Sister Wolf Read Free

she flicked back the lights, she heard a low cough. She yelped, and wheeled around toward the noise. Sheriff Stoeber stood facing her, hat in hand. By his little smile she knew that her squeal had given him the advantage.
    “We may have to appeal, Miss Deym,” he said, pulling a sad face. “The Interior never asked the county about that license.”
    “You have the right, Sheriff Stoeber,” she answered, and hugged the green binder. She was so startled that she had forgotten to call him “Mister.”
    Marit pulled a chair over to the turret window. The Dangerfield van was two hours late and she was tired of standing. The Sheriff had not come back, but the patrol car would pass her house in forty minutes. She shifted in the chair, which had a broken back and a wobbly leg.
    The Sheriff was not her only adversary. She had as much to fear from Commander Enos, the chairman of the board of the Meyerling Community for the Unsighted, which bordered Marit’s estate on its eastern flank. Commander Enos had God on his side. He had been an officer in the Salvation Army, and kept the title after his retirement. The Commander was tall and gray, with seven strands of hair. His limbs and parts were so attenuated that he seemed to float. His bones did not join and lock, as in mortal vertebrates; the Divine Will held his skeleton inside his skin, instead of joints. His arms seemed to be the normal length for his unusual height, but outstretched, their span was as startling as a condor’s wings. Marit was a trustee of the Meyerling Community, and she dreaded functions where she might have to shake his hand: the Donors’ and Patrons’ cocktail party; the graduation exercises; the opening of the bakery, where the blind inmates displayed lopsided loaves and misshapen cookies. After meeting him for the first time, she had drawn her hand away and found her black glove coated with pallid scales. The Commander’s skin flaked and peeled, unlubricated by animal juices; his flesh seemed to be effecting its own disembodiment. Marit called him the Holy Eunuch.
    The Holy Eunuch regarded his trusteeship as a sacred mission. He proclaimed that the afflicted were made more nearly in God’s image than the whole and sound, and that the care of the maimed and defective must be an act of faith, as it was in some primitive or ancient tribes where the citizens worked only for their priests, to keep them in marble palaces and linen robes and fed on rare foods. Addressing the board of trustees, the Commander would hold up both hands, thin fingers splayed, narrow fingertips as transparent as the fingertips of virgins and nuns, and implore Heaven, or some crack on the boardroom ceiling, if he, if any of them, were worthy of serving the blind.
    Bishop Meyerling had left the Community an endowment so rich that it would need no supplement until the year 2000. Yet money flooded in, unsolicited, from children’s allowances, widows’ mites, overstocked trust funds, and guilty profits, even though Meyerling was a private school and nearly all of its pupils came from wealthy families. For the few teaching positions that opened up each year, so many applications were received that extra staff had to be hired to answer and process them. Nothing attracts financial support like a little child. In South America every female beggar walks her rounds with a baby, drugged to look sickly. When poliomyelitis was epidemic, an adult victim would not have made good poster art. The unsighted of the Meyerling Community, who inspired such generous giving, were all children, as young as five and as old as nineteen. These tender gobbets roamed loose and unguarded, learning to function without a dog or cane. If they wandered onto the Deym preserve by accident, they could not see a bear or lynx, and might be stunned or gouged by the threatened animal, perhaps to death. These children of night and pathos endangered Marit’s animals. When he learned of her plans, Enos would arm the