Sister Eve and the Blue Nun Read Online Free

into Eve and began to cry. She held him as they both sat on the chapel floor.
    “Hail Mary, full of grace—” she began to recite as he sobbed into her shoulder.
    “It’s too late,” he said, interrupting her. “It’s too late for that.”
    “Anthony, what’s wrong?” Eve faced her friend, trying to look him in the eye. “What happened to Kelly?”
    He held up his face, his eyes filled with tears, and shook his head. “She’s dead,” he said again.
    “How do you know this?” Eve asked. “Did she fall? Was there some accident?” She began trying to think of all the ways the young woman might have died. “Is she sick?” she asked, still not believing that his sister was dead.
    Brother Anthony kept shaking his head. “I did it. I’ve done this,” he said, his voice breaking.
    “What have you done? You couldn’t have killed Kelly,” Eve responded. She clasped his chin, stopping him from shaking his head back and forth. “Anthony, look at me; tell me what has happened.”
    He didn’t answer.
    “Is she in her room?” Eve asked, prompting her friend. “Did you see her in her room?”
    He nodded.
    Eve started to stand. “Let’s go there,” she said. “Maybe she’s not dead. Maybe I can help.”
    Anthony pulled on the sleeve of her jacket, yanking her back down beside him. “No,” he answered forcefully. “Not yet. Not until I tell you.”
    Eve nodded and waited. She had never seen her friend in such distress. She knew she needed to hear what he had to tell her, even though she wanted to run to the guest room to check on the young woman.
    The two sat in silence. There were only a few candles still burning at the prayer station, and it had grown darker in the chapel than it had been when Eve first arrived. She was having a difficult time seeing the monk who sat beside her.
    “We argued,” he said, and Eve nodded in agreement. She had, after all, witnessed the exchange at dinner.
    “I . . . I found something.”
    Eve didn’t respond.
    “I made her promise that she wouldn’t tell anyone. I needed to show it to Father Oliver first, and she promised.”
    Eve felt him slump a bit. She was leaning against the side of the pew, resting her back but still keeping one arm around him.
    He was shaking his head. “Only, she told. I don’t know who or how many people she told, but she told, and now someone’s killed her.”
    Eve couldn’t believe the news. Not only was his sister dead, the young, beautiful, smart Kelly Middlesworth, but now he was saying that she had been murdered.
    “How do you know this?” she asked, her head reeling with the information.
    “I just came from there. I was just in her room. The pages are gone and she’s dead.” He slid farther down, dropping his face into his hands. “It’s my fault. I never should have given them to her. It’s all my fault and now she’s dead.”
    Eve reached over and pulled his hands away from his face. “Anthony, how do you know for sure? I need to go to her. I need to check to see if she’s really dead.”
    He grabbed her hands. “She’s dead. There’s no pulse. There’s no breath. I checked. I checked over and over. She’s dead.”
    Eve looked at her watch as he held on to her hands. She could tell the time because the hours on the face of her watch stayed lit in the dark. It was after midnight. She pulled her hands away from his and touched his face, studying his eyes. She didn’t ask, but she wondered where Anthony had been all evening, wondered why he had gone to his sister’s room so late, wondered how Kelly had been killed and why, if indeed she had been murdered. This was all just too much to believe.
    “Tell me what happened,” she said. “Tell me why you went there.”
    “I wanted to tell her that I forgave her, that I understood why she did what she did and that I forgave her.”
    “Why? What did she do?” Eve wanted to know. “Why did you need to forgive her?”
    Anthony shook his head. “I can’t tell . . .