Chapter 6 #4
“Um, thank you very much for lunch, Sister Agatha,” Katherine began carefully, also slowly picking up a spoon. “Really, you didn’t have to feed us. We’re here to try to make things right if we can… somehow.”
“Yes,” Sister Agatha replied levelly. “You said.” She delicately tore a small bit of bread from the lump on her plate and dipped it in her soup. “I am… eager to hear more.”
“Well.” Katherine nudged Mrs. Chrysler for some help, but her friend was practically elbow deep in her own meal, soaking up the remaining drops of her soup with the last bit of her bread.
“Perhaps,” Mrs. Chrysler added, getting the hint and spurting only a few crumbs, “you can tell us what’s transpired since we last saw you. And where we can find Edward Splint?”
“He’s dead now.” Sister Agatha waved a hand dismissively. “His children inherited his old businesses.”
“Someone married that snake?”
Sister Agatha shrugged. “He was very charismatic, in his way.”
“Well, perhaps we may have some luck with his children, then,” Katherine said. “They might be made to understand. Is his office still run out of Merchants Lane?”
“Yes.”
Katherine waited, but the nun provided no further detail. She pursed her lips. “Sister Agatha, please. We’re trying to make up for… you know. And we’re sorry it took us so long to try. Would you please tell us what happened, after that day?”
“I don’t even really know what happened leading up to that day,” Ruben said, gingerly blowing on a spoonful of his own soup.
Sister Agatha looked up from her bowl and eyed him squarely. “All right.” She set down her spoon, and pushed the bowl away. “Over forty years ago, Edward Splint approached this convent with an investment opportunity.”
The cats drew closer under the table to listen.
“We’d always operated on a very tight budget,” Sister Agatha continued, “so it seemed only reasonable to hear him out. One acre of land, he wanted to borrow. Just one.” She held up a wizened finger.
“On the outskirts of our extensive property. To do some experiments, he said, to take some measurements. There could be money in the bog, he said.” She shook her head and went on, her brow furrowed.
“The tests, he said, would tell him. If we put up just a little gold for the tests, he assured us that we could make money off the bog. I thought about all the good we could do. Profit, from acres and acres of bog? What if we could harvest something from it? Sustainably, of course,” she hastened to add.
“So, you gave him the gold,” Ruben said.
“Yes, we did.”
“So, then what happened?” he asked.
“Well, he came back after his tests. Said the place was perfect. Said he’d like to buy the acre from us, and that if we put up just a bit more gold for the equipment he needed, that investment would come back to the convent a hundredfold. A hundredfold! What’s one acre for that kind of payout?”
As Sister Agatha spoke, more and more of the color that had been newly restored to Ruben’s cheeks was starting to drain away.
“Well, he came back soon after, telling me that he needed more equipment. We were already in so deep, so I acquiesced.”
The sunk cost fallacy. Tilly nodded sagely under the table. Classic con.
“The sunk cost fallacy,” Sister Agatha said, “… as I know it now. But, not at the time. I had given him so much gold, and he came back one last time and told me that he’d like to buy the whole property, the whole bog, except for the convent and the land immediately around it.
I refused. That land had been under Saint Percival’s care for nigh seven hundred years!
” Sister Agatha actually thumped the table with her thin but mighty fist, and her listeners jumped.
“She’d had her vision there, the one that ultimately gained her sainthood and inspired her to start this ministry.
Not to mention that it is also an ancient dragon breeding ground, or at least it was…
So, if anyone were going to manage that bog, it would be us.
The convent. Not him. Not ever. Never in ten thousand years would I agree to sell it. ”
Sister Agatha took a sip of her water, which seemed to diminish the fire that had been building in her eyes.
“Anyway, I was growing suspicious. He’d bought his equipment, presumably.
We hadn’t yet seen any return. It had been months.
So, I told him no. I said I wanted our payment for the one acre I’d agreed to sell him, and I wanted our gold back for the tests and the equipment.
Whatever returns he got from that one acre, he could keep.
Our relationship would be ended. And… he agreed, I thought.
He had one of his employees draw up the papers and bring them by for me to sign.
I read them. Carefully. And I signed them.
Payment was supposed to arrive the following week. ”
“But, it didn’t.” Ruben had absently been loosening his cowl and shrugging off his scarf. He looked sweaty again.
“No. Instead, we got a notice to vacate,” Sister Agatha said bitterly.
“We’d had a few observation towers on the bog, to monitor the dragon mating season.
