The Sinner: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

silence here. Not idle chatter.”
    “I’d hardly consider it idle chatter to talk about her mission abroad.”
    “Have you ever lived abroad, Dr. Isles? I don’t mean in a nice tourist hotel, where maids change the sheets every day. I’m talking about villages where sewage runs in the street, and children are dying of cholera. Her experience there wasn’t a particularly pleasant topic to talk about.”
    “You told us there’d been violence in India. That the village where she worked was attacked.”
    The Abbess’s gaze dropped to her hands, the skin chapped and red, folded on the desk.
    “Reverend Mother?” said Maura.
    “I don’t know the whole story. She never spoke of it to me. What little I do know, I heard from Father Doolin.”
    “Who is that?”
    “He serves in the archdiocese in Hyderabad. He called from India, right after it happened, to tell me that Sister Ursula was returning to Graystones. That she wished to rejoin cloistered life. We welcomed her back, of course. This is her home. Naturally, this was where she came to find solace, after . . .”
    “After what, Reverend Mother?”
    “The massacre. In Bara village.”
    The window suddenly rattled, buffeted by a gust. Beyond the glass, the day was leached of all color. A gray wall, topped by gray sky.
    “That was where she worked?” asked Maura.
    Mary Clement nodded. “A village so poor it had no telephones, no electricity. Nearly a hundred people lived there, but few outsiders dared to visit. That was the life our sister chose, to serve the most wretched people on earth.”
    Maura thought of Rat Lady’s autopsy. Of her skull, deformed by disease. She said, softly: “It was a leper’s village.”
    Mary Clement nodded. “In India, they’re considered the most unclean of all. Despised and feared. Cast out by their families. They live in special villages, where they can retreat from society, where they don’t have to hide their faces. Where others are as deformed as they are.” She looked at Maura. “Even that didn’t protect them from attack. Bara village no longer exists.”
    “You said there was a massacre.”
    “That’s what Father Doolin called it. Mass slaughter.”
    “By whom?”
    “The police never identified the attackers. It could have been a caste massacre. Or it could have been Hindu fundamentalists, angry about a Catholic nun living in their midst. Or they could have been Tamils, or any one of half a dozen separatist factions at war there. They killed everyone, Dr. Isles. Women, children. Two of the nurses in the clinic.”
    “But Ursula survived.”
    “Because she wasn’t in Bara that night. She’d left the day before to fetch medical supplies from Hyderabad. When she returned the next morning, she found the village in ashes. Workers from the nearby factory were already there, searching for survivors, but they found none. Even the animals—the chickens, the goats—were slaughtered, and the corpses burned. Sister Ursula collapsed when she saw the bodies, and a doctor from the factory had to keep her in his clinic until Father Doolin arrived. She was the only one from Bara who survived, Dr. Isles. She was the lucky one.”
    The lucky one, thought Maura. Spared from slaughter, only to come home to Graystones Abbey and find that Death had not forgotten her. That even here, she could not escape his hand.
    Mary Clement’s gaze met Maura’s. “You’ll find nothing shameful in her past. Only a lifetime of service in God’s name. Leave our sister’s memory alone, Dr. Isles. Leave her at peace.”
             
     
    Maura and Rizzoli stood on the sidewalk outside what had once been Mama Cortina’s restaurant, and the wind sliced like an icy blade through their coats. It was the first time Maura had viewed this scene in daylight, and she saw a street of abandoned buildings, and windows that stared down like empty eye sockets.
    “Nice neighborhood you’ve brought me to,” said Rizzoli. She looked up at the faded sign for Mama Cortina’s. “Your Jane Doe was found in there?”
    “In the men’s bathroom. She’d been dead about thirty-six hours when I examined her.”
    “And you’ve got no leads on her ID?”
    Maura shook her head. “Considering her advanced stage of Hansen’s disease, there’s a good chance she was a recent immigrant. Possibly undocumented.”
    Rizzoli hugged her coat tighter.
“Ben-Hur,”
she murmured. “That’s what it makes me think of. The Valley of the