There is, of course, the other, more important side to her. When I was a member of the convent, Joseph was my spiritual director, and it was she who guided me during the difficult year of my decision to leave. It was also she who welcomed me as a bride last summer, and I’ve never had any doubts that she arranged the perfect weather that accompanied our beautiful wedding in St. Stephen’s chapel.

As always, I started my visit with a walk around the convent grounds, which include the women’s college I had taught in for many years. A bell rang as I approached the college campus, and a moment later students and brown-habited nuns poured out of the buildings, talking, laughing, enjoying their youth and their education. I watched them with my usual feelings of nostalgia, hoping to see a familiar face.

“Sister Edward?”

I turned. A tall, thin girl bundled in a blue down jacket stood beside me. “Janine?” I asked hesitantly, irritated that my memory was failing me.

“Yes. Janine O’Brien. How are you? It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

“A year and a half. You must be graduating this year.”

“I am. I’ve applied to graduate school in a lot of places. I think I’ll go on in English.”

“That’s wonderful.”

“What are you doing now?”

“Unexpected things,” I admitted. “I got married last summer and I work at a couple of part-time jobs.”

“Married,” she said, as though the news had stunned her.

“I met him after I left St. Stephen’s. It was all pretty surprising.” I looked at my watch. “I have an appointment with Sister Joseph. Are you walking toward the Mother House?”

“I’ve got to get back to the dorm.”

“It’s been wonderful seeing you. Good luck. And I’m Chris Bennett now. If you want a recommendation for graduate school, Sister Joseph will give you my address.”

“Thank you.” She seemed flustered. “I may just do that. ’Bye.”

I watched her go, then turned and hurried off for my appointment.

—

“Whatever the reason, it’s good to see you,” Joseph said, giving me a hug.

I had run the gauntlet downstairs, saying hello to everyone I ran into. The long table in Joseph’s office was set with the expected tea and cups, some cookies that had the look of a nun’s hands-on loving care.

“From the villa,” Joseph said. “No one will ever forget what you did for us at Christmas.”

“Not enough, I’m afraid,” I said with the touch of sadness that the memory of the past Christmas would always evoke in me. “The debt is all mine.”

“There are no debts among friends,” Joseph said with finality. “Sit down. I’m eager to hear about your case. You were chintzy with details on the phone, if I may say so.”

I sketched the story, as I always did when I came to Joseph for help. She had her stack of unlined paper and pencils beside her, and as we sipped tea and munched on cookies she took notes, interrupting from time to time to ask questions.

In a very literal way, I laid my case on the table, showing her pictures of Natalie and finally putting the ring of keys down between us.

“And where did these come from?” she asked.

“From a carton Sandy brought over before I agreed to work on the case. There were some books of Natalie’s, inscribed by men but none of them a Terry, some cosmetics she used, their wedding album and some loose pictures, quite a few because Sandy must have taken every opportunity to photograph her.”

“So the carton was brought into the marriage, so to speak, by Natalie and added to by her husband.”

“That’s the way it looks to me. He claimed never to have seen the keys, so I guess they must have fallen out of an envelope of pictures.”

“And which of the keys have you identified?”

“This small one opened the desk she sat at at Hopkins and Jewell. This one turned the front-door lock in the apartment she lived in five years ago. And this one Martin Jewell identified as opening the door of their old office.”

She looked at the remaining keys, the ones that probably opened suitcases. “So they represent Natalie’s old life. When she left Hopkins and Jewell to get married, she started a new key ring.”

“Which is probably in the purse she was carrying when she disappeared.”

“Let me think about these keys for a moment. She couldn’t return the door key to Hopkins and Jewell because no one except Mr. Jewell knew she had it.”

“She could have returned it to him.”

“True, but perhaps she didn’t want to be alone with him or perhaps she’d even forgotten about the key. Presumably she hadn’t used it for some time.”

“If we accept his story, that’s true.”

“And she couldn’t turn it in to this Wormy person because Wormy doesn’t know Natalie’s been given a key.”

“Right.”

“But she also kept the key to her desk before she left.”

“It would seem so,” I said. “Maybe that key is the oversight. I’ve begun to think she kept the key to the office in case she wanted to check out her file again.”

“A bit of paranoia,” Joseph said.

“If there was someone in her past whom she had reason to be afraid of, she didn’t want her new address and name in their files. I know they sent her a W Two form after she disappeared.”

Joseph made a note. “So they had to have her new name and address.”

“Until January of last year. Maybe she was planning to sneak back one night and get rid of it after tax season.”

“It’s probably on a computer now, but from what you’ve said, she would have been knowledgeable enough to know the system and expunge any damaging information. Of course, we’ll never know if she intended to.” Joseph picked up the ring of keys. “It’s this key that concerns me most.” She held up the key to the door of the apartment near Gramercy Park. “It’s marked Segal. That’s the name of a lock that’s used a lot in New York apartments, and if it has the name of the lock on it, it’s one of the original keys that was issued with the lock.”

“Are you sure about that?”

She pulled her own large ring of keys out and found one to show me. “I had this one made just a few days ago. It’s a duplicate for a broom closet in the dormitory. The original is marked with the name of the lock, but this one isn’t. This one is stamped Morgan Hardware, the hardware store in town. Just out of curiosity I asked the locksmith there about it when he was cutting it for me. He said duplicates don’t have the name of the lock on them. They may have the name of the company that makes the blanks like Ilco, the International Lock Company, or they may be stamped by the hardware store or locksmith with their name, as mine is.”

I looked at Natalie’s key. “So this is an original key, probably the one the landlord gave her or the locksmith if she had the lock installed herself.”

“My question is, how could she have gotten away with not turning in the key? If they’re still using the same lock, they must have gotten a key back.”

“Maybe a roommate had a duplicate, or the brother.”

“Which means she returned the duplicate and kept the original. A little odd, don’t you think? Well, perhaps it was more convenient to return the duplicate; it wasn’t on her key ring. But I think it warrants a phone call, Chris.”

I agreed and wrote it down. “There’s a possible explanation for why she only returned one key,” I said, thinking it over. “She didn’t want the landlord to know she’d had overnight guests, male or female.”

“Good thinking. If she returned two keys, there might be questions. Funny, though, that she returned the duplicate, not the original.”

“No answer, Joseph. Not at this point anyway.”

“Let’s see where we are. We have a good-looking woman in her thirties who, like many women, uses cosmetics and hair color to enhance her looks and make her look younger, a woman who married the man of her dreams, lives in the house she has always wanted, and now is possibly pregnant with a child. Nothing unusual anywhere except that her life seems to start five to seven years ago and she is the best suspect for removing all evidence of her earlier life from her personnel record. Would she have removed those papers if she had married Martin Jewell?”