by Jane Haddam
“Ellen, what are you doing here?” she said. “I’ve got a right to be here,” Ellen said. “This was Drew’s office. It’s going to be mine, now. It’s going to be mine because he’s dead.”
“Yes,” Martha said, sounding exasperated. “We know he’s dead, Ellen, it’s been on the news all night. But we have work to do. Drew wasn’t just a person, he was an enterprise, and dead or not we’ve got obligations we’ve got to fulfill.”
Danielle Underwood came out from behind the partition that led to the offices in the back. She was prettier than Martha, and her accent wasn’t anywhere near as awful, but Ellen knew that she was much the same. All these women were alike, really, all these women with careers, thinking they were better than everybody else, thinking they were special. Ellen took great satisfaction in remembering that these days, when you called somebody “special,” you weren’t talking about how bright they were.
It was hot in here now, hot-cold, hot-cold, hot-cold. Ellen unbuttoned her coat. “I don’t think you should make decisions without talking to me,” she said. “I’m going to be in charge here now. I don’t want you doing things that are going to be blamed on Drew if I don’t know about them first.”
“But that’s ridiculous,” Martha said. “You have no idea what goes on in this office. You have no idea what it is we do. You can’t give orders about something you know nothing about.”
“I can give orders about something I own,” Ellen said. “And I own this. Whatever it is, now that Drew isn’t here.”
“You don’t own this yet,” Martha said. “The will will have to be probated. In the meantime, I’m going to keep this office running the way it ought to be run, the way Drew wanted it run, the way I ran it for him. And if you don’t like it, you can see the lawyers.”
“Martha,” Danielle said.
“Don’t shush me,” Martha said. “This is ridiculous. She doesn’t know the first thing about the work Drew was doing. She doesn’t even know what he did besides be on the radio, and she only knows that because she’s got her radio dial turned to his program. She’s a walking clothes rack, that’s all she is. He married her because she looks good in photographs.”
Ellen smiled slightly. That might very well be true, at least up to a point. She thought Drew might also have married her because she made him feel comfortable. Unlike Martha, or Danielle, or the “right-wing blondes” who had taken over television lately, she didn’t have that Seven Sisters–Ivy League accent, and she hadn’t grown up taking summer vacations on Martha’s Vineyard.
She suppressed a sudden, almost irresistible urge to tell Martha Iles exactly what Drew Harrigan liked to do in bed. She went all the way back to Drew’s office, let herself in, and looked around. It was neat. There were no papers on the desk. There were photographs, mostly of her. She thought they should have had children. Then she changed her mind. To be left with children to bring up after their father had died young was not a good thing. She’d had an aunt that had happened to. Both the children had grown up wild, and one of them had landed in jail for shoplifting when she was only twenty-two.
Martha Iles was hovering at the office door. Danielle Underwood was hovering right behind her. Ellen went over to Drew’s desk, pulled out the swivel chair, and sat down. It was an enormous desk, like the ones executives had in movies from the 1950s. Ellen hated movies from the 1950s. She hated movies from the 1940s, too. She hated all things from back in history. It was all too long ago, and the people never made any sense. She did like this desk, though. This desk made her feel invincible.
Martha Iles came a little farther into the room. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” she said. “I don’t know what you think you can accomplish. You can sit behind a desk, anybody can, but that doesn’t mean you can do the work that comes across it.”
“It means I can fire you,” Ellen said.
“Not today, you can’t,” Martha said.
“Then I’ll wait,” Ellen said. “I’ll call the lawyers this afternoon and we’ll see what happens, won’t we? No, I’ll call them now, here, from the desk. I’ve got Neil Savage’s home number. I’ll bet I can get him over here right this minute. Don’t you think so?”
“I think you’ve lost your mind,” Martha said.
