Copyright 1994(c)

                        NUN OF THE ABOVE
                      By J. Jordan Cannady

     They all agreed that Sister Angelique had the disposition of 
a saint, the smile of an angel, the wisdom of a judge, and the 
temperance of a Methodist.  She was singular in a world of piety 
inside a world of earthly matters.  She was one of their best.  
     This made it all the more puzzling, why the best nun in the 
convent should meet such an ignominious end -- to be locked in a 
walk-in freezer shortly after evening vespers and not discovered 
until the morning kitchen staff went inside for a case of frozen 
waffles.  Ironically, had it not been the second Tuesday of the 
month, waffle day, it might have been mid-day or even dinner time 
before poor Sister Angelique's body was found.  Some efforts were 
made to revive the poor woman but she was, alas frozen stiff and 
hours beyond any hope of recovery. 
     The city of Dutchberg, Kansas, boasted a population of 
three thousand and eleven, counting the Carmody triplets born in 
July scant hours before the official census figures were tallied. 
     The city was run by an unpaid mayor, six city council members,
two secretaries, and Mrs. Lorinda Dutch, the great great- 
granddaughter of Orrin Dutch, bootlegger, amateur taxidermist, 
and sole proprietor of Orrin's Dry Goods, the first honest-to-God 
business in Lawrence County that wasn't on wheels. 
     These paragons of civic pride had determined long ago that 
their fair city had no significant crime problem whatsoever.  
     Aside from the occasion violation of the Kansas Blue Laws, the
last real crime committed in Dutchberg occurred in 1957 when Luke 
Madders shot out the one traffic light in Dutchberg.  It seems 
that Luke was running about fifteen minutes late to pick up Miss 
Sally Dennison for the annual Columbus day square dance and 
chicken dinner.  Word had it that Sally was not altogether 
particular about who she shared her bounties with and Luke was 
anxious to test the rumor.  Now Luke had no doubt that the 
fried chicken could wait, but he wasn't as sure about Sally.  So 
when Luke managed to catch the only light in town red, with not 
another car in sight from any other direction, he snapped.  It 
took Luke about three seconds to reach back, yank his shotgun out 
of the rack, take aim and blow the lights right off of the pole. 
     The visiting circuit judge fined Luke fifty dollars and made
him clean up the park for a month.  Luke didn't mind the
punishment, he figured he had it coming.  What he did mind was that
he he never did make it over to Miss Sally Dennison's house, across
the tracks in the old part of Dutchberg.     
     With so little crime in town it made little sense to waste 
perfectly good tax revenues on protection.  After all, the state 
militia drove through town at least four times a day, and with 
the closest thing to a college in town being "Our Lady of 
Perpetual Denial Convent," there simply was no call for more than 
a token two-man police force. 
     Immediately following the discovery of Sister Angelique's 
body, the police were summoned by Mother Carpathian, the 
spiritual and administrative leader of the convent.  Half of the 
police force responded to what was the first major felony call in 
the ninety-three year history of the town.   
     Sergeant High Ransom, his name an unfortunate lapse 
demonstrating the wisdom of never allowing the town drunk to name 
his own children, stood in the kitchen staring down at the 
expired nun.  The balance of the convent's inhabitants, eighteen 
nuns and four novices, ranging in age from seventeen to eighty- 
three, huddled behind him whispering to themselves.  After a 
moment, Ransom dropped down on one knee in front of the victim 
and began his examination. 
     Her body lay on its side on the kitchen's grey pebbled 
Congoleum tile floor.  It had frozen in a sitting position.  Both 
arms were wrapped around her body as if she'd been hugging 
herself in order to fend off the cold.  Her legs were folded 
beneath her.  Ransom began to search through Sister Angelique's 
clothing and discovered several important clues in the deep 
pockets of her dark blue habit.  In one pocket he found the 
Oxford Treasury of American Humor.  In the other was a soft bound 
edition of the Unexpurgated Collection of Ribald Humor, edited by 
Bennet Cerf. 
     At the sight of the Oxford book, the volume of murmuring 
