SISTER ANGELA, THE MOTHER SUPERIOR, managed the convent and the school from a small office adjacent to the infirmary. The desk, the two visitors' chairs, and the file cabinets were simple but inviting.

On the wall behind her desk hung a crucifix, and on the other walls were three posters: George Washington; Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird; and Flannery O'Connor, the author of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and many other stories.

She admires these people for many reasons, but especially for one quality they all shared. She will not identify that quality. She wishes you to ponder the riddle and arrive at your own answer.

Standing in her office doorway I said, "I'm sorry about my feet, ma'am."

She looked up from a file she was reviewing. "If they have a fragrance, it's not so intense that I smelled you coming."

"No, ma'am. I'm sorry for my stocking feet. Sister Clare Marie took my boots."

"I'm sure she'll give them back, Oddie. We've had no problem with Sister Clare Marie stealing footwear. Come in, sit down."

I settled into one of the chairs in front of her desk, indicated the posters, and said, "They're all Southerners."

"Southerners have many fine qualities, charm and civility among them, and a sense of the tragic, but that's not why these particular faces are inspiring to me."

I said, "Fame."

"Now you're being intentionally dense," she said.

"No, ma'am, not intentionally."

"If what I admired in these three was their fame, then I'd just as well have put up posters of Al Capone, Bart Simpson, and Tupac Shakur."

"That sure would be something," I said.

Leaning forward, lowering her voice, she said, "What's happened to dear Brother Timothy?"

"Nothing good. That's all I know for sure. Nothing good."

"One thing we can be certain of-he didn't dash off to Reno for some R and R. His disappearance must be related to the thing we spoke of last evening. The event the bodachs have come to witness."

"Yes, ma'am, whatever it is. I just saw seven of them in the recreation room."

"Seven." Her soft grandmotherly features stiffened with steely resolution. "Is the crisis at hand?"

"Not with seven. When I see thirty, forty, then I'll know we're coming to the edge. There's still time, but the clock is ticking."

"I spoke with Abbot Bernard about the discussion you and I had last night. And now with the disappearance of Brother Timothy, we're wondering if the children should be moved."

"Moved? Moved where?"

"We could take them into town."

"Ten miles in this weather?"

"In the garage we have two beefy four-wheel-drive extended SUVs with wheelchair lifts. They're on oversize tires to give more ground clearance, plus chains on the tires. Each is fitted with a plow. We can make our own path."

Moving the kids was not a good idea, but I sure wanted to see nuns in monster trucks plowing their way through a blizzard.

"We can take eight to ten in each van," she continued. "Moving half the sisters and all the children might require four trips, but if we start now we'll be done in a few hours, before nightfall."

Sister Angela is a doer. She likes to be on the move physically and intellectually, always conceiving and implementing projects, accomplishing things.

Her can-do spirit is endearing. At that moment, she looked like whichever no-nonsense grandmother had passed down to George S. Patton the genes that had made him a great general.

I regretted having to let the air out of her plan after she'd evidently spent some time inflating it.

"Sister, we don't know for sure that the violence, when it happens, will happen here at the school."

She looked puzzled. "But it's already started. Brother Timothy, God rest his soul."

"We think it's started with Brother Tim, but we don't have a corpse."

She winced at the word corpse.

"We don't have a body," I amended, "so we don't know for sure what's happened. All we know is that the bodachs are drawn to the kids."

"And the children are here."

"But what if you move the kids in town to a hospital, a school, a church, and when we get them settled in, the bodachs show up there because that's where the violence is going to go down, not here at St. Bart's."

She was as good an analyst of strategy and tactics as Patton's grandma might have been. "So we would have been serving the forces of darkness when we thought we'd been thwarting them."

"Yes, ma'am. It's possible."

She studied me so intently that I convinced myself I could feel her periwinkle-blue stare riffling through the contents of my brain as if I had a simple file drawer between my ears.

"I'm so sorry for you, Oddie," she murmured.

I shrugged.

She said, "You know just enough so that, morally, you've got to act… but not enough to be certain exactly what to do."

"In the crunch, it clarifies," I said.

"But only at the penultimate moment, only then?"

"Yes, ma'am. Only then."

"So when the moment comes, the crunch-it's always a plunge into chaos."

"Well, ma'am, whatever it is, it's never not memorable."

Her right hand touched her pectoral cross, and her gaze traveled across the posters on her walls.

After a moment, I said, "I'm here to be with the kids, to walk the halls, the rooms, see if I can get a better feel for what might be coming. If that's all right."

"Yes. Of course."

I rose from the chair. "Sister Angela, there's something I want you to do, but I'd rather you didn't ask me why."

"What is it?"

"Be sure all the doors are dead-bolted, all the windows locked. And instruct the sisters not to go outside."

I preferred not to tell her about the creature that I had seen in the storm. For one thing, on that day I stood in her office I did not yet have words to describe the apparition. Also, when nerves are too frayed, clear thinking unravels, so I needed her to be alert to danger without being in a continuous state of alarm.

Most important, I didn't want her to worry that she had allied herself with someone who might be not merely a fry cook, and not merely a fry cook with a sixth sense, but a totally insane fry cook with a sixth sense.

"All right," she said. "We'll be sure we're locked, and there's no reason to go out in that storm, anyway."

"Would you call Abbot Bernard and ask him to do the same thing? For the remaining hours of the Divine Office, the brothers shouldn't go outside to enter the church through the grand cloister. Tell them to use the interior door between the abbey and the church."

In these solemn circumstances, Sister Angela had been robbed of her most effective instrument of interrogation: that lovely smile sustained in patient and intimidating silence.

The storm drew her attention. As ominous as ashes, clouds of snow smoked across the window.

She looked up at me again. "Who's out there, Oddie?"

"I don't know yet," I replied, which was true to the extent that I could not name what I had seen. "But they mean to do us harm."