Ellen thought that this was something she hadn’t considered. With Drew gone, she was both rich and powerful, if only powerful in this little sphere here, in the office. She could grow to like this, and when she had destroyed it, when she had fired them all and sold whatever needed to be sold and settled whatever needed to be settled, she could go back home and never have to worry about anything again. She knew that people were supposed to have a lot of trouble coming back home when they had been away for a long time, but that was because they became accustomed to the way things were done in the places they’d gone. Ellen had never been accustomed to any of it. She could slip back into life at home as easily as if she’d done nothing more radical than take a day shopping at Wal-Mart. She was even looking forward to shopping at Wal-Mart again.
Drew had wanted to live in this world, but Ellen had never understood why.
2
Sister Maria Beata of the Incarnation was having a bad morning. The only consolation for it was the fact that it wasn’t her usual bad morning. There had been no reading from St. John of the Cross or, even as bad, St. Thérèse of Lisieux at refectory. She thought that if she had to hear all that treacly nonsense about the Bride and the Bridegroom one more time, she’d spit in the soup. The reading this morning had been from St. Teresa of Avila herself, and it had been deliberately bland and unconnected to “the world.” The last thing Reverend Mother wanted was for her nuns to think too long and hard about what had happened to Drew Harrigan, of all people, in their own barn. They’d never been happy about letting people into that barn in the first place. Of course, they had said prayers at Mass this morning and at Office for the repose of Mr. Harrigan’s soul, but they’d said those before, the night he died. They just hadn’t known his name then. It wasn’t the Mass or the Office that was bothering Beata, or the readings at refectory, or how crazy she sometimes got in the long silences that were the background music of all that went on in Carmel. She was not listening for the voice of God this morning, and she wasn’t distressed at the fact that she wasn’t hearing anything. It was still true that she might have made a mistake, coming here, but she didn’t have time to think about it now. She knew in her bones that there were aspects to this situation Reverend Mother hadn’t considered, and she wasn’t looking forward to the fact that she was the only one here who would be able to warn her.
Sometimes, in periods of enormous stress, she thought about the life she had had before coming to Carmel, and about the fact that Reverend Mother had been reluctant to receive her because of it. In the long months when she was discussing her vocation through the grille a couple of times a week, she had sometimes thought that she would have had an easier time being accepted if she’d been a drug addict and felon instead of Susan Titus Alderman, graduate of Bryn Mawr and the Yale Law School, Rhodes Scholar, Harkness Distinguished Fellow in History.
“It’s not the intelligence,” Reverend Mother had said, when she first came to Carmel. “The intelligence is an asset. It’s the ambition. You’re a very ambitious woman.”
“I don’t think I am,” Beata had said at the time, and by now she had decided that she had been telling the truth. She had not been ambitious. The constant struggle had made her tired and annoyed, even though she engaged in it and even though she was good at it. She looked back on all of that as a kind of delirium, implanted in her by a father for whom competition was an end in itself. You played to win no matter what you played. You made sure always to be among the first in any group you might enter. If she had joined a street gang, she would have been the leader of it in six months flat. As it was, she was president of her class twice during her years at Exeter, head of the yearbook committee, star of the Branch-Soule Debating Society, most active m
ember of the Broadside. She was the kind of student schools featured in their recruiting catalogues and highlighted in their alumni newsletters. She was organized, efficient, intelligent, and relentless. And by the time she came to Carmel, she was sick of the whole thing.
No, she thought again, it wasn’t the ambition that was the problem. It was the alienation she felt at the way so many of the men and women who had built this order saw God. She did not want to experience an ecstatic union, not even on St. Teresa’s terms, and St. Teresa was as levelheaded as they came. She didn’t want to be a Bride to anybody’s Bridegroom, not even when the Bridegroom was Jesus Christ himself. The imagery alone made something deep inside her shut right off. It seemed to her that it ought to be possible to approach God as a mind instead of a heart, to approach Him in the clear light of the reasoning He’d endowed human beings with to begin with. Maybe she should have been a Benedictine, or a Dominican. If the Jesuits had admitted women, they might have been her best bet.
This morning, her best bet would be to ditch her habit and escape the monastery, but she knew she wouldn’t do that, and not only because she didn’t want to leave, unhappy as she was at times lately. Along with the need to win, her father had implanted in her the need to take responsibility, so here she was.
