Scorched Grace

by Margot Douaihy

Genres: Hard-Boiled; Female Sleuths; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

Sister Holiday, a chain-smoking, heavily tattooed, queer nun, puts her amateur sleuthing skills to the test in this “unique and confident” debut crime novel (Gillian Flynn). When Saint Sebastian's School becomes the target of a shocking arson spree, the Sisters of the Sublime Blood and their surrounding community are thrust into chaos. Unsatisfied with the officials' response, sardonic and headstrong Sister Holiday becomes determined to unveil the mysterious attacker herself and return her home and sanctuary to its former peace. Her investigation leads down a twisty path of suspicion and secrets in the sticky, oppressive New Orleans heat, turning her against colleagues, students, and even fellow Sisters along the way. Sister Holiday is more faithful than most, but she's no saint. To piece together the clues of this high-stakes mystery, she must first reckon with the sins of her checkered past-and neither task will be easy. An exciting start to Margot Douaihy’s bold series for Gillian Flynn Books that breathes new life into the hard-boiled genre, Scorched Grace is a fast-paced and punchy whodunnit that will keep readers guessing until the very end.

Release date: February 21, 2023

Publisher: Gillian Flynn Books

Sample

1

THE DEVIL ISN’T IN the details. Evil thrives in blind spots. In absence, negative space, like the haze of a sleight-of-hand trick. The details are God’s work. My job is keeping those details in order.

It took me four and a half hours to do the laundry and clean the stained glass, and my whole body felt wrecked. Every tendon strained. Even swallowing hurt. So, when my Sisters glided into the staff lounge for the meeting, folders and papers pressed against their black tunics, I slipped into the alley for some divine reflection—a smoke break. It was Sunday, dusk.

Vice on the Sabbath, I know. Not my finest moment. But carpe diem.

An hour to myself was all I needed. An aura of menace taunted me all day. The air was thick and gritty, like it wanted to bare-knuckle fight. Sticky heat, typical in New Orleans, but worse that day. The sun, the swollen red of a mosquito bite. Slow simmer belying the violence of the boil. I couldn’t sit through another reprimand.

Fall term was a week in, and two kids had already filed grievances about me. She’s always on us—a student scrawled—I can’t feel my fingertips! Another (anonymous, I might add): Music class is TORTURE!!! I worried that Sister Augustine—our principal and Mother Superior, sturdy and sure as a sailor’s knot—would interrogate me in front of everyone during Sunday’s meeting. Which would inevitably lead to Sister Honor’s weaponizing of minor infractions for her crusade against me. That woman’s bullshit was so skillfully honed it was almost holy. And sure, my expectations were high. The highest. Saint Sebastian’s School was one of the few private Catholic schools left, far from fancy but definitely elite. I made my classes practice for an hour at a time, five days a week. Like they were real ensembles. How else would they learn? Day in, day out, you must commit. I’d be doing the students—and God—a disservice otherwise. To suffer is a privilege.

Pain is evidence of growth.

The ache means we’re changing.

And everyone is capable of change. Even me.

But that doesn’t mean I always got it right. Whenever I was punished, my task was to clean the massive stained glass windows of the church. I’d climb up on our rickety ladder and shine the glass, pane by intricate pane. Eleven in total. Bold blue, coral, fern green, and my favorite, sanguine, the color of sacred wine, the living red of a singing tongue during vespers. Our stained glass told stories from the Old and New Testaments. Moses, akimbo, parting the cerulean sea. The Evangelists: Matthew as a winged man; Mark as a lion; Luke as a flying ox; and John, an eagle. The slow-motion trauma of the stations of the cross. Adoring angels floating above the manger during the birth of Christ, our Lord, holding luminous harps like jewels in their small hands. So beautiful, it hurt to look sometimes.

