Great Day for the Deadly (3 page)

There had probably never been such a place or such a century, but Miriam always wished there were.

S
AMUEL XAVIER HARRIGAN WAS
an Irishman who had been raised in Scotland, educated in England, and brought to the pinnacle of his career in places like Borneo. He had built his precut cedar log house halfway up an Adirondack mountain on the west side of Maryville because he wanted to spend his free time in a place where there was snow. At least that was what he told people, especially media people. When the silly, skinny girls came out from
Time
and
TV Guide,
he couldn’t help himself. Samuel Xavier Harrigan had a reputation as a wild man. He was big and his white hair was shaggy, although not particularly long. He had a sheepskin lined winter jacket and a thick-timbred baritone voice that tended to roar. He had once eaten roast grubs with chicory and chives on the Public Broadcasting System. He could have told them he came up here to commune with the spirits of reincarnated squirrels and gotten them to believe.

The truth was somewhat more prosaic. Years ago, when Sam had been nothing more than a decently respected herpetologist with enormous stage presence and an even more enormous appetite for a good time, his best friend from Oxford had come up here to teach at one of the local universities. He had also come up here to die. This was back in 1980, before anybody really knew what AIDS was, but AIDS was what James had—and once Sam did know something about it, he wasn’t particularly surprised. James had always put the lie to the Oxford stereotype of the homosexual as effete. James had always been a rip, and he remained a rip until very nearly the end. In the meantime, Sam built the house, kept him company, and tried to write a book. James always said Sam would have been perfect if he could get over this thing about wanting to go to bed with girls.

After James was gone, Sam could have moved onto something more—well—suitable, but he hadn’t wanted to. James died in 1984, and by then Sam was already on PBS, cooking wild dandelion greens over an open fire in the Scottish highlands.
The Fearless Epicure
had been born and was about to go into a growth spurt. In 1985, the schedule would include wild goat with thistles in Albania, buffalo in a prairie grass shell in Montana, and stewed carpenter ants in Mozambique. Summer of Love Productions, the company that funded him, didn’t care what Sam did as long as he didn’t cook anything that was endangered. He just kept on getting wilder and wilder, farther and farther out, until he got tired for the season and decided to come home. Every once in a while he thought about moving, and then he thought how stupid that would be. The Rocky Mountains were full of people who did the kind of thing he did. So were New Mexico and southern California. So, God help him, was Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Sometimes it seemed like the Adirondack Mountains were the only place in America that hadn’t been invaded by television. Sam Harrigan definitely wanted to stay in America. He thought his reasons were too complicated to explain to Americans, but he wanted to stay.

At eleven o’clock on the morning of Thursday, February 21, he wanted to get dry. He had been sitting on his screened porch since seven thirty, watching the rain come down and no one at all come out of the little house halfway down the hill. He had been worried about his animals. Most of them hibernated and their schedules had been thrown way off by this false spring. His red panda was agitated and tearful. His lizards were jumpy and upset. His snakes seemed to have disappeared. He was worried about the little house down the hill, too, and the person who lived there. It was much too late for nobody to have come out. Worst of all, for the last ten minutes he’d had his ear glued to the telephone. Charlie Wicklow was calling up from Boston, steamed up in that underpowered WASP way of his about something or other. Charlie Wicklow was Sam’s agent,

“All I want from you,” Charlie was saying, “is a promise that you’ll at least not offend anybody. Especially not the Cardinal Archbishop of Colchester. And especially not in public in front of half the town of Maryville.”

“I don’t know the Cardinal Archbishop of Colchester,” Sam said reasonably. “Maryville is used to me. Is that the back door?”

“What?”

“Nothing.” As it turned out, it
was
nothing. Sam was sitting watching the little house down the hill. He’d thought for a moment that he’d seen movement there, finally, after a thoroughly dead day. It bothered him. She always left for work between seven thirty and eight, Monday through Friday, without fail. He didn’t know what she did at night—he didn’t watch her at night—but whatever it was it never kept her out to the next day. Or it hadn’t, until now. Sam rubbed his knuckles against the stubble on his chin and fretted. Maybe she’d found a man she wanted to see. Maybe she’d decided to move in with him. Why hadn’t he made his move before this, when he still had a chance?

“Sam?” Charlie said. Sorry.

“You ought to be sorry,” Charlie said. “You’re not listening to a word I say. This is important.”