Here Reverend Mother was, too, pacing back and forth in front of her desk. Beata came in and bowed as she had been taught to do. Everything at this Carmel was elaborately formal. It was the kind of thing you couldn’t know about a cloister until you were already inside it.
“I’m sorry for your loss, Reverend Mother.”
“What?” Reverend Mother said. “Oh, you mean Drew. I suppose I should feel loss, but I don’t. I’d like to think that was because I was being perfected in my vocation. We’re supposed to be detached from the people and things we knew in the world. But it isn’t that. Drew and I never really got along very well. We haven’t spoken much in years.”
“Yes, Reverend Mother. It’s still a loss, though, isn’t it? I’m sorry to be so obtuse, but I don’t have any brother or sisters.”
“I had only Drew. We weren’t even close as children. Never mind. You wanted to see me? Immaculata is getting a little mulish about the amount of time you’re spending away from the desk. And yes, I know it’s hardly your fault, but she is what she is.”
Beata let that go. Immaculata most certainly was what she was, and what she was was a woman who had entered the convent because she’d had no other place to go. Beata had known nuns like that growing up—well, all right, religious sisters—and the breed always made her nervous. There was an undertone of anger and resentment in them that could break out at any time.
Reverend Mother motioned to the chair. Beata sat down. “I’m sorry to bother you,” Beata said, “but it occurred to me that nobody may have told you what’s coming. And you’d have no reason to know. So I thought I’d better warn you.”
“About what? Do you mean what’s coming about Drew?”
“Yes, Reverend Mother. I know you don’t listen to the television very often, but you must have heard by now that the police are treating this as a case of murder. And that’s going to mean certain things.”
“I suppose it will,” Reverend Mother said. “Do you mean you think they’ll treat me as a suspect? Because he was my brother, I mean, and he died in the barn.”
“There’s that, yes,” Beata said, “but it really isn’t the most difficult thing. I doubt if they’ll seriously consider you a suspect. You had no reason to murder him, not even in regard to the property, because the property will still be held in escrow even with your brother gone. I will say, though, that they’re going to have a fit—”
“—Sister.”
“Sorry, Reverend Mother, but there’s almost no other word for it. They’re going to be very upset when they find out about the property and your connection to Drew, and they’re going to want to know why I didn’t say anything about either last night. And we can’t very well say I didn’t know, because I saw Neil Savage on behalf of the convent just a couple of weeks ago.”
“They’ll think we’re hiding something,” Reverend Mother said.
“I doubt it, Reverend Mother, although they’ll say they do. The thing is, they’re going to want to search the monastery.”
“You mean search the barn?”
“No, Reverend Mother, I mean search the monastery. The whole thing. Including the enclosure.”
“But they can’t search the enclosure,” Reverend Mother said. “Lay people aren’t allowed in the enclosure.”
“I wouldn’t really want to be the one who tried to sell that to a judge in Philadelphia at the moment,” Beata said. “Reverend Mother, you’ve got to understand that everybody is going to be acting under constraint. There was just a huge priest pedophilia scandal in this city, not that long ago. The police department and the mayor’s office both got hit with accusations that they’d given the Catholic Church special treatment and that as a result of that, many more children were harmed than would have been otherwise. They can’t be seen to be giving us special treatment in this case.”
“But we’re not talking about special treatment,” Reverend Mother said.
“Drew wasn’t killed in the monastery, he was killed in the barn. The barn is out there. There’s a big wall around the monastery and the barn is on the other side of it.”
“So is the monastery’s front door,” Beata said. “You must realize that police procedure would demand they search the premises here, all of them, if this wasn’t a monastery. There’d be no question, and no trouble getting a judge to sign the warrant. And you have to understand that the Cardinal isn’t likely to be much help. He was brought in here to fix things after the scandal. He’s not going to want to cause another scandal by insisting that the monastery enclosure not be violated.”
“But the police make exceptions for religion all the time,” Reverend Mother said. “I mean, well, think of it—”
“Here’s a reason to watch the news more often, Reverend Mother. The last district attorney wanted to end the practice of excusing priests from testifying to what they’d heard in confession. It’s a new world out there. At the very least, they’re going to have to insist on searching your office and your cell, because you will be a suspect. In the end, they’re going to have to insist on searching everything. There’s no way around it. If you did kill your brother—”
“—Sister.”
