Excerpt from The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Sister Jeanne poured the milky tea into a cup she borrowed from the cabinet and set it down. "It's still awfully cold in here, Sister," she said.

Sister St. Saviour moved the cup closer without raising it. "The men have just been in to turn on the gas," she said. "I asked them to carry out a few things that were damaged in the fire. They're going to wash the walls for me as well. So we've made some progress."

Sister Jeanne took a plate from the cupboard, set out the buttered bread and jam.

"Mr. Sheen will get the body from the morgue this morning," Sister St. Saviour went on. "First thing the lady wakes, she'll have to pick out his clothes. You can run them over for me. We've got a mass set for six tomorrow morning. Then the cemetery. The ground, praise God, isn't frozen. It'll all be finished before the new day's begun."

"That's quick," Sister Jeanne said. She hesitated and then added, "Sister Lucy wonders why it's such a rush."

Sister St. Saviour only raised her eyes to the top of the newspaper. "Sister Lucy," she said casually, "has a big mouth."

She turned the opened newspaper over, to the front page, straightening the edges. Then she touched her glasses. "Here's a story," she said, and put her fingertip to the page. "Mr. Sheen mentioned it to me this morning. A man over in Jersey, playing billiards in his home, accidentally opened the gas tap in the room, with the pole they use, the cue, it says, and asphyxiated himself." She raised her chin. "His poor wife called him for dinner and found him gone." The glasses made her dark eyes sparkle. "Day before yesterday. Mr. Sheen mentioned it to me this morning. He was pointing out how common these things are. These accidents with the gas."

Sister St. Saviour moved her finger up the page. "And now here's a story of a suicide," she continued. "On the same page. Over on Wards Island. A man being treated at the hospital over there, for madness. It seems he was doing well enough, but then he threw himself into the water and disappeared. At Hell Gate. It says the water covered him up at Hell Gate." She clucked her tongue. "As if the devil needed to put a fine point on his work." She moved her arm once again. She might have been signing a blessing over the page. "And here's another story of a Wall Street man gone insane. Same day. Throwing bottles into the street, bellowing. Carted off to the hospital." She leaned forward, reading, her finger on the page, "'Where he demanded to see J. P. Morgan and Colonel Roosevelt.'"

Sister Jeanne leaned forward as well. "Is it true?" she asked.

Sister St. Saviour laughed. "True enough." Her smile was as smooth as paint. "The devil loves these short, dark days."

Sister Jeanne straightened her spine. She sometimes feared that Sister St. Saviour was wobbly in her ways. Hadn't she once said, on Sister Jeanne's first day in the convent, "Could you go tinkle for me?"

"Mr. Sheen told me," Sister St. Saviour went on, "that he could show the article about the billiard man to anyone in the Church, or at the cemetery, in case there was a question. To show how common these sorts of accidents are. And how easily they could be misinterpreted. This New Jersey man, after all, had come home early from work. And closed the door. Had he been a poor man, not a man with a billiard table at all, they might have made a different report out of it. The rich can get whatever they want put into the papers."

* * *

BY THE TIME MRS. GERTLER RETURNED to reclaim her apartment, Annie was up and dressed and sitting in a chair by the window with one of Sister Jeanne's handkerchiefs clutched in both hands.

The two nuns walked up the stairs with her, Sister Jeanne ahead and Sister St. Saviour just behind, her swollen ankles weighting each step with pain. At the apartment door, it was Sister St. Saviour who stepped back so the girl could enter with the young nun at her side.

Excerpted from The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott. Copyright © 2017 by Alice McDermott. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.