Great Day for the Deadly (13 page)

“The Cardinal,” Sister Scholastica was saying, as she kicked at the bottom of the door the way people did when weather stripping made a corner stick, “has already been on the phone to Pete Donovan. Pete Donovan is our chief of police, which you probably already know. I can’t believe the Cardinal wouldn’t have told you. At any rate, you won’t have any of the trouble you may have had other places. Pete had no objection to your being called in.”

“That’s good,” Gregor said blandly. In fact, it was imperative. He had never had to work against the wishes of a local police department. He wasn’t sure he would agree to work if a local department was against him. God only knew it would make an investigation practically impossible. “What about you?” he asked her. “Do you have any objections to my being called in?”

“Of course not.” Scholastica looked startled. She had finished with the door and was now looking around the foyer, as if she were trying to remember something she had forgotten. “If you really want to know the truth,” she said, “it was my idea. Calling you in, I mean. The Cardinal had thought of it—”

“It seemed to me like a natural for the Cardinal.”

“It was. But before he called us about it, I mentioned it to Reverend Mother General. That was the day after it happened, a little over a week ago. I just kept looking at the whole situation and thinking—”

“What?”

If Scholastica hadn’t been a nun, she would have shrugged. It was Gregor’s experience that nuns—or at least the old-fashioned kind—didn’t shrug when you expected them to. Instead, she turned to the right and headed for the doors there, obviously expecting Gregor to follow. The soles of her shoes were rubber and her feet were soundless on the marble, but she still made noise as she moved. She had a ring of keys at her waist that jangled.

“I don’t know what kind of information you’ve gotten from the Cardinal,” she said, “but we got a great deal of it right away. Maybe that was because Reverend Mother General did the expected thing for once and called the Chancery immediately.”

“Immediately when?” Gregor asked.

“Immediately period,” Scholastica said. “As soon as Pete Donovan called us. We’re supposed to call the Chancery for any death, really, even when a retired Sister of ninety-seven passes away in her sleep, but with that sort of thing we often take a day or two while we get ourselves organized. With an accident of any kind—”

“Did you think it was an accident?” Gregor asked her. “In the beginning?”

“In the beginning, we didn’t know what it was,” Scholastica admitted. “When Pete called it was still early, maybe two o’clock at the latest, and he didn’t really know what had happened either. That was when he still thought the cause of death was going to be the snakes and he was beside himself. I mean, we all knew the snakes probably belonged to Sam—”

“Did you?”

Scholastica blushed a little. “Well, we didn’t tell the press, if that’s what you mean. We wouldn’t. We got so sick of them hanging around, amusing themselves—oh, never mind. Their behavior was deplorable. And word came from the Cardinal in no time at all that he didn’t really want to have anything get out, so we—managed.”

“Better than I would have thought possible,” Gregor said.

“Yes. Well. In the old days, the Church was a great teacher of discipline. Anyway, I think everybody thought they were probably Sam’s snakes because he’s had stuff like that up there before, it drives the old nellies at the Town Governing Board wild, but then they could have been Josh Malley’s—”

“Who’s Josh Malley?”

Scholastica shot him a strangely amused look. “Josh Malley is the twenty-five-year-old husband of our sixty-something-year-old local bank president. From what I hear—I was in Colchester at the time—she brought him back from Corfu a couple of years ago and has been doing the Lord only knows what with him since. It’s been very strange, really. When people have midlife crises—I suppose this would have been an end of life crisis—when they have these crises they usually change, don’t they? They start wearing silly clothes and have plastic surgery and tell all their friends they’d rather be called Kiki from here on out. Well, Miriam didn’t do that. She’s always been a solid, sensible woman and she’s still a solid, sensible woman. She just has Josh.”

“And what does Josh have to do with snakes?”

“Oh,” Scholastica said, “well. She’s always buying him toys, Miriam is, and one of the things she bought him is a menagerie. It’s a small zoo, really. She had a lion in it for a while—a very small lion, mind you—but the Governing Board went absolutely nuts and she had to give it away. The menagerie has snakes in it.”

“Water moccasins?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hmm,” Gregor said again.

