The Sinner: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

room, followed by the Abbess.
    For a moment, no one spoke. Noni sat with head ducked, hands in her lap. The picture of childish obedience. What an act.
    Rizzoli pulled up a chair and sat down, facing the girl. There she waited, not speaking. Letting the silence play out between them.
    At last, from beneath a wayward curl of hair, Noni cast a sly glance at Rizzoli. “What’re you waiting for?” she said.
    “For you to tell me what you saw in Camille’s room. Because I know you were peeking at her. I used to do the same thing when I was a kid. Spy on the grownups. See what kind of weird things they do.”
    “It’s a ’vasion of privacy.”
    “Yeah, but it’s fun, isn’t it?”
    Noni’s head came up, her eyes focusing with dark intensity on Rizzoli. “This is a trick.”
    “I don’t play tricks, okay? I need you to help me. I think you’re a very smart girl. I bet you see things that grownups don’t even notice. What do you think?”
    Noni gave a sullen shrug. “Maybe.”
    “So tell me some of the things you see the nuns do.”
    “Like the weird things?”
    “Yeah.”
    Noni leaned toward Rizzoli and said softly: “Sister Abigail wears a diaper. She pees in her pants because she’s really, really old.”
    “How old, do you think?”
    “Like, fifty.”
    “Wow. That
is
old.”
    “Sister Cornelia picks her nose.”
    “Yuck.”
    “And she shoots it on the floor when she thinks nobody’s looking.”
    “Double yuck.”
    “And she tells me to wash my hands because I’m a dirty little girl. But she doesn’t wash her hands, and she’s got boogers on hers.”
    “You’re ruining my appetite, kid.”
    “So I told her why didn’t she wash off the boogers, and she got mad at me. She said I talk too much. Sister Ursula said so too, because I asked her why that lady didn’t have any fingers, and she told me to be quiet. And my mommy makes me apologize all the time. She says I’m ’barrassing to her. That’s because I’m out and about where I shouldn’t be.”
    “Okay, okay,” said Rizzoli, looking as if she was getting a headache. “That’s a lot of really interesting stuff. But you know what I want to hear about?”
    “What?”
    “What you saw in Camille’s room. Through that peephole. You were looking, weren’t you?”
    Noni’s gaze dropped to her lap. “Maybe.”
    “Weren’t you?”
    This time Noni gave a submissive nod. “I wanted to see . . .”
    “See what?”
    “What they wear underneath their clothes.”
    Maura had to catch herself from bursting out in laughter. She remembered her years at Holy Innocents, when she, too, had wondered what the sisters wore beneath their habits. Nuns had seemed like such mysterious creatures, their bodies disguised and shapeless, black robes fending off the gazes of the curious. What did a bride of Christ wear against her bare skin? She had imagined ugly white pantaloons that pulled all the way up over the navel, and cotton bras designed to disguise and diminish, and thick stockings like sausage casings over legs with bulging blue veins. She had imagined bodies imprisoned by layers and layers of bland cotton. Then one day, she had seen pinch-lipped Sister Lawrencia lift her skirt as she climbed the stairs, and had caught a startling glimpse of scarlet beneath the nun’s raised hem. It was not just a red slip, but a red
satin
slip. She had never again looked at Sister Lawrencia, or at any nun, in quite the same way.
    “You know,” said Rizzoli, leaning toward the girl, “I always wondered what they wear under their habits, too. Did you see?”
    Gravely, Noni shook her head. “She never took off her clothes.”
    “Not even to go to bed?”
    “I have to go home before they go to bed. I never saw.”
    “Well, what did you see? What did Camille do up there, all alone in her room?”
    Noni rolled her eyes, as though the answer was almost too boring to mention. “She cleaned. All the time. She was the
cleanest
lady.”
    Maura remembered the scrubbed floor, the varnish rubbed down to bare wood.
    “What else did she do?” asked Rizzoli.
    “She read her book.”
    “What else?”
    Noni paused. “She cried a lot.”
    “Do you know why she was crying?”
    The girl chewed on her bottom lip as she thought about it. Suddenly she brightened as the answer came to her. “Because she was sorry about Jesus.”
    “Why do you think that?”
    The girl gave an exasperated sigh. “Don’t you know? He died on the cross.”
    “Maybe she was crying