Merry Sister Mary and the One and Only Killer

Prologue

Some have said to be a Catholic nun one must possess a certain devoted, spiritual, stern, and zealous personality, although, God proves time and time again, there are always exceptions to every social stereotype. Imagine a short pudgy woman wearing a nun's traditional habit but on a unicycle bouncing down the steep churchyard steps with her polka-dotted knickers flapping in the air. If you are imagining that, I do apologize. No one in their right mind wants to see what a nun has tucked away, but if you were ever curious— I hope I fulfilled that much. One would think automatically, this unusual nun was no Sister of the Clergy; a Daughter of God should not act with such frivolity. Well, one would be wrong. Good people are not always what society expects. My name, Merry Sister Mary, was given to me by my sisters, and for the record, no one expected me.

As my joyous persona may imply, I appeared unfit to serve God, but I believe God has a sense of humor. Why else has He sent me your way? Besides, I was the type of nun that made even the most pious of church goers look twice under their pompous hats and cry out in sinful barbarity, "What in God's name was that?"

Those who knew me understand that to call me strange or abnormal would be no more an insult than to call the Queen, her Majesty. To me, strangeness was normal, weird held no shame, and queer could only be expressed. In fact, I messed with people from time to time just to get a reaction while continuing to keep my saintly composure. Sometimes I walked under ladders, or sat on recently painted benches, or my favorite antic, opened my umbrella indoors. Bad luck to some, but not for me. I carried my umbrella everywhere, and, frankly, no one quite understood why. That was because I would never tell.

My umbrella, simple in design, had a brown-wooden handle, a black canopy, and a golden cap at the top. Carved into the base were the letters: DT. If one were to ask, DT, stood for Doubting Thomas, my favorite and most relatable character in the Bible. Whenever someone wondered why I called my umbrella after the great doubter, I always smiled and answered plainly, "To doubt prepares one in life for the unexpected, like rain on a sunny day."

If one were to find a nun, one would think to first look in a church or some convent reciting her rosary. Yet here I sat, let go from my convent in Chicago due to lack of discipline and my lack of skills for teaching or nursing, shipped off on the first bus ride out of the state, to a stricter convent in New Orleans, Louisiana. I would never reach my destination in time for Sunday mass, for I, Merry Sister Mary, was about to solve a murder.