The sisters there were to leave immediately.
The land was no longer ours.” The fire in her eyes was back, and Katherine almost expected her glare to bore a smoky hole into the table.
“His messenger showed me the contract I’d signed.
But, it was different. Completely. It backed up everything he said, and nothing I’d agreed to.
It wasn’t the one I’d signed. I am sure of it.
The Eagle Heights Development Cooperative owned the land now, and could do anything they wanted with it.
And they wanted, evidently, to build an Active Adult Living Community.
We got… nothing. He wanted the land. He’d always wanted the land. And he got it.”
Ruben gulped audibly.
“I protested, of course,” Sister Agatha continued.
“I went to the local clerks’ office. I demanded the return of the land title, insisted that they listen to me.
I told them that the contract of sale they’d seen was a fraud.
But, they informed me, it had been notarized.
Notarized! The seal is sacred in Pim, as you undoubtedly know.
There is no higher authority for the bureaucrats.
” She cast her eyes reverently, apologetically, to the ceiling, and resumed.
“The clerks suggested perhaps I had no memory of signing the contract due to my ‘advanced age.’ Advanced age! I knew the contract was a fraud. The version I signed was not notarized. There is no flaw in my memory.”
Sister Agatha paused a moment to fume in silence, and Mrs. Chrysler seemingly couldn’t help but fill the widening quiet. “Could you have been magicked into signing?” she suggested tentatively.
Sister Agatha bridled. “No,” she said. “Pim is a signatory to the International Magical Accords. And even if someone had been so bold, magical mind-control simply would not work on me.” She closed her eyes solemnly, and Mrs. Chrysler and Katherine exchanged glances. They believed her.
“So, I did the only thing I could do,” the nun continued, opening her eyes. “I needed our gold back, and I needed that seal examined by a sorcerer. I hired two thieves.” Sister Agatha’s hands opened now to take in Katherine and Mrs. Chrysler. “And that’s when these two entered the story.”
“We planned for weeks,” Katherine said. “We learned where Splint kept his documents, his gold. Planned the best way to break in, and the best escape routes. Contingencies, alternatives.”
“We scouted the guard schedules,” Mrs. Chrysler piled on. “Learned what kind of safe he had. And I practiced on a mock-up”—she poked Ruben sharply in the shoulder three times to underscore her next point—“for three days, till I could crack that safe in fifteen seconds flat.”
“And yet,” Sister Agatha said darkly.
“Then you entered the story,” Katherine finished.
Ruben squirmed in his seat. All eyes were on him.
He took a deep breath, but it didn’t seem to steady him.
“I, uh, entered it a bit earlier, actually, now that, um, you mention it. I know you ladies don’t regard me as particularly skilled, but I keep telling you, I did have talents…
” He turned to the nun. “Your real name, your legal name, isn’t Agatha, is it? ”
The nun quickly narrowed her eyes, two ebony beads filled with fire. “We take the names of the saints when we take the veil,” she confirmed slowly.
“And you signed on behalf of the convent as… Ernestina Jinglebottom?”
Mrs. Chrysler’s jaw dropped; Katherine stifled a laugh. Unbelievable.
The temperature in the room plummeted. All of its heat seemed to reside now in Sister Agatha’s eyes. Ruben either didn’t notice the danger he was in, or he simply felt he had to face it, and he plodded on.
“And your signature—the upper loop of the ‘E’ is a lot bigger than the lower loop, isn’t it? The ‘a’ connects with the ‘J’ just slightly, and there’s a sweeping leftward flourish under the ‘m’… Am I right?”
Sister Agatha stared. Mrs. Chrysler shuddered. Katherine swore she could see her own breath. But none could take their eyes off of the resolute Ruben.
“I remember, because I also practiced for three days”—he reciprocated Mrs. Chrysler’s pokes to the shoulder, and she shrank back in horror—“to get it right. See? I told you that stamp wasn’t a flopper.”
He—he?!—forged her signature on the contract and stamped it? Mr. Scruffles said.
Wow, said Tilly. His forgery may have been a success, but he managed to tick off a nun in the process.
Katherine and Mrs. Chrysler instinctively shuffled their chairs a farther distance from Ruben, who was now the sole focus of Sister Agatha’s stare.
Her nostrils flared and her eyes were unblinking.
“Ruben Hoode,” she finally said with a scythe-like harshness.
“I do not know you. You are a stranger to me.”
“Yes, but—”