“They were here yesterday. . . .” She closed her eyes so tightly her jaw clenched. Her hands, too, fisted, one around her key ring. “I checked just yesterday, and there were eleven dresses hanging right here.” Eyes flying open, she jabbed a long finger toward the empty rod. “Eleven.” The last word was weak. “Only eleven and now all gone.”

“Only eleven?” Bentz repeated.

“Yes.” She made the sign of the cross over her chest. “But there were twelve up here that I remember. I double-checked my notes, and one was missing yesterday.”

Montoya felt a chill as cold as a north wind whisper through his brain. “Sister Camille was wearing the twelfth,” he guessed.

“Yes.”

“And Sister Asteria the eleventh,” Bentz said, his gaze meeting Montoya’s. “Meaning that there are ten left.”

Montoya said, “Ten dresses, ten more victims?”

“Oh, please, no!” Charity gasped, but Montoya could tell the idea had already come to her; he was only reaffirming her worst fears.

“We’ll need that list of names,” he said. “Of anyone who once was an orphan at St. Elsinore’s.”

“And also the nuns who work there now. Some work with the kids and at the clinic, right?” Bentz asked as the reverend mother, in the sweltering quarters of the attic, nervously fingered the cross dangling from a chain at her neck.

“Yes, yes, of course,” she said, still shaken. Then with more conviction than he would have expected, she added, “I’ll get what you need right now.” She blinked and sniffed, as if tears were burning the back of her eyelids.

Anger?

Righteous fury?

Or guilt?

Who knew? And did it matter?

“Come along, then.” Some of the stiffness had returned to her spine, the determined, no-nonsense set of her jaw back again. “If Father Paul gives me any grief, any talk of legal issues, I’ll tell him to take it up with God!”

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 37

It was late afternoon by the time Slade helped Valerie carry boxes down from the attic. Shadows were stretching long over the grounds of Briarstone, evening fast approaching.

The day had gotten away from her. She’d had some paperwork for Briarstone that couldn’t be put off any longer while Slade had called his brothers, checked on the ranch, then repaired a clog in the sprinkler system and worked on Valerie’s computer, debugging it, adding some memory, cleaning out files with her permission, and getting the damned laptop up to speed. She’d done some digging on the Internet when the computer was up and running and had found several O’Malleys in the phone book, looking for the elusive Mrs. Stan, but so far had struck out.

All the while, she’d been thinking about Camille’s disturbing diary—the images it had evoked and the cryptic messages she’d left for herself.

Which were probably nothing.

Yet they nagged at her, kept scratching at her mind, an itch that couldn’t be relieved.