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At thatshe shouldn’t She disappeared into the roo until dawn--her body burning fro hat she thought she’d heard

At the funeral she’d co to the night before Tall and elegant with auburn hair and violet eyes, the woman had terrified her with both her beauty and the despair that seemed to surround her like a dark halo Søren introduced her as Elizabeth, his elder sister, and introduced Nora as a friend of Claire’s Nora re not at a person, but at a ghost A living, breathing ghost, but a ghost all the sahost flicker across Søren’s gray eyes

"I promised I would protect you, little one That is the only reason I’ you away," Søren said and pulled Nora into his viselike arms

"Your sister… You’re afraid they’ll find out about what Elizabeth did, aren’t you?"

Søren pushed a strand of hair behind her ear

"My fear of Elizabeth is the same as it has always been I’, Suzanne woke up with the dawn and didn’t even bother turning on her computer She’d never been stymied like this before It was as if some sort of presence sat on the other end of the internet purposely thwarting her every atte of substance about Father Marcus Stearns But today she was going to pull out all the stops Desperate ti offline

The library opened early but she arrived even before the doors unlocked As soon as they let her in, Suzanne rushed the research desk with pencils and notepaper She hadn’t done hardcopy research in years Probably not since middle school when her entire class had taken a field trip to the library and learned how to dig through the fat green tomes and write down the na for Suzanne didn’t have leaned from her online research was that Father Marcus Stearns had been at Sacred Heart for nearly twenty years and had presided at no other parishes Apparently Father Stearns also acted as confessor to a nearby order of Benedictine sisters One of the and mentioned that their Father Stearns, like her, had been born in New Haht, that ht So she knew his nae and state of birth A place to start at least