“ ’ Mont … Ella give ’Mont ’Ible, he give me. Leave, see Johnny, he say, ‘Keep, keep safe, keep safe.’” She squeezed her eyes shut and struggled to speak. “I keep. ’Mont come, I give.”

“The night he left home, he told you he was going to see Johnny?”

“ ’ Es,” she managed to say.

“Then he gave you his Bible and told you to keep it safe for him, that he would take it back from you when he came home again,” I translated.

She smiled in relief that I had understood her but didn’t try to speak again. I picked up the markers and tucked them into the Bible. Before I gave it back, I turned the well-worn pages, looking to see if Lamont had left anything.

“I’ll do my best for you, Miss Claudia,” I promised.

She squeezed my fingers again with her weak left hand. When she smiled, I could see what a beautiful woman she’d been before her stroke. Miss Ella was frowning more deeply than ever, but I felt better about the case when I left. Not because I had any better ideas, but because I understood now how much it meant to Miss Claudia that I find her nephew.

I felt a little less optimistic after talking to Rose Hebert that night. She didn’t know what Miss Claudia meant, that Steve Sawyer wasn’t Lamont’s friend’s name. “Of course his name was Steve. Maybe he called himself Steven to be formal, but I don’t know what else Miss Claudia had in mind.”

24 - FIRE IN THE NUNNERY

24

FIRE IN THE NUNNERY

AT SIX MONDAY EVENING, I RANG THE BELL TO SISTER Frankie’s apartment on the fringes of Uptown. She lived in a square box, the kind of characterless building that went up in the sixties, with metal-framed windows set level against the tan brick walls so that you didn’t even have a ledge to hold a window box. The Mighty Waters Freedom Center had offices on the ground floor. The rest of the building seemed to be private apartments, some with nuns; F. Kerrigan, OP, and C. Zabinska, BVM, for instance. From the other names, and the discarded toys I could see in the entryway, it seemed that a number of families lived here, too.

The building sat flush with the walk, without even a token patch of grass in front. No one looking at the cracks in the bricks or the open windows where fans tried to stir an evening breeze to life would accuse the sisters of violating any vows of poverty.