increased significantly for a moment and then, just as quickly 
dropped like the ebb and swell of a wave.  But it wasn't until 
Ransom jerked the Cerf collection out that he heard what could be 
the clue that would reveal the murderess. 
     It was a sharp intake of breath followed by a spontaneous  
"Sacre Bleu!" 
     Ransom hadn't heard French spoken since attending 
Dutchberg High in 59 and thus it was easy to understand why he 
mistook this phrase for Norwegian.  No flies on him, no sir!  
Ransom knew his geography well.  One could almost see the gears 
turning in his head as he began to put everything together. 
     "Norwegian is spoken in Norway, right High?"  He often spoke 
to himself in this manner when solving a mystery.  "And who lives 
in Norway but Norwegians?"  The trap was inexorably closing on 
the mystery suspect.  He slowly turned to stare an icy stare at 
the collection of nuns.  "Norway is close to the North Pole and 
is cold as the dickens."  Bang, the trap slammed shut.  "Who else 
but a Norwegian would think of murdering someone by turning them 
into a popsicle?"  Several nuns shifted their eyes away from his 
hostile glare and looked down at their shoes. 
     Now, it was simply a matter of determining which of the 
remaining nuns was originally from Norway. The intensive
interrogations began shortly after noon.  A little over four hours
later, Ransom was done.  None of the residents of Our Lady Of
Perpetual Denial were Norwegians, although one had volunteered that
she had lived for a brief time in Minnesota during her formative
years and had been acquainted with a family named Olsson who had
lost a small fortune in a failed attempt to develop a farm bred,
fresh water strain of lutefisk, a delicacy favored by Norwegians
which somehow involved taking a small fish, putting it in a sock
and dipping it in kerosene or some other such obnoxious process. 
She was pretty sure that there was no connection between her
friends, the Olssons and Sister Angelique.  Sergeant Ransom
concurred. 
     Ransom was, by now, tired and frustrated.  Each of the nuns 
had told him how much Sister Angelique had meant to them and how 
she was always ready to supply them with a joke or funny story to 
lighten some of the more tedious moments at the convent.  As a 
matter of fact, Sister Angelique was becoming a minor celebrity 
in the church community as she was often called upon to speak at 
various public gatherings about the power of laughter, and its 
role in healing both the mind and the body.  She sincerely 
believed that humor was a potent medicine sure to speed recovery, 
with no more lasting side effects than an occasional strained rib 
from a bout of non-stop belly laughs. 
     Ransom sat alone in the convent office, piecing together 
what he'd learned about Sister Angelique.  Just like that obscure 
Norwegian phrase he'd caught earlier, something was tickling at 
him, nudging his subconscious mind.  Then, like some Holmesian 
flash, he had it.  He began to remember the time when Wilson 
Brown, the town's only barber and world's most insensitive joker 
had told one too many Polack jokes to Bob Viskotsky, the local 
watchmaker and repairman. 
     Bob was one of the biggest men in the county and he'd warned 
Wilson to lay off of him a dozen times, but it did no good.  One 
day, Wilson was giving Bob a trim in his shop when he happened to 
notice a neat row of indentations situated just above the single, 
continuous bushy eyebrow that grew above both of Bob's deep-set 
eyes.   
     Bob had stumbled earlier in the day in his shop while 
carrying the works of a cuckoo clock to his work bench.  His 
forehead struck against the clock and was neatly punctured by the 
row of seven little spindles that held the gears in place. 
As Wilson trimmed wisps of hair from Bob's large head with 
his shiny zinc plated scissors, he started in on him again, "Say, 
Bob (snip), I can't help but notice your forehead (snip,snip)."  
     Wilson spun the chair to face the long mirror so that he could
point out the neat row of perforations to Bob and the rest of the 
customers.  (Snip,snip, snip)  "If I told you once, I've told you 
a hundred times, you people need to stick a cork on the end of 
your fork if you're planning on practicing with it." (snip) 
     As the last few snippets of hair floated down around his 
face, Bob Viskotsky leaped out of the vinyl barber chair, grabbed 
Wilson by his shirt front, tore the thick leather razor strap 
