The Three Sisters (11 page)

CHAPTER IV

Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom
of Heaven.

–
Matthew
5
:
10

hile Coito of the Dominions, Theodora of the Powers, and Regina of the Virtues were staying at the True Love Mortuary, the legal search for the three gradually expanded. Though Sheriff Kazan had issued an all-points bulletin for three nuns fleeing jail in a hearse, most of the lawmen who saw it thought it was an April Fool’s joke the sheriff had forgotten to send out the month before. By the time Sheriff Kazan was able to convince federal officials that it was not a joke, a week had passed leaving the three’s trail cold. Were it not for this bureaucratic delay, the three might have been captured at the True Love Mortuary, but as it was, the three sisters escaped the law and were able to depart for Washington, D.C. before the law could catch up with them. When the FBI was brought in, one of the detectives recommended that every funeral home and cemetery in Tennessee and surrounding states be contacted to see if the stolen hearse could
be found.

On Friday, the FBI contacted Sheriff Calder, who lived five miles from The True Love Mortuary, to see if the stolen hearse had been left there. Though Sheriff Calder laughed at the thought of the Rams harboring escaped criminals, receiving a call from Washington was a rare event, and consequently, this became a high-priority request. The sheriff called the Rams’ residence, but received no answer. For a lark and lack of anything else to do, Sheriff Calder drove out to the Rams’ residence to waste away the afternoon talking with his old friends and satisfy the men up in Washington. When he arrived, however, he found the now abandoned hearse, but not the Rams. Sheriff Calder immediately called
back Washington.

The next day several Feds visited the Rams’ former home, hoping to discover where the Rams and the three sisters had gone. As Detective Schmuck Hole arrived and began investigating, he quickly took the few clues he had and tried to put them together. It soon became obvious to him what had happened to the six people, and with only the few pieces of evidence available to him, he reconstructed the events surrounding the three’s arrival, stay,
and departure.

According to Detective Hole, the three sisters had decided to drop the hearse off at this desolate cemetery to ensure that no one would find it, but the Rams had caught them in the act. To keep them quiet, the Rams were kidnapped an
d/
or killed. With the Rams out of the way, the stolen station wagon could transport the three criminals along the nation’s highways and escape detection. Because the three Catholic criminals had again evaded capture, Detective Hole made an even stronger, more determined resolution to bring them
to justice.

“It looks pretty grim,” Detective Hole intoned in his deadpan monotone to John Hotchkiss, who was working with him on the case. “Trespassing on church property, escaping from jail, stealing one, now two cars, kidnapping—and maybe even murder. It looks like we’ve got some desperate, degenerate people on our hands, John.” Detective Hole was short of stature and moved very slowly and deliberately. He wore thick glasses and was precise in all of
his actions.

“I agree with you
completely, sir.”

“You remember all the times I warned others about the threat to our nation’s morals that the Catholics posed, but no one would listen to me? This case will prove how right my ideas have been. Did you find anything out there in
the cemetery?”

“Just a bunch of tombstones,” answered
John Hotchkiss.

“Any
fresh graves?”

“No, no new ones. All the tombstones were pretty plain. You’d think they could afford better tombstones with all the welfare they collect. Can you imagine having to work out here instead of in Washington? This must be where they send people who
get demoted.”

“Did you find out anything new from
the sheriff?”

“No, nothing he hadn’t told you. Do you know that he didn’t even have a file on the Rams? But he seemed to know the Rams
well enough.”

“I guess we’ll just have to work with what
we’ve got.”

“Coming out here really makes you appreciate the government bureaucracy in Washington,” John Hotchkiss interjected. “It really makes you realize how much more there is that the government could be doing if it had the money. Incidentally, I gave the sheriff some tips on better
organizational habits.”

“Good job, John. I guess there is not much more we can do out here, so I think we should head back to Washington and continue our work. We must stop these women before they commit
more crimes.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I don’t know how long it will take us to find them, but I can guarantee you, we will get them. And when they are captured, John, these three Catholic criminals will pay for their crimes.” With no more information to gather, Detective Hole and John Hotchkiss returned
to Washington.

Two nights later, Detective Hole sat alone in his library awaiting John Hotchkiss’s arrival at his house. Barely breathing and making no movements at all, his diminutive figure made only the slightest impression in the seat of the chair he occupied. He had removed his heavy glasses and laid them on the table beside him so he could better relax, and think about how he would recapture the three sisters before they committed more crimes.

Detective Hole had always been a God-fearing man, and since he had never deviated from the religious rules which his upcoming had taught him, he expected the same adherence to moral rectitude from everyone else.

When he was born on April
20
,
1933
(the seven-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Inquisition), his mother had thought him the jewel of her eye and so, gave him the Christian name of Schmuck. His family name being Hole, he enjoyed the somewhat dubious honor of having to bear the name Schmuck Hole for the rest of his life.

