Sister Claire who’d noticed that they weren’t just the local Memphis network affiliates but came from as far away as Nashville and Paducah and Little Rock, even St. Louis. As soon as they’d turned into the driveway the reporters had swarmed the van, pointing their lights and cameras and microphones and barking their furious, incomprehensible questions. These people had no decency. Sister Arnette was so frightened she began to shake. It had taken two police officers to move the reporters off the property—Can’t you see they’re nuns? Whaddaya wanna go bothering a buncha nuns for? All of you just back it up, right now—so the sisters could walk safely into the house.
Yes, hell was real, and Arnette knew where it was. She was in it, right now.
After that they’d sat together in the kitchen, none of them hungry but still needing to be somewhere—everyone except Lacey, whom Claire had taken straight upstairs to her room to rest. It was odd: of all of them, Lacey seemed the least shaken by the events of the afternoon. She’d barely uttered a word for hours, not to the sisters and not to Dupree, either, just sat with her hands in her lap, tears rolling down her cheeks. But then a funny thing had happened; the officers showed them the videotape from Mississippi, and when Dupree froze the image on the two men, Lacey stepped forward and looked, hard, at the monitor. Arnette had already told Dupree that that was them, she’d had a good look and there wasn’t a single doubt in her mind that the men on the screen were the same two who had come to the house and taken the girl; but the expression on Lacey’s face, which was something like surprise but not exactly—the word Arnette thought of was astonishment—made them all wait.
“I was wrong,” Lacey said finally. “It isn’t … him. He is not the one.”
“Which him, Sister?” Dupree asked gently.
She lifted a finger to the older of the two agents, the one who’d done all the talking—though it was the younger one, Arnette recalled, who’d actually taken Amy and put her in the car. In the image, he was looking straight up at the camera, holding a disposable cup in his hand. The time signature on the bottom right corner of the screen said that it was 06:01 on the same morning the two of them had come to the convent.
“Him,” Lacey said, and touched the glass.
“He didn’t take the girl?”
“He most assuredly did, Detective,” Arnette declared. She turned and looked at Sister Louise and Sister Claire, who nodded their assent. “We’re all agreed to that. Sister is just upset.”
But Dupree was not deterred. “Sister Lacey? What do you mean he’s not the one?”
Her face was shining with conviction. “That man,” she said. “Do you see?” She turned and looked at all of them. She actually smiled. “Do you see? He loves her.”
He loves her. What to make of that? But these were the only words Lacey had offered on the matter, as far as Arnette was aware. Did she mean to imply that Wolgast actually knew the girl? Could he have been Amy’s father? Was that what all this was about? But it didn’t explain what had occurred at the zoo, a terrible thing—a child had actually been trampled in the chaos and was in the hospital; two of the animals, a cat of some kind and one of the apes, had been shot—or the dead boy at the college, or any of the rest of it. And yet for the remainder of the afternoon at the station, in and out of various offices, telling their story, Lacey had sat quietly, smiling that strange smile, as if she knew something no one else did.
It all went back, Arnette believed, to what had happened to Lacey so long ago, as a little girl in Africa. Arnette had confessed the whole thing to the sisters, as they sat in the kitchen waiting for the hour when they could go to bed. She probably shouldn’t have, but she’d had to tell Dupree; once they were back at the house, it had all just kind of come out. An experience like that didn’t ever leave a person, the sisters agreed; it went inside them and stayed forever. Sister Claire—of course it was Sister Claire, who had gone to college and kept a nice dress and good shoes in her closet as if at any moment she’d get an invitation to