Like watching people in church as they kneel and pray. Howl and lose balance. I see people at their absolute lowest. I hear people beg God and Mary and Jesus for second chances. One planet away from their spouses or kids next to them in the pew. Or so alone, they’ve thinned to ghosts. We’re always there, us nuns, to witness, to hold space for miracles in the terror, in the boredom, in the gore of life. To take it in, watch your hands tremble, validate your questions, honor your pain.

You never see us seeing you. Nuns are slippery like that.

With my special cloth, I wiped Jesus’s crown of thorns and the doves of peace. The gilded vignettes reminded me of my tattoos, ink I was required to cover, even in the soupy heat of August, with black gloves and a black neckerchief—one of Sister Augustine’s contingencies.

Cleaning the windows was supposed to be my penance, and it was bone tiring, but I liked the work. Each panel bewitched me. Better drama than Facebook. Or a bar fight.

Sometimes, Jack Corolla, one of Saint Sebastian’s janitors, brought his ladder to help. Help was a generous verb. I’d often have to climb down and anchor his ladder, as he was remarkably clumsy and scared of heights. Jack loved the seraphim window the most, besotted with the angel’s fine hair, the incandescent gold of lightbulb filament. “It’s it’s it’s the curse of an ancient building like this,” is how Jack explained, in his Southern lilt and stutter, every single problem he couldn’t fix on campus. Leaky pipes, flickering lights, whatever. Jack was paranoid about lead in the water and mold spores after storms, convinced something bad was always about to happen. He reminded me of my kid brother, Moose. Neither would ever admit to being superstitious but sure as the sun sets in the west, they both knocked on wood in threes. “Double filter your water, Sister!” Jack warned. “Once ain’t enough. Double filter!” Concern bordering on harassment. Sweet harassment. Both guys liked to shoot the shit and tag along under the pretense of work. Both fancied themselves handymen while being the least handy men in the room. But we reinvent ourselves, don’t we? We keep trying because transformation is survival, like Jesus proved, like Moose taught me. My brother knew better than anyone the cost of living your truth. I wish I had listened to him earlier.

During the first of countless castigations doled out by Sister Augustine, I discovered that if you pressed your face to Mary’s face in the Nativity glass, you could peer right through her translucent eye and see New Orleans shimmering below like a moth wing. On the highest rung of the ladder, my eye to Mary’s eye, I saw Faubourg Delassize and Livaudais unfold to the left, Tchoupitoulas Street and the hypnotic ribbon of the Mississippi River to the right. The city was electric at every hour, but at dawn, I was astonished by the wattage of color that vibrated in the silken light. Pink-, yellow-, and persimmon-painted shotgun homes stretched out in the Garden District, long and narrow as train tracks. Purple and green Mardi Gras parade beads and gray Spanish moss dripped from the branches of gnarled oak trees. I watched the streetcar roll up and down Saint Charles, passengers slowly climbing on and off as the metal trolley bell pealed through the air. Most fools imagine New Orleans as schlock and caricature—the tyranny of Bourbon Street and green terror of Jell-O shots. Throwing your guts up on the curb or into your crawfish étouffée. And, yeah, I’ve rolled my eyes at that nonsense in the French Quarter. But the city is more complex and hauntingly subtle than I ever imagined. Mythical and true.

As true as any story can be.

The intoxicating musk of sweet olive and night-blooming jasmine. Cobblestones the size of Bibles. The terrible symmetry of storms—the eyes and rainbands of hurricanes. Sudden downpours chainsawing the air. Floods and rebirth.

Across the city, I stumbled into random treasures, like divine visions, Saint Anne’s face in the palm trees. During my first week in the Order, after picking up my uniform from the Guild, I walked into a dusty curiosities shop, painted in the velvet black of a Dutch still-life painting, that sold only bird skulls, scrimshaw, and marbles. I’ve never been able to find it again. Through Mary’s portal, I watched peacocks roam the streets with the technicolor hues of an LSD flashback and envied their freedom. I saw fog hover like a neon white veil over the river and the corner shop on Magazine Street where Sister Therese learned you could buy one bar of soap and one vial of love potion for five bucks. She never brought the potion home, but her eyes sparkled every time she mentioned it.