They had passed through a short empty corridor that opened onto nothing, with doors at the front and back like the lock of a canal. Scholastica opened the far set of doors and motioned him through, into another short corridor with more signs of life. This corridor had doors in its walls and crucifixes on them, each crucifix accompanied by a Bible verse in elegant calligraphic script. Gregor leaned close to one and found Hebrews 13:12-15:
Jesus died outside the gate.
It was, after all, Lent.

Scholastica led him through another set of doors, then around a corner. Gregor thought the Motherhouse hadn’t looked this big when he was still outside it. It hadn’t looked this complicated, either. He let Scholastica take him where she wanted to and forced himself not to try to make sense of it just yet. He could do that later, with pen and paper and Sister’s advice on how to make a map.

“Anyway,” Scholastica said, “if the snakes had belonged to Josh we would have been happy to let the world know about it, but we couldn’t be sure because Sam wasn’t talking. And in the beginning we didn’t know at all, of course. We just thought Brigit had drowned.”

“Was that likely?” Gregor asked.

“After Pete called, no,” Scholastica said. “He did tell Reverend Mother about the snakes. I mean before that, when she was missing and we didn’t know where she was. The rain really was terrible, and there was flooding down at St. Andrew’s. We were helping out by packing up canned goods and getting our gym ready to take anybody Iggy Loy couldn’t handle—”

“Iggy Loy?”

“St. Ignatius Loyola Church. It’s right down the hill on Delaney but not too far down. It was high enough up to escape any water damage, and we knew it would be. And I know the library is just on the other end of Delaney Street and I know it’s not far—”

“This is the library where she was supposed to be going.”

“There’s only the one,” Scholastica said. “Brigit went every day. We’re all supposed to have one or two little practical chores to do around the house, and that was hers. I thought it was a good idea, but—”

“But Brigit was a flake?”

“I wouldn’t say flake, exactly.” Scholastica looked uncomfortable. “Mr. Demarkian, part of me wants to say that Brigit was nothing particularly special. There were always girls like Brigit in postulant classes, immature girls, borderline cases. Before I became Postulant Mistress, I didn’t realize how hard it would be to decide whether to keep them or not. The actual decision is supposed to rest with Alice Marie—Sister Alice Marie is Mistress of Novices—in consultation with Reverend Mother, but in practice it comes down to me. And I just have a hard time making up my mind.”

They had come to the end of the corridor they had turned the corner into. They were now presented with turns to the right and to the left. The place felt like a maze, turning in on itself, folding up like an accordion. It made Gregor dizzy.

In front of him, Sister Mary Scholastica had come to a stop, turning neither one way nor the other. Now she swung around and faced him for the first time since she had let him through the door. Her face was pale and taut, but there was still no real expression in it. Gregor cast his mind back to last year in Colchester and tried to get some take on this. Had Scholastica been so stoic and expressionless then? Had she been so tense? What was wrong with her? Gregor had come prepared to deal with human emotions. He always did, because he knew too well that if he didn’t they would get in the way. That was one of the things the Bureau had taught him, on kidnapping detail especially. Taught or not, he really didn’t have a talent for this sort of thing. He was always being thrown by the unexpected.

Scholastica had wrapped her arms around her waist and hunched her shoulders forward. She was still staring at him intently, as if she expected him to give her the answer to a question she hadn’t asked.

“Brigit Ann Reilly,” she said, with a trace of coming explosion in her voice, “was not that common type, the girl too immature to be in the convent. She was immature enough, mind you, but that wasn’t what was wrong with her, as far as a religious order was concerned. As far as I was concerned. She was a perfectly ordinary girl from a perfectly ordinary family in New Hampshire. I’m not trying to imply that there was something odd about her background, because I don’t believe there was. I think she would have made a perfectly marvelous wife and mother in the ditzy
I Married Joan
mold, or a competent private secretary to someone whose schedule wasn’t too complicated. She wasn’t very bright and she wasn’t very stupid. She wasn’t very imaginative and she wasn’t very bad. She was just utterly and incurably undisciplined.”

“Undisciplined?” Gregor demanded.

Scholastica turned away from him and went to the left. She was walking quickly now, with an abrupt and decisive step Gregor remembered from nuns he had run across in his childhood. She pushed open yet another set of swinging wooden doors, held yet another one open for him to pass through, and then continued on their way, oblivious of anything but her own words and her own forward motion.

