The garnets are a particularly deep and limpid red, like Our Savior's blood."
I looked down, of course, to see my familiar chain wearing a heavily ornate cross studded with cabochons of the same intense color as - strike me, lightning! - Midnight Cherry Shimmer.
"No need to blush, Delilah," the mother superior said. "Always such a modest girl, the ideal Our Lady of the Lake graduate. I'm glad you're the sole member of your class to pay us a visit." Her gaze sharpened. "Not that you particularly got along with the more affluent girls."
"That's exactly why I'm here," I pounced, to distract her from my scarlet-woman-red chest, the damn cross, and the flush heating my cheeks. "I was the only scholarship student, as they constantly reminded me. What scholarship?"
"Oh. That is awkward. Almost as awkward as when Margaret Mary Rasmussen raised such a fuss about your driving lessons. No need to blush over that entirely innocent incident, on your part. I'm sure you were taught in Ethics the motto of the Order of the Garter, 'Honi soit qui mal y pense.' Evil to him ... or her ... who evil thinks."
"My scholarship," I insisted, not allowing her to distract me.
"Not exactly a scholarship, dear. That would require the school itself awarding the money, and we had very little for that in those days."
"I didn't have any money in those days. I had to work twenty hours a week as a dorm receptionist, but everything was paid for. Classes, uniform, room, and board. There was even a 'necessities' fund at the bursar's office, which had me putting in requisitions for pens and sanitary pads."
"Please, Delilah. Too much information." Sister's pale face colored. "You were on a stringent budget, true, but that builds character. Obviously. Look at you now. A poised professional."
"If the school didn't have the academic scholarship money for me, who or what did?"
"This is awkward, as I said. We were charged to be discreet. Actually, to silence."
"I'm long gone, Sister Regina." I deliberately invoked her name at the time. "Where did I spend summers? I don't even remember."
"We have a camp. In the woods."
I recalled the long-sword glimmer of a body of water far larger than the campus pond. Trees. Shadows. Horses and hoot owls.
"A camp?"
Sister cleared her throat. "Camp Avalon in the North Woods. Very cool and bracing during the hot and humid Kansas summers."
"I was at a f-forest camp and I don't even remember?"
"Really, how much do any of us remember of our pasts, Delilah? Most of the girls who come back laugh about the oversized gym suits, the required physical education classes, the - "
"The May crowning of the Virgin with flowers," I filled in. "The winter Snow Fest, the SATs, the crummy mixers with the local boys' high schools."
I could have been describing the photos in the high school yearbook, had I ever had the cash to buy any of them. In any Midwestern private girls' school yearbook. I finally had a generic nonhistory, I realized.
"So," I said. "Who was the benefactor?"
"Not a who, Delilah. A what."
"Something supernatural?"
"Hardly." Sister chuckled indulgently, which I doubted any Our Lady of the Lake students had ever heard. "Not a yeti from Tibet, I assure you." She laughed even more unconvincingly.
The reference had my hackles rising. Achilles, my dog who died in Wichita, was a Tibetan breed, named after the land's capital city, a Lhasa apso. Yetis, aka the Abominable Snowmen, were the mystical white hairy creatures rumored living in the mountains of Tibet.
While I rocked back on my pump heels at that link, she trebled on.
"Not, Delilah, a ... a witch doctor from Timbuktu. Merely a nondescript corporation from Corona, California."
"Corona, California? It sounds like a Beach Boys song title."
"I wouldn't know."
"Does the corporation have a name?"
"The checks were signed La Vida Loca and always went through promptly."
That's what I needed. A paper trail to hack into. I stood, smiling.
"Thank you, Sister. It's been wonderful to visit the campus and see you again."
"Feel free to wander where you will."
Except it was getting into early evening, and I had a date with two guys and a dog.
OUTSIDE THE ADMINISTRATION building, the twilight was doing a fade to black, as the film direction goes. I'd glanced up to check for any washed-out version of the moon to gauge how far it had passed the half-moon stage ... when my sky-gazing self crashed into a hapless pedestrian.
"Pardon me," the man's voice said, for no good reason.
"Sorry." I'd been the inattentive one.
He was