The Girl In the Well

Seventeen-year-old Sister Marguerite has never known any life but that of a nun. Abandoned as a orphan at the door of a church, she has been raised in a convent.

She has faced the poverty and the daily disciples of life, but now she must face the inclinations of her maturing body. And she must also solve the mystery of why she fears the well in the yard of the convent.

This fictional story is set near St. Louis, in the immediate years after Missouri had entered the Union as the 24th State.


“The little girl did not cry out as one would have expected of a child so young. She felt her bruised body, bruised but not broken. Somehow she had landed on her feet.

She stood silently in the cold water, feeling the slippery mud underneath them, feeling the sharp limestone rocks beneath the layer of mud. The darkness was overwhelming. 

She would not cry out, she resolved. Neither would she fight her fate. 

She deserved this. He had said so and he knew. He stood next to God, so if he said she deserved to die, it must be true. 

She stared but did not see, was cold but did not feel. Her silent terror had become numbness.”