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The office door creaked open with a treacherous groan, and Mairin froze, not daring to breathe.

After a few minutes, she crept inside. It was dead silent and chilly.

The very air of the Mother Superior’s inner sanctum felt heavy with the pervasive scent of incense and stale cigarette smoke, a lingering reminder of Sister Gerard’s stern presence.

There was a full moon, which Helen said was auspicious, but at the moment, its light was hidden in the clouds.

A watery glow emanated from the sodium vapor lights over the parking lot outside, reflecting off the silvery frame of the reliquary.

Dust motes danced in the feeble light, and Mairin tried to stay calm, letting her eyes adjust. It was creepy, being alone in the dark with a dead saint, but she didn’t dare switch on a lamp for fear of alerting someone.

She set down the key and went to work. Her fingers trembled as she ran her hands over the fancy reliquary, its gold leaf flaking

off beneath her touch. She tried lifting the top, but it wouldn’t budge. Frustrated, she considered breaking the glass. No.

The crash would wake someone for sure, and the whole place would go on lockdown. Then her fingers found a latch under the

back edge of the big case. She jimmied it, and it unhooked with a soft click .

A rush of elation filled Mairin, and she bit her lip to stifle a gasp of triumph. Here at last was a chance for deliverance.

It was a sin. It was salvation. Instead of reforming her character as the nuns had promised her mother, this place had turned

her into an unrepentant thief.

She took in a nervous breath. People who disturbed the remains of saints were supposedly doomed to burn in hell. She shrugged

the worry away. She already lived in hell.

Inside, she found a fancy monstrance on a pedestal. It was shaped like the chalice the priest lifted during holy communion,

only this one had a glass capsule inside. She lifted the thing out and set it on the desk, angling it toward the light.

Inside were some small objects. A couple of stones or pebbles. She tipped them out into her palm and studied them. The objects

were nothing special. Stones. Or bones. Or... teeth?

“Jesus,” she hissed, dropping the things back into the capsule and pushing the monstrance away. Were those really some dead

saint’s teeth? Gross .

She stood on tiptoe and peered down into the box. It was completely empty, other than the desiccated carcass of a moth. She tried tapping the velvet-lined base of the container to see if it had a false bottom, but it was solid, with no seams or hidden closures.

So where was the money? Had they been wrong after all?

Desperation tightened her chest as she searched again, feeling around the outside of the coffer. She tipped it back and checked

the underside—nothing. Think, she told herself. Think think think. The girls were counting on her. She’d persuaded them to

join her. She couldn’t fail them now. She thought about Angela, who had gone through the worst ordeal of them all. Helen,

desperate to see her parents once again. Denise and Janice and Kay, all deserving of a better life than the cruelty and drudgery

here.

“Help me out, Dad,” she whispered, wondering what Patrick O’Hara would do in this situation. When people were counting on

him, he always stepped up. It was actually his last act on earth—he stepped up to save someone. Maybe he’d known he couldn’t

survive the rapids, but he’d joined the rescue anyway. She wished he hadn’t been a hero that day, but now she understood why

he’d made that choice. The thought gave her a flicker of hope. She had to find her way back to a world filled with love and

possibility, like the one she’d known with her father. He wouldn’t have given up.

Mairin racked her brain, trying to piece together everything she’d overheard during her hours in the closet. She’d heard Sister

Gerard clearly tell Bernadette to put the cash into St. Apollonia’s keeping. Those were the exact words. Now she scowled at

the reliquary, thinking hard. What a fancy container for someone’s old teeth, even though they were supposedly verified by

the Vatican.

What would a person sacrifice for her faith? Apollonia had sacrificed her teeth and thrown herself into the fire rather than

bad-mouth her lord Jesus. Did she not realize that suicide was a sin? And how the heck did her teeth end up in Buffalo?

It all seemed pretty sketchy to Mairin. As sketchy as nuns hiding money from the diocese.

How do you imagine we pay for all the good we do?

Mother Superior’s words rang hollow, because they did no good at all for the girls who were forced to live here.

Under the guise of reform, they subjected girls to chilly dorms and meager meals, long hours of dreary labor, a cycle of prayer and repentance, all performed under the constant threat of humiliation and punishment.

Some were forced to see the doctor who did horrible things to the girls he was entrusted to care for.

With a frustrated sigh, Mairin glared even harder at the reliquary. She had examined every detail of the stupid contraption.

Or had she? Maybe she’d overlooked something. Maybe... sitting back on her heels, she studied it again. There was a martyr’s

palm on the front of the stand. In catechism, Mairin had learned that the palm was a symbol of the spirit over the flesh.

As she crouched there, scowling, the moon emerged from behind the clouds and cast more light through the windows. Now she

saw that the palm frond was made of brass, with a small button at the center.

Mairin felt a prickle of inspiration. The relic, it seemed, had its own secrets.