His name caused him a number of problems while he was growing up, for being a bespectacled kid who always did well in school and never got in trouble, his school companions of questionable moral standing picked on him whenever the chance presented itself. What ruffian would pass up the chance to call some odiously obnoxious ox-eyed kid “Schmuck” fifty times a day with impunity? As for the girls, they despised his holier-than-thou attitude and steered clear of him. More than one person has suggested that his lack of friends while growing up brought him into the field of
criminal law.

How had three Catholic women outwitted him and evaded capture for so long? Detective Hole asked himself as he sat in his study in complete silence. Where were they now? What had happened to the Rams? Two days before, he had visited the True Love Mortuary where the three sisters’ stolen Hearse had been found, but the criminals had already left when he arrived and the trail of the criminals had been lost again. Yet, as if the three former nuns were trying to taunt him, today Detective Hole had learned that the three sisters had come to the Washington, D.C., area, or so he surmised since that afternoon the Rams’ station wagon had been found in a shopping center in Virginia, several miles outside of the capital.

Were they hiding in the city or had they already left? Stolen another car perhaps? If they had, their means of travel was now unknown. There was no way of knowing where they were or where they might strike next. Detective Hole would not give up though, for he was certain that somewhere along the way, Coito and her band of criminals, like all criminals, would make the inevitable mistake which would lead to their capture; however, the detective was not content to wait for the three to commit their inadvertent
faux pas
. He wanted to stop them now before they had the chance to
act again.

In order to devise a new strategy for recapturing the three, Detective Hole had invited over his young bureaucratic aide, John Hotchkiss, to discuss the case and help him determine what could be done to bring the criminals to justice. In thirty-four minutes, at eight o’clock, John would arrive at Detective Hole’s small house. Until then, the detective would sit in his library with no music, TV, or anything else to disturb him so he could consider
the case.

Though Detective Hole was a puritanically religious man who foreswore any superstition, he felt that sitting in the quiet amongst his religious books inspired him to think clearly. It might even provide him with the means to solve the case. After all, had he not figured out several other cases in this same way? If Detective Hole were to gain inspiration, it would be here in his library, surrounded by his numerous religious books (meticulously ordered according to the Library of Congress system of classification) and the becalming silence. If God desired it, He would reveal Detective Hole’s next move
to him.

As with anyone, a person’s library (or lack thereof) reveals who the person really is. Detective Hole’s religious beliefs were evinced by the hundreds of books on Christianity in his library, and besides the usual commentaries, dictionaries, concordances, and other books which illuminated the Bible’s message, Detective Hole had also gathered a voluminous collection of books devoted to exposing the Catholic Church. Most of these books were from the nineteenth century when America became particularly fecund in producing anti-Catholic works after Irish and Eastern European immigrants “invaded” the nation. Some, however, were of quite
recent vintage.

Most of the detective’s conservative friends in Washington, especially those in the military, were forever reminding him and others of the Communist threat which menaced the world, and though Detective Hole never denied the presence of this threat, he always found that the ubiquitous opposition to Communism had allowed a closer and more subtle threat to remain relatively unnoticed, to wit, Catholicism. Though Detective Hole admitted that Communism posed a greater threat to America than Catholicism, he felt that the defection in the ranks of those who recognized the Catholic threat made it all the more imperative that he redouble his efforts to stop the Pope. In fact, Catholicism was the only subject over which Detective Hole showed any emotion. In everything else his disposition was as constant and unchanging as a rock’s, but when someone disagreed with Detective Hole’s opinions on the Catholic threat, another personality rose from within him. The more opposition he found to his ideas, the more adamant he became in his beliefs about Popish plots and the more suspicious he became of those
around him.

To prove the veracity of his opinions, Detective Hole had amassed the facts against Catholicism in his personal library by bringing together a collection of anti-Catholic documents for which he had intense humble pride.
Maria Monk, The Escaped Nun—A Sister of Charity, Confessions of a Sister of Charity, The Orphan Nun of Capri, The Monk and the Nun, a Funny Tale, More Murder in the Nunnery
, and others were all there. The detective also possessed the complete works of James Fulton and Rev. Beecher as well as pamphlets by the Know-Nothings from the
1800
s who had exposed the Catholic faith’s secrets. He included in his library more recent works such as Paul Blanshard’s
American Freedom and Catholic Power
.

Detective Hole believed and memorized the stories, facts, and figures these books presented and was always ready and willing to quote directly from them to convince anyone who doubted the dangers posed by the worldwide Catholic conspiracy. The detective could go on for hours talking about Catholicism’s menace, yet no matter how involved Detective Hole became in his detailed denunciations, his colleagues never tried to stop him from his
anti-Catholic demagoguery.