love Troy, thought Alice. Hideous place. I wonder if Sister Vincent de Paul misses