There seemed to be one more set of doors to pass through. Gregor assumed there was only one more, because he couldn’t imagine Scholastica slamming the palms of her hands into doors like that time after time without getting hurt. He caught the swing of the door himself as he came through, just in case she had forgotten what she was doing besides talking.

“Brigit Ann Reilly,” she was saying, “was the kind of girl who had enthusiasms. She was ready to canonize the postman one week, because of the beautiful things he had said to her when she’d met him on the doorstep while he was delivering the mail. She saw secrets everywhere. Undistinguished people whom she liked had secret lives, according to her. Secret religious lives. She was addicted to felling in calf love—nonsexual calf love, I want to make myself clear—with a different person every week and then”—Scholastica threw up her hands—“I don’t know how to explain this to you, really. I don’t know—Oh, Mr. Demarkian, the whole thing is such a mess, I don’t know where to start talking about it, never mind explaining it.”

“I do,” Gregor said. “Brigit Ann Reilly was a girl who liked secrets. Other people’s secrets.”

“But not
blackmail
secrets,” Scholastica said. “She didn’t like to know discreditable things about people. I’d have known how to deal with that. I’d have thrown her right out of here as soon as it became clear. What Brigit liked was thinking that someone she was infatuated with had the stigmata and wasn’t telling anyone.”

“And was that happening, Sister? Did someone she knew have the stigmata on the day Brigit Ann Reilly died?”

They had come to a dead stop again, this time in front of broad door with a window cut into its top half. There was a brass crucifix hanging just under the window. Gregor looked at the walls around him and saw a few unobtrusive homages to St. Pat’s. There was more balance here than Gregor had seen in any other part of the convent—but he didn’t know that balance was the business convents were into. Scholastica went to the door with the crucifix on it, opened it up and looked inside. Then she pushed the door all the way open and wedged a rubber doorstop underneath it with her foot. The office beyond it was empty, and obviously the sanctuary of the order’s Reverend Mother General. There was a full-size poster-photographed copy of the portrait in the foyer on the far wall, surrounded by photographs of two dozen or so other women in the same pose: an order genealogy of Reverend Mothers General.

“Reverend Mother General must be off somewhere with Mr. Donovan,” Scholastica said. “She’s got him up here, you know, just to talk to you. You can sit down in the meantime, if you want. She won’t mind having you in here.”

“You were telling me about the stigmata,” Gregor prompted gently.

Scholastica flushed. “I didn’t necessarily mean the stigmata in particular. Although I’ve got to admit, that was exactly the kind of thing Brigit went in for. She said in Recreation once that if she got to have just one wish granted it would be to have a vision of the Virgin, and if it hadn’t been the first week I’d have thrown her out for that. That kind of thing is a form of hysteria. What I’m trying to say is, all that last week before she died, she’d been—strange in a way I recognized.”

“Strange the way she was strange when she formed one of these infatuations,” Gregor translated.

“Exactly,” Scholastica said. “Only it was different, this time, because I don’t think she was fixed on anyone I know. She certainly wasn’t fixed on anyone in the convent. I would have found out who it was if she had been.”

“Was she fixed on someone she met on her walks to the library? Is that what you mean?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Demarkian. I didn’t know what to think about it all even before Brigit died. I will say I hope she wasn’t fixed on Glinda Daniels because Glinda—”

“Glinda what?”

“I’m going to leave you in Reverend Mother’s office now,” Scholastica said. “She’ll be along in a minute. Just make yourself comfortable.”

“Sister—”

But Sister had backed up, out of the door, and then proceeded to do something Gregor had never known anyone but a nun to be able to do: She had truly and undeniably disappeared. Gregor looked up and down the corridor and saw no one, only open doors that revealed small empty classrooms. He looked into Reverend Mother General’s office and wondered how she managed to keep it so very neat. His own desk at home was a holocaust, and Tibor’s was worse than that. The only pieces out of place in this room were the letters and the single small package at the edge of Reverend Mother’s desk, and Gregor found himself resenting the Sister who had put them there, carelessly, without regard to the fastidiousness that marked the rest of this space.