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she could have had surgery to recreate the hymen. She could have, in theory, but reality is a different matter entirely.”
     
    “How’s that?” I asked.
     
    “After my examination, we’re no longer in need of theory,” she said. “We have fact. And that fact is, Sister Mary isn’t just a virgin because she has an intact hymen—as we’ve said, you can have one of those and still have had sex—improbable, but not impossible. But Sister Mary isn’t just a virgin because she has an intact hymen. She’s a virgin because she’s never had intercourse.”
     
    When Anna and I arrived back at St. Ann’s, Keith was administering the polygraph to Sister Mary Elizabeth. They were inside one of the classrooms in the education center. Sister Abigail, Father Thomas, and Father Jerome were in the hallway outside the door seated in school desks—slid out here, no doubt, for that purpose because they were the only ones in the hall.
     
    “I hope you don’t mind, but he said he didn’t have much time, so we gave him the background information, a list of questions, and let him get started,” Sister Abigail said.
     
    I shook my head. “That’s fine.”
     
    “Did you have specific questions you wanted him to ask?”
     
    “Yeah,” I said, “but he knows what he’s doing. It’ll be fine.”
     
    “John, would you convince him it’s better if we not involve the outside world in this?” Father Jerome asked me, nodding toward Father Thomas.
     
    “It’s not just me you have to convince,” Father Thomas said. “Word of this has already spread through St. Ann’s. It won’t be long before somebody calls the bishop.”
     
    “What’d the doctor say?” Sister Abigail asked.
     
    “That Sister Mary is a pregnant virgin,” I said. “Something she’s convinced of to a medical certainty.”
     
    “See,” Father Thomas said. “There’s no way we’re keeping this quiet, and if it gets back to the bishop and doesn’t come from us, we’ll probably lose St. Ann’s.”
     
    “I’ve never tested a more honest or transparent person,” Keith Coleman said. “She even made the obviously embarrassing admission that she finds John here handsome.”
     
    “So she doesn’t lie, but she’s got a vision problem?” Anna offered.
     
    Keith laughed.
     
    “Bottom line,” he said, growing serious again. “She’s telling the truth. She has not had sex, she has not withheld any information, she doesn’t have any idea how she got pregnant.”
     
    “I told you,” Father Jerome said. “Now, can we please leave her alone? She’s done nothing wrong. She doesn’t deserve to be a sideshow attraction.”
     
    “The fact that she passed the test is all the more reason why we have to notify the church,” Father Thomas said. “We might actually be dealing with a miracle. What if she and her baby have been sent from God, do you want to stand in the way of that?”
     
    “Even if what you’re saying is true,” Father Jerome said, “and I just can’t fathom that it is, why do you think it has to be a spectacle? Mary had Jesus in obscurity. Let Sister Mary Elizabeth have the same consideration.”
     
    Though a lot younger and in a different type of clerical garb, it occurred to me just how much I must look like I fit with these two men in my suit and clerical collar, but I doubted I could be any different and still be a minister in the same religion.
     
    As the two Fathers continued to argue, Keith, Anna, and I stepped down the hallway for some privacy.
     
    “You didn’t just ask her about having sex with a man, but about doing anything that could have gotten her pregnant, right?”
     
    He nodded. “I covered everything,” he said. “Test-tube, artificial insemination, accidents. Everything.”
     
    I nodded as I thought about it some more.
     
    “Thanks again for doing this, Keith,” I said. “I owe you.”
     
    “You can pay me be telling me what the hell’s going on here,” he said. “Is this