“In case I meet the Cardinal Archbishop of Colchester.”

“For Christ’s sake. Sam, let me start again from the beginning, all right? Maybe, if I repeat it one more time, you’ll retain enough of it so that we can discuss it. Do you remember my saying that you’d received an invitation to attend a reception on St. Patrick’s Day at the sisterhouse of the—”

“Motherhouse.”

“What?”

“Motherhouse,” Sam repeated. “Not sisterhouse. A Motherhouse is the first and principal house of a religious order. I take it I’ve been invited up to St. Mary of the Hill.”

“The Sisters of Divine Grace,” Charlie said.

“Same difference. What do they want me up there for?”

“I think they’re putting on some kind of program.”

There’s going to be a Mass. ‘Celebrated’ by John Cardinal O’Bannion. That’s what it says here. ‘Celebrated.’”

“That’s what it would say, Charlie. That’s how it’s said.”

“Yes, well, that wouldn’t have got to me. Even the Cardinal Archbishop wouldn’t have gotten to me necessarily. It’s what this reception thing is for. Those nuns are going to have a saint.”

“What?”

“Listen to this, Sam. ‘On the occasion of the beatification of the Blessed Margaret Finney, a Mass of petition for her successful canonization.’ Doesn’t that mean that they’re going to have a saint?”

There was a pack of cigarettes lying on the low picnic-style rough pine coffee table, torn open on one corner and shedding flecks of tobacco. Sam picked them up, extracted one, and lit it with a wooden kitchen match. He had wooden-handled kitchen matches all over the house and kerosene lamps to go with them, because his electricity up here was provided by his own private generator and something was always going wrong with it. He took a deep drag and exhaled and stared through his screen. There was still no movement at the little house, but something hopeful had occurred to him. Her car was a bright red two-door Saab. It was parked just where it belonged, halfway up her drive.

He took another drag on his cigarette, stared at the porch ceiling and sighed. It really was a mess out there today. Maybe she had decided to call in sick so she wouldn’t have to go out into the wet. Maybe she really was sick, and he ought to go down there and rescue her. He imagined her lying curled up on the carpet in her living room, burning up with fever, only half-conscious. He didn’t even know if she had a carpet in her living room. He only knew her name because of an accident. He was either insane or regressing to an adolescent state. This was the way he had fallen in love for the first time, when he was fourteen, with little Ginnie MacIver. Little Ginnie MacIver had had a head full of bubble bath and a size thirty-eight chest.

Sam took yet another drag, blew yet another stream of smoke into the sodden air, and chucked the burning butt into the tin ashtray he kept on the plant shelf. Charlie Wicklow was babbling on and on, on and on. Sam didn’t want to listen to him. Charlie Wicklow was a Protestant, and like all Protestants he was going to end up giving Sam a headache. This was true even though Sam hadn’t been inside a Catholic Church for over twenty-five years.

“Charlie,” Sam said, “calm down a minute. Why did that invitation come to you?”

“Your invitations always come to me,” Charlie said. “At least, they do when they’re from somebody you don’t know.”

“Right. They come here when they’re from somebody I do know.”

“I don’t get it.”

“It’s just this, Charlie. I don’t know any of the Sisters of Divine Grace on a first-name basis, to put it both awkwardly and inaccurately, but I do know them. They send a pair to knock on my door twice a year collecting for their missions, and I give to their missions, too, to the tune of four or five hundred dollars a visit—”

“That must be why you got invited.”

“Maybe so, Charlie, but the point is, if they want to invite me to this reception, why don’t they just send another pair up to deliver the invitation? They love coming up here. They stand around and sniff and try to figure out what I’m making in the kitchen.”

“What are you making in the kitchen?”

“Usually popcorn. Charlie, take a look at that invitation you’ve got and tell me—”

But for once, Charlie didn’t have to be told. He was rustling papers. He was coughing and heaving and hemming and hawing. Finally, he got back on the line and said,

“The invitation didn’t actually come from the Sisters of Divine Grace. It’s for a reception at the Motherhouse of the Sisters of Divine Grace, but the invitation itself is from the Cardinal’s office.”

“Ah.”

“What do you mean, ‘ah.’”

“I mean you’ve got to hold on for a second. There’s something I want to do.”