“If you did, you could have hidden any number of things in this building, anywhere in it. You have free run of the place. You’ve got more than that. You’ve got control of the place. You could have concealed pills, poison, anything, anywhere around here.”
“Did they say where they thought I’d have gotten the poison in the first place?”
“They didn’t say anything about you and poison. I’m just telling you the way they’re going to think. And the poison they were talking about yesterday was arsenic. It’s easy enough to get. It’s what’s in rat poison. I think we have dozens of boxes of the stuff in the cellar.”
“I don’t think we have dozens of boxes of anything in the cellar,” Reverend Mother said, “but I take your point. You do realize what this means, don’t you? They’ll break the enclosure. The monastery will have to be reconsecrated.”
“It can be done.”
“Oh, of course it can,” Reverend Mother said, “but it’s an enormous problem. And then, what about the nuns? We’ll have to send them off someplace, or their own vows will—”
“No,” Beata said. “I don’t think so. It will look like—”
“You must be joking.” ”—I’m not,” Beata said. “It will look like you’re sending them away for a reason, because one of them knows something, or because one of them is the murderer. I’m sorry, Reverend Mother, but we’re just going to have to put up with it. It won’t be for long, and I doubt if anybody will be required to testify at the trial, if there is one, except me, since I was the one who saw the body and call
ed the ambulance. I know it’s a problem, and a pain in the neck. And we can certainly talk to the Cardinal and see if he’s willing to mount a rearguard action. But in the long run, he’ll lose, and you’ll look guilty. I think it’s better just to get it over with.”
Reverend Mother licked her lips. “You said there was an old district attorney. Does that mean there’s a new one now?”
“That’s right. The other one died suddenly, and this one was appointed.”
“Is this one… friendly to the Catholic Church?”
“I don’t know,” Beata said. “He isn’t somebody I knew when I was practicing law. He’s got an Italian name. He might have been brought up Catholic.”
“Which could be good or bad,” Reverend Mother said. “I don’t know. I’d better call the Cardinal this morning, I suppose, and talk it out with him. He’s going to do that thing where he doesn’t shout, but it’s worse.”
“I know,” Beata said.
What she didn’t say was that if the new district attorney was an anti-Catholic fanatic, the Reverend Mother could find herself arrested, and it wouldn’t matter at all that there wasn’t going to be evidence enough to bring her to trial. It was the kind of thing she should have been thinking yesterday, when she didn’t come forward with the information that the convent was intimately connected to Drew Harrigan and all his works, and not just because he’d died in the barn.
It was the kind of thing she would have thought of automatically if she had still been practicing law, and it bothered her that she hadn’t thought of it when it really mattered.
THREE
1
John Jackman’s office was not really a neutral venue, although that was what he had declared it was when he decided, the night before, that they would all meet there in the morning. Gregor didn’t really blame him. John was brilliant and young and African-American in a city and state where being all three could propel him into the Governor’s Mansion, someday, and Gregor thought he wanted to get there sooner rather than later. After that, he probably wanted to install himself in the White House, although Gregor tried not to think about that. He could hate politics all he wanted, but he knew that if John ever ran for governor, or president, he’d be doing some speeches in front of the kind of crowd that looked on A&E true crime specials the way other people looked at the front page of the newspaper. At the moment, John wanted to install himself in the mayor’s office, and to do that he had to be perceived as a man who could handle all the crime the city of Philadelphia threw up. He didn’t need a high-profile celebrity murder case in the headlines every day for weeks, or even months. He didn’t need the perception that he was unable to stand up to rich people when they got in trouble; but that perception was inevitable in cases like this one, because rich people had good lawyers who knew the rules of the game. He especially didn’t need to give the present mayor an opportunity to complain about him on the six o’clock news. He now had all these things, and with them the memory of the fact that he had been a first-rate homicide detective. He was on a tear.
