Trial By Fire

Ali was struggling through her memory banks, trying to remember the proper term one should use when addressing a bishop. Was she supposed to call him Your Excellency, or Reverend Gillespie, or was there something else?

“Sit down, sit down,” he urged pleasantly, leading Ali to a chair.

“Sister Anselm is here now, in the ICU?”

Bishop Gillespie nodded. “Yes, they brought her up from the recovery room a few minutes ago. I spoke to the surgeon-an orthopedic guy. He says they set the leg and put in metal plates and screws to hold it in place. It was broken in more than one spot. They won’t be able to schedule the hip replacement until sometime next week. No visitors but relatives,” he added.

“I can’t see her, then?” Ali asked.

“No,” he said. “Sorry. They may let me in later, but then I have special dispensation.”

Having seen Sister Anselm’s damaged leg with her own eyes, Ali wasn’t surprised to learn that more than one surgical procedure would be necessary to repair it. As for the fact that Sister Anselm wouldn’t be allowed any visitors? That was fine with Ali.

“I’m sure you’re startled to find me here,” Bishop Gillespie continued, “but Sister Anselm is rather a special case. Considering the seriousness of the situation, it seemed to me that having a contingent of security guards on hand to keep an eye on her while she’s recovering would be a good idea.”

Ali agreed with that assessment completely. She also liked the fact that the security guards in question appeared to take their responsibilities seriously. They seemed more than capable of handling any unexpected contingency.

“The truth is,” the bishop went on, “if I had really listened to Sister’s concerns-if I had been paying attention-I would have sent one of my cars and a driver to take her to and from the hospital as needed. That’s what I should have done. Now we have to deal with the consequences of my negligence.”

“I’m sure Sister Anselm will forgive you,” Ali said.

“Yes,” Bishop Gillespie agreed. “She’s a very forgiving soul. But knowing she’s come to grievous harm, I’m not at all sure that I shall be able to forgive myself. Then, of course, there’s what happened to you today as well,” he added sadly. “I understand you, too, have sustained some injuries in the process of rescuing Sister Anselm.”

The man seemed so troubled that Ali didn’t want to add to his burden. “Nothing serious,” she said casually. “A few scrapes and bruises, but nothing’s broken.”

“I understand the man responsible for that dreadful attack is dead. It’s difficult to imagine that kind of evil loose in the world. What sort of depraved individual would leave one poor woman to burn to death in a fire and abandon another to die in the desert? Behavior like that is entirely beyond the pale.”

Ali realized that someone had been feeding Bishop Gillespie a whole lot of very accurate information that he wasn’t supposed to have. Despite Agent Do

“Have you and Sister Anselm been friends for a long time?” she asked.

He nodded. “A very long time,” he said. “Has she told you anything about her background?”

“Some. She told me about her mission and about how, when she’s dealing with badly injured people, she’s often as concerned about healing their broken relationships as she is their broken bodies.”

Bishop Gillespie nodded sagely. “That’s true,” he said. “She’s forever trying to do for others what other people once did for her.”

“The nuns in France, you mean,” Ali said. “Before she became Sister Anselm.”

Bishop Gillespie beamed. “So she did tell you some of it?”

“About losing her parents and being left alone after they died.”

Bishop Gillespie nodded. “Sister Celeste, Sister Anselm’s first mother superior, recognized her natural facility for languages and encouraged her to study as many of them as possible. The convent saw to it that Sister Anslem received a degree in nursing. Once she was able to return to the U.S., she also earned a doctorate in psychology.”

“She never said exactly how that happened,” Ali said. “How she came back home.”

“I’m proud to say a good deal of that was my doing,” Bishop Gillespie said. “She lived and worked in France, speaking all those languages, but she wasn’t French any more than she was German. By then she had given up all hope of reclaiming her birthright as an American citizen. Yes, her family had been badly treated during the war. For her parents and her sister, Crystal City was a prison, but not for little Judith. That was her name then. As a child she had loved the relative freedom of living in the camp. She loved Texas and being out of those cold midwest winters, and she wanted desperately to come back home.

“It was Sister A

“Why are you telling me all this?” Ali asked.

“Because I want you to know what a treasure she is,” Bishop Gillespie said, “and because I want you to help me.”

“Help you do what?”

“You may have wondered what Sister Anselm was doing with the latest GPS/networking applications on her iPhone. Those are my doing as well, I’m afraid. When she’s at home, she stays in Jerome, in Saint Bernadette’s, a convent that specializes in treating troubled nuns, but when she’s on the road…”

Ali knew from reading Nadine Hazelett’s article that Sister Anselm’s home convent was in Jerome, but she knew nothing of Saint Bernadette’s.

“Wait a minute,” Ali interrupted. “What’s this about troubled nuns?”

“Back when Jerome was a busy mining community, there was a parochial school there. That shut down when the mines did, but the building itself was still in good shape, as was the convent. Since the diocese couldn’t find a suitable buyer at the time, we ended up keeping it. A few years ago we remodeled the place and turned it into a rehab facility.

“It turns out nuns have the same kinds of difficulties everyone else has-anger management issues, substance-abuse issues.” Bishop Gillespie smiled and shrugged. “You name it, we’ve got it. With a doctorate in psychology, Sister Anselm helps out there with the sessions when she’s home, but when she’s on the road, it’s important for me to be able to stay in touch with her, and with some of my other special emissaries as well.

“As I said earlier, over the past several days Sister Anselm had e-mailed me some of her concerns,” Bishop Gillespie continued. “She felt that even in a hospital setting, Mimi Cooper might still be in danger-that the people responsible for the attack on her life might attempt to strike again. She was also concerned that due to working so closely with Mimi, she, too, might be targeted. It turns out she was all too right about that,” he added regretfully. “What do you think?”

Bishop Gillespie’s direct question put Ali on the spot. “I was there,” she said finally. “I know that the man who died this afternoon, Thomas McGregor, is the person most directly responsible for what happened to Sister Anselm, but I don’t believe that he acted alone.”