Sometimes, as the quiet desperation of my breath settled on the stained glass, I wanted to run outside and join the spontaneous porch concerts that erupted at all hours—washboard jazz, bebop, zydeco, funk, punk, classical, swing. I wanted to pull a guitar out of a musician’s hands and play. To leave this earthly realm for a moment and let my fingers think for me. Sweat dripping from my chin.

But the Order challenged me to stay, to soften the barbs of my mortal coil.

Earth can be a heaven or a hell, depending on perspective. Control your thoughts, choose where to focus, and you can shift your reality.

Looking through Mary’s eye, I could see the four distinct buildings of Saint Sebastian’s campus. Our convent, church, and rectory were three standalone buildings closely grouped on the north side of Prytania Street. Our school, with its three wings—east, central, and west, arranged like a squared-off horseshoe—was across the street, due south. A grassy courtyard injected color and life into the center of the school’s U, between the east and west wings. Students lay flat as shadows in the grass under old palm trees, or they sat on the long granite benches, gossiping, swooning, doing anything but homework. A riot of flowers strobed in the courtyard all year. Even at night, their blossoms and orbs danced with their own fire.

Not that I was outside much carousing after dark. Without cars, the Sisters had to walk everywhere. In the lacerating rain, we walked. In the harsh sun, we walked. Through the punishing winds, we walked.

We had no computers in the convent. No cameras. No phones, except one corded green wall-mounted rotary relic in the kitchen. No money of our own. Our radio was a vintage model with a working dial, gifted by Father Reese. We bartered for goods like books, chicory coffee, red licorice, and Doritos (blame Sister Therese). We grew seventeen varieties of fruits, vegetables, and herbs in the garden, between the church and convent. No students were allowed in our garden, but once or twice I noticed Ryan Brown munching on figs and satsumas that looked rather familiar. Our eggs were from our own hens: Hennifer Peck and Frankie. When we had special Masses or post-storm fundraisers, we went house to house in our faubourg. That’s how I met a few neighbors, wondering and worrying what they made of a nun like me. Not that I knew what to make of a nun like me—gold tooth from a bar fight, black scarf and gloves concealing my tattoos, my black roots pushing through badly bleached hair.

God never judged me as harshly as I judged myself.

If you talked to anyone else the way you talk to yourself, Moose said, it’d be abuse.

Fortunately, there wasn’t much time to let my mind wander. When I wasn’t in Mass, teaching guitar, grading lackluster homework, or practicing with the choir, I cleaned, mopping the rich wood floor of our convent, carrying Murphy Oil Soap and warm water in a tin bucket, trying not to splash bubbles over the sides. I wore my white apron when I scrubbed, as Sister Augustine instructed. That way, we’d have a record of the dirt and grime, our toil, how hard we worked. We had to keep our facilities clean. Insidious wet penetrated every edifice, gnawing beloved structures from the inside out, like lies. All our buildings were drowning in mold. You’d bleach one corner, then notice mold blooming on a new wall the next day. Tarmac-black rashes.

Every Wednesday before dawn, I tiptoed around the convent in my slippers, with the telescoping duster, to remove the gothic cobwebs from our tallest corners. We never killed any kind of creature, appreciating the sacred energy of every living being, even faceless hell-things. Using a cup and newspaper, I carried centipedes, roaches, spiders, and giant moths outside to the garden and placed them gently under the orange blossom tree, the wasps hissing and thwacking against the side of the cup. Some spiders were big enough that I noticed their dozen eyes, glistening like iridescent black holes.

Freeing insects, saving souls—we did it all. Service meant action. Talk was cheap. Even the students were expected to pitch in. That Sunday, during my sweaty marathon of cleaning, I heard the heavy chime of the altar bell. It was Jamie LaRose and Lamont Fournet exiting the sacristy, their arms full of metal objects that caught slices of color from the windows’ prisms.