The something Sam wanted to do was get closer to the screen. He could have done that with the phone in his hand, but then he would have been distracted by Charlie’s nattering. There was movement at the little house down the hill at last. The front door had been flung open and slammed shut. The drive had been possessed by a swirling storm of beige raincoat and wide-legged dark blue pants. She always dressed like that, in pants with legs so wide they might as well have been culottes and tight little shells topped by oversize jackets that flowed almost to her knees. She had straight blond hair blunt cut to her shoulders and across her forehead that reminded Sam of Mary from the folk song group from the sixties. She was five feet four and maybe a hundred and forty-five pounds. Like most American women with the kind of figure Sam liked, she probably thought she was fat.

She got to her car, dropped her keys, managed to pick them up without ruining her clothes in a mud puddle, and let herself into her car. Seconds later, smoke began to pump out of her exhaust pipe. Sam leaned sideways and grabbed his telescope. He had never done that before—he didn’t spy on her, for God’s sake; that wasn’t what the telescope was for—but today he was worried. The road to the bottom of the hill was narrow and twisting and hardly safe for a vehicle meant to cruise on city streets. He should have gone down and offered her a lift this morning. It would have been a good way to get himself introduced.

“Forty-two,” he said out loud. “Maybe forty-five.”

He had been holding the phone again. Charlie said, “What?”

“Never mind,” Sam said. He thought he’d been saying it all morning. “I just want you to realize, before you go accepting that invitation, that the Sisters may have no idea they’re giving a reception.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about Cardinal Archbishops and Princes of the Church. Especially enthusiastic ones, and John O’Bannion certainly is one of those.”

“Are you saying you
won’t
go?”

“No, Charlie, I’m not saying I won’t go. I’m just saying you should let me check this thing out a little. Let me find out what the Sisters really want. I don’t care what John O’Bannion really wants. I don’t have to live with John O’Bannion.”

“But—”

“Trust me.”

The hesitation on the other end of the line was like a physical entity. Charlie didn’t trust him, and Sam didn’t blame him. Sam knew he had never been particularly trustworthy. Finally, though, Charlie sighed, and Sam knew he had won the point, at least for the moment.

“All right,” Charlie said. “But Sam, this thing has a deadline on it. March 1. Get back to me before then or I’ll accept in your name and stick you with it.”

“Right.”

“I mean it, Sam.”

“I said right.”

“You never take me seriously,” Charlie said.

There was a sharp click in Sam’s ear—sharp enough to make Sam wince—and then the phone went to dial tone. Sam put the receiver back in the cradle and sighed. He had been hanging onto the telescope for the whole of his last series of exchanges with Charlie, but it hadn’t done much good. Between the rain and the bright green budding caused by the thaw that had allowed the rain and the crazy way Maryville went about celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, Sam had been able to keep her car in sight only sporadically. He kept getting fuzzed out by pouring water or blocked by leaves and plastic decorations. He hadn’t trained the telescope on the hill below him before. Now that he had, he seriously wondered if the people of Maryville took drugs in preparation for their celebration of the seventeenth. They seemed to have swarmed up here and stuck plastic shamrocks and little ceramic shillelaghs to every branch.

At the very bottom of the hill, the bright red Saab shot out of the trees, turned left onto Londonderry Street and raced out of sight. Sam kept the telescope trained on the place where she had disappeared, thinking. He hadn’t realized how good it was, how clearly he could see what was down there. His picture of Londonderry Street and Clare Avenue and Diamond Place was so clear, he could have been watching them on television. He watched a garbage truck rumble down Clare Avenue on its way to the warehouse on the river. He followed a pair of old men moving from store window to store window on this lower end of Londonderry Street. Then he saw a very curious thing. The buildings on Diamond Place were all abandoned. Sometimes in the summer they were claimed by drifters and by bums, but in the winter they were always empty. Up here it didn’t do to try to live without central heat. Since Diamond Place didn’t lead anywhere, it was possible for that short street to go months at a time without any human presence. Now, though, it quite definitely had one. Sam saw her turn off Clare Avenue and head up toward the worst of the abandoned buildings, the ones at the end whose front walls seemed to be coming down. Sam recognized her clothes, too. She was one of those nuns-in-training from the Sisters of Divine Grace, a postulant, with a long black dress and a black thing on her head that wasn’t exactly a veil. She was walking swiftly, as if she knew where she was going, and so intently she seemed not to notice the rain. When she got to the barrier of the dead end, she stopped, looked closely at the buildings on either side of her, and nodded at one. Then she climbed its steps, opened its door, and disappeared.