from off of the counter and proceeded to tan the malevolent 
barber's posterior with it.  Due more to embarrassment than
contrition, Wilson never pressed charges and Bob's wife, Naomi, cut
his hair at home from that day on. 
     It was now clear to High what must have actually occurred.  
Obviously, Sister Angelique had become so carried away with humor 
that it had ultimately led to her demise.  It was now left up to 
the police to determine which nun had some weakness, some flaw or 
some quirky behavior that would prove too tempting for a 
prankster like the good Angelique to pass up. 
     Once more, the questioning went on for hours, this time long 
into the evening.  By nine PM, High had learned that Sister Rose 
was secretly addicted to "The Young and the Restless," Sister 
Mary Catherine snored like a lumberjack, Sister Stella Marie and 
Sister Cecilia were having an ongoing argument about the benefits 
of putting the convent's daily output of coffee grinds and 
eggshells directly in the garden soil rather than the compost 
pile, and Sister Olive had once dated the professional wrestler 
Killer Kowalski before joining the order.  Ransom also learned 
that each of the aforementioned nuns had rock-solid alibis for 
the night Sister Angelique died. 
     That night, as High drove away from the convent he was both 
utterly stymied and dejected at his lack of progress in solving 
this case. 
     The next morning began with a telephone call to the Kansas 
state militia's staff psychologist for help in developing either 
a motive for the crime or a psychological profile of the mystery 
suspect.  Dr. Felix Morales, a graduate of the University of 
Kansas at Topeka and a consultant to the prestigious Menninger 
Clinic suggested to Sergeant Ransom that the logical answer might 
be that rather than being a victim of foul play, Sister 
Angelique, like Pagliacci the clown, may have been hiding some 
deeply submerged tragic pain, no doubt brought on from a 
dysfunctional upbringing and manifested by the complications of a 
life of celibacy, and so had simply taken her own life.  This 
made sense to High.  If she were going to do herself in, how 
better than by slowly, mercifully, falling asleep, holding her 
favorite joke books (God, what a depressed woman she must have 
been), never to wake up. 
     That particular theory held up for about three minutes.  All 
of her fellow nuns agreed that Sister Angelique's humor was 
genuine and that High Ransom's theories were beginning to reek. 
     There were no more interviews by Ransom, no more far-fetched 
hypotheses pursued, and the case was set aside as an unsolved 
mystery, unsolved that is, up until this morning. 
     It was Sister Consuela who discovered the late Sister's 
diary hidden behind the plain wooden dresser where it had 
apparently fallen.  The young novice nun resisted the temptation 
to peek, and instead took the diary immediately to Mother 
Carpathian's office.  The elderly nun read the diary from cover 
to cover before setting it down and calling the police to come 
out and retrieve it.  The answer to the mystery of Sister 
Angelique's death lay within her last two journal entries as 
follow: 
     December 12, 1994 
     Dear Diary,  
     
          I have read everything I can lay my hands on about
     this wonderful discovery by Mr. Norman Cousins and I too,
     am left with the conclusion that laughter is indeed the
     most potent of healing powers.  I've seen it myself, over
     and over again, and I no longer have any doubt that there
     is just one last step that needs to be taken.  I cannot
     imagine asking anyone else to try what must be done, it
     must be me.  I pray that I have the courage as well as
     the humor. 
           
     December 18, 1994 
     Dear Diary, 

          Tonight is the night!  I have gathered up my two
     best joke books for the experiment and as soon as
     everyone has gone to sleep I will do it.  I must get at
     least one gallon of the Hagan Daz to see if laughter will
     truly help melt fat cells away like I believe it will. 
     Yes, a gallon should do it. 
          Oh, I better remember to take something along to prop
     that silly door open.  Ever since that latch broke on it,
     at least two of the kitchen staff have been trapped in
     it, one for nearly twenty minutes.  Well, I'm sure I'll
     remember the door.   
          I wonder if I'd better try some pasta, too? 
                               END