“Hello, Sister Holiday!” Lamont’s voice was as enveloping as a bear hug as he yelled from below. They were stowing liturgical gifts from Mass. “So sorry to bother you!”

I wondered about people who apologized for no reason, like they were currying favor for a future infraction. But Lamont and Jamie, both seventeen years old, seniors at Saint Sebastian’s, were the most reliable of our altar servers. Never late for choir practice. Never dropped the incense boat or backtalked Father Reese. Lamont was nearly six feet tall, and waxed loudly about his Creole family, crowned deities on the Krewe du Vieux float. Jamie was the quieter of the two, and stout, built like a bank vault. Always looking down and shuffling his feet. A definite heaviness about Jamie, smiled only with his teeth, never his eyes, like the kid kept his soul locked deep inside. He was from a Cajun line, French Canadians that migrated to the Gulf in whatever century. The boys’ surefire earnestness, their tucked-in shirts and desire to tell me everything about their young lives, was refreshing—unnerving, even—in the sea of teenage sarcasm and squalor.

After Jamie and Lamont left the church that Sunday, I finished cleaning in the sludgy heat and locked up. Made sure the courtyard and street were empty, avoided the procession to the imminent shitshow of a meeting, then I snuck into my alley. I called it mine because I was the only sucker who braved the clamor of the theater and the rotten stench of the dumpster. It was my secret.

Everybody’s got secrets, especially nuns.

Like a good mystery, the alley was both hidden and obvious. You could walk right by it and never see it. A gap by design. My secret smoking lounge. And, that day, my front-row seat to the crime that would change everything, the first rip of the unraveling.

I had no money for cigarettes, of course, but smoking what I confiscated from my students was fair game. Students aren’t allowed to smoke at Saint Sebastian’s—it was my duty to step in. And Sister Honor says waste is a sin. So, there I was on my stoop in the alley on Sunday night, minding my own business, roasting in the delirious heat that never ceased, not even at dusk. Django Reinhardt guitar spilled from a car somewhere on Prytania. Music was the connective tissue of New Orleans—there when you needed it, like prayer. Both prayer and music were holy, and they saved my sorry ass more times than I could count.

A true believer, me, despite the optics.

That’s why Sister Augustine positively welcomed me to Saint Sebastian’s School last year. She saw my potential. She was the only one who gave me a chance when no one else would, not even the daycare where they employed security guards too rough for correctional facilities, or the auto repair shops where everyone was on meth, or the insurance agencies in Bensonhurst. I was willing to work nights and weekends, for fuck’s sake, and I had the makings of a damn good investigator: equal parts methodical focus and capriciousness with the patience of a hunter and an appetite for femme fatales. They still said no. But not Sister Augustine. She invited me to New Orleans, into the Order, with a few provisions.

There were only four of us: Sister Augustine (our devoted Mother Superior), Sister Therese (a former hippie with a resting beatific face who fed stray cats), Sister Honor (an interminable killjoy who detested me), and me, Sister Holiday, serving the impossible truth of queer piety. We were as different from one another as the book of Leviticus to the Song of Songs to the Book of Judith. As an Order, though, as the Sisters of the Sublime Blood, we made it work. For God’s love—the only real love—and for the sake of the kids and our city. Our motto, To share the light in a dark world, is carved into the plaque on our convent door.

We were a progressive Order, but Catholic Sisters all the same, with rules to follow or, in my case, to test. We were focused, working diligently at the school, the church, the prison, and our convent. Our bedrooms were modest. Our convent bathroom was spartan and cavernous with a musty, sepulchral air. No mirrors anywhere. No blow-dryers. The shower stalls sported cheap plastic curtains. When I spaced out in the shower, never for too long (Sister Therese timed me to preserve water), I’d watch droplets form little stalactites on the ceiling. The convent’s common areas were as austerely appointed as holy tombs, and as cold, a blessing in the sweltering, insistent heat.

