Mendelhaus’ thin lips tightened.
“You shot—”
“Didn’t kill him,” Paul explained hastily. “Broke his arm.
One of the brothers is bringing him over.
I’m sorry, Father, but he jumped me.”
The priest glanced aside silently, apparently wrestling against anger.
“I’m glad you told me,” he said quietly. “I suppose you couldn’t help it.
But why did you leave the hospital?
You’re safe here. The yacht will be provisioned for you.
I suggest you remain in your room until it’s ready.
I won’t vouch for your safety any farther than the building.”
There was a tone of command in his voice, and Paul nodded slowly. He started away.
“The young lady’s been asking for you,” the priest called after him.
Paul stopped.
“How is she?”
“Over the crisis, I think.
Infection’s down.
Nervous condition not so good.
Deep depression. Sometimes she goes a little hysterical.”
He paused, then lowered his voice.
“You’re at the focus of it, young man.
Sometimes she gets the idea that she touched you, and then sometimes she raves about how she wouldn’t do it.”
Paul whirled angrily, forming a protest, but the priest continued:
“Seevers talked to her, and then a psychologist—one of our sisters.
It seemed to help some.
She’s asleep now.
I don’t know how much of Seevers’ talk she understood, however.
She’s dazed—combined effects of pain, shock, infection, guilt feelings, fright, hysteria—and some other things, Morphine doesn’t make her mind any clearer.
Neither does the fact that she thinks you’re avoiding her.”
“It’s the plague I’m avoiding!” Paul snapped. “Not her.”
Mendelhaus chuckled mirthlessly. “You’re talking to me, aren’t you?”
He turned and entered the chapel through a swinging door.
As the door fanned back and forth, Paul caught a glimpse of a candlelit altar and a stark wooden crucifix, and a sea of monk-robes flawing over the pews, waiting for the celebrant priest to enter the sanctuary and begin the Sacrifice of the Mass.
He realized vaguely that it was Sunday.
Paul wandered back to the main corridor and found himself drifting toward Willie’s room.
The door was ajar, and he stopped short lest she see him.
But after a moment he inched forward until he caught a glimpse of her dark mass of hair unfurled across the pillow.
One of the sisters had combed it for her, and it spread in dark waves, gleaming in the candlelight.
She was still asleep.
The candle startled him for an instant—suggesting a deathbed and the sacrament of the dying.
But a dog-eared magazine lay beneath it; someone had been reading to her.
He stood in the doorway, watching the slow rise of her breathing.
Fresh, young, shapely—even in the crude cotton gown they had given her, even beneath the blue-white pallor of her skin—soon to become gray as a cloudy sky in a wintery twilight.
Her lips moved slightly, and he backed a step away.
They paused, parted moistly, showing thin white teeth.
Her delicately carved face was thrown back slightly on the pillow.
There was a sudden tightening of her jaw.
A weirdly pitched voice floated unexpectedly from down the hall, echoing the semisinging of Gregorian chant:
“Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo, et mundabor…” The priest was beginning Mass.
As the sound came, the girl’s hands clenched into rigid fists beneath the sheet.