Even my shady alley was blazing hot. I had my goddamned gloves and scarf on that Sunday, as Sister Augustine demanded, and it felt like they had melted into my skin. It was still a glorious moment alone, before the staff meeting adjourned, before I stepped into the convent for supper, with two cigarettes collected on Friday afternoon, nabbed from behind Ryan Brown’s pointy ears. “Aw, Sister, again?” Ryan Brown, a sophomore at Saint Sebastian’s, the king of self-owns, whined after I took his smokes. “C’mon.” He threw his hands in the air like a toddler. Of all my students, he had absolutely no street smarts. My contraband supply flowed through this curious kid. Most students fled the instant I walked into a room, whereas Ryan Brown lingered. His flagrant violations of our tobacco rules made it seem like he was trying to get caught. Or he was bad at being bad. Not like me.

I held up the cigarettes. “Showing off your smokes makes you a tough guy?”

“But I—”

“Learn how to fight for what you want,” I cut Ryan off. No time for excuses. “Or learn how to hide it better. Otherwise, you’ll lose everything.”

My wisdom held a kind of grace, I’ll admit.

I offered my students the only thing that mattered in life—honesty—and I served it the way I meted out revenge, ice cold. I was a fuckup about most things, but when it came to commitment, I was all in, like a python eating a goat, sinew and toenails and skeleton and all. Like my Sisters, I did everything I could to lift each student, to help them carry the light in their own hands, not hold it for them. Sometimes that meant calling out their sloth and turpitude. And I knew how to clock BS because I lived it. To break a horse or a human, you must first understand wildness.

All weekend I had waited for the perfect moment to savor the cigarettes, and it had finally arrived that Sunday. I was sweating through every layer of my uniform, but I needed more time outside. Without a minute to myself, I’d snap at Sister Honor. My fuse was still dangerously short, and Sister Honor knew how to wind me up.

I pulled out one of the stolen cigs that I kept hidden in my guitar case. Ran it under my nose, sniffed it, and lit it with the last match in the book. A cloud of gnats dispersed as quickly as it formed, not like the sunset, which remained, the battered gold of a pocket watch that seemed to slow time itself. Twilight was the hinge between day and night. Gauzy tides of heat pushed and pulled me. My skin pruned under my gloves. They say if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere. But New Orleans is the crucible. The home of miracles and curses—neither life nor death but both. In such a liminal space, like standing in a doorway, you could be in or out, doomed or redeemed.

Sweat rained down my back. I was surprised it was so quiet out there, in the moth-thick alley, no live show or rehearsal in the old theater. PUTTING THE DEVIL BACK IN VAUDEVILLE, the poster promised. Like the devil would let anyone tell them where to go. The theater, like so many grand spaces in the city, was devastated by the storms that grew stronger every year. Paint on the front door peeled off in big mahogany rolls. On route to ruin, still delicious. More opulent than Buckingham friggin’ Palace.

With all the matches gone, I had to chain-smoke my contraband, lighting one with the other. Such luxurious tobacco—probably an import. Our wealthiest students were fuckers—I’m sorry, Lord, it’s true—but their smokes were superior to the garbage I choked on back in Brooklyn, back in my old life where my fingers bled for rent money, for tips, for my next whiskey.

A crescent moon floated like a talon. Frogs croaked in the privacy of their night disguise. A creaky chorus, the nocturne. Ever more haunting in the tropical steam and amber smoke of the streetlights. Meaty magnolia blossoms held glinting veins of pink, little hearts pumping inside each petal. I took another drag, let it sink in.

Suddenly, the back of my throat soured. My eyes watered as a wave of extra heat slapped me.

Then, a smear of red and orange. The night sky exploded. It took a beat to understand what I was seeing.

Fire.

The school. My school on fire. The east wing of Saint Sebastian’s was burning.

Livid flames stabbed through an open window.

In a few seconds, the horror erupted. ...