Precious Blood (The Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries)

by Jane Haddam

  At 5:45 just as the church bells rang the three-quarters hour, the church lights began to go on, rank after rank of them starting in the center of the building and marching outward to the front door. The peaked stained-glass windows that made up most of the wall on Gregor’s side of the church spilled light onto the courtyard sidewalks. Into that light came the tall figure of a nun in veil and cape. Gregor had no trouble recognizing her as Sister Mary Scholastica. She strode to the side of the church, opened a door near the back Gregor hadn’t noticed before, and disappeared downward. A moment later she reappeared, in the company of a smaller woman in a long brown coat. The smaller woman looked to Gregor as pregnant as anyone could get.

  Gregor was sure the women would go back into the church again, or go somewhere else. It was cold out there, and the wind was very strong. He could tell that much by the way Sister Scholastica’s habit whipped around her legs. Instead, the two women stood there, talking and gesturing, seemingly oblivious to the freeze. In a few minutes they were joined by yet another woman. This one was very blond and very bright, with a red coat and red boots and red leather gloves to match. Even at a distance, she looked expensive as hell.

  I wonder what this is about, Gregor thought. The blond woman was more vehement than Sister Scholastica or her pregnant friend. She shook her head and stamped her feet and threw her arms into the air. Sister Scholastica folded her arms across her chest and looked as bullish as she was probably being. The pregnant woman fluttered. Then the blond woman shot out her hand, grabbed the pregnant woman by the wrist, and started tugging her off toward Ellery Street.

  Sister Scholastica stood her ground until the other two were out of sight. Then she straightened her veil, turned around, and went back down the steps into the church. Seconds later, the church bells began to ring six o’clock, and a man Gregor didn’t recognize raced out of the Carver Street building, hatless, coatless, and with his Roman collar flapping loose at one side. He, too, disappeared through the back door of the church.

  That, Gregor decided, had to be Father Andy Walsh. And this—he looked toward the church, whose stained-glass windows were now dotted with head-shaped shadows—had to be six o’clock Mass. It was going to start a little late. From what he’d heard about Andy Walsh, he supposed that was typical. He turned his head to the left, to the building he was now sure was the convent, and had his conjectures at least partially confirmed. A little knot of nuns was straggling across the courtyard from that direction. They were trying to look pious, but mostly only succeeding in looking cold. It’s too bad, he thought. Those new habits aren’t anywhere near as graceful as the ones they used to wear in the old days.

  He sat back to wait for whatever might happen next, and for the nuns to come back after Mass. He was fairly sure they wouldn’t have breakfast until then.

  [2]

  If he’d known anything about convents, he would have gotten his breakfast sooner. As it was, he waited until seven o’clock before going across the courtyard, even though the nuns had come back from church at twenty to. He had a half-formed conviction that he was giving them time to get their cooking done.

  By the time he’d straggled his way to the convent’s front door—he didn’t have the courage to go bumbling around looking for the back one in a day that was still mostly dark—the nuns had not only got their cooking done, but most of their breakfast eaten. The rosy-faced little Sister told him that, and told him a lot of other things, too, most of which he didn’t retain. He’d always been under the impression that nuns were quiet people. This one made his favorite niece look like a mute.

  “Sister Superior was wondering what had happened to you,” the little nun was saying. “She said she hadn’t told you what time we ate breakfast, and she didn’t know what time you got up, so she thought what we ought to do was put up a plate for you and leave directions for the microwave, but Sister Martha said she didn’t think you needed directions for the microwave, everybody knows how to run a microwave, but then Sister Francis said you never really know with men, which is of course a very sexist remark, so Sister Superior didn’t like it, so—” The little nun pushed open a door and stood back to let him pass. “Oh,” she said. “Here we are.”

  Gregor looked into a long, narrow room almost entirely filled with a long, narrower table and its chairs—not the kitchen, but the dining room. At the far end of the table, Sister Scholastica sat over a cup of coffee, casting a jaundiced eye at Gregor’s nun-guide. The rest of the nuns were all eating breakfast and trying to correct school papers at the same time. Most of them had their veils unfastened and hung on the back of their chairs. Only two of them bothered to look up at him.

  “Vatican Two,” Sister Scholastica said, still looking at Gregor’s little nun. Then she turned to Gregor himself and said, “Good morning, Mr. Demarkian. Won’t you please sit down? Coffee’s already on the table and Sister Martha—”

  “Oh,” Sister Martha said. She jumped up from her place, flushed. “Mr. Demarkian. I’m sorry. I’m afraid I haven’t woken up yet. I’ll bring your breakfast right in.”

  “Sister made up your plate last night,” Sister Scholastica said.

  “It’s so hard to know what to serve someone who isn’t supposed to have eggs or butter,” Sister Martha said. “Especially a man.”

  “Why isn’t Mr. Demarkian supposed to have eggs or butter?” Gregor’s little nun said. “Is he sick?”

  Gregor wanted desperately to tell this child that he would be happy to have eggs and butter both, but Sister Scholastica got to her first. She rose out of her seat, leaned forward against the table, and said,

  “Peter Rose, it’s after seven o’clock in the morning. You’ve got your class and your catechism students coming, too. Don’t you have something to get done this morning?”

  “Of course I do!”

  “Good.” Sister Scholastica sat down again. “Go do it.” Then she turned to Gregor again. “Do sit down, Mr. Demarkian. In fact, sit down next to me. I’ll keep you company for a while. I suppose I ought to be over at the school making some sense out of the arrangements for the children’s Mass, but I just don’t have the stomach for it at the moment.”

  “I don’t have the stomach for what I’ve got to do, either,” one of the older nuns said, “but I’m going to go do it.”

  “Sister Benedict Marie is a martyr to her work,” Sister Scholastica said.

  “Sister Benedict Marie is a lot older than you are,” Sister Benedict Marie said. She grabbed her veil from the back of her chair and jammed it over her head, flattening a mass of grey-blond curls over her forehead. She put up a hand and whisked them out of sight. “Six year olds,” she told Gregor. “That’s what they’ve given me. Six year olds. At my age.”

  “What is your age?” Sister Peter Rose asked, in perfectly innocent seriousness.

  Benedict Marie made a face at her. “In my day, Sister, you’d have been killed in Chapter of Faults. Good morning, Sisters. Somebody has to get some work done around here. It’s Holy Thursday.”

  She turned her back on the lot of them and clumped out, nearly colliding with Sister Martha in the doorway. Then a bell rang somewhere in the distance, and all the rest of the nuns got up, too. There weren’t as many of them as Gregor had thought at first. Only six, including Sister Scholastica. Sister Martha put a covered plate down at Gregor’s place and hurried after the rest of them, retrieving her veil from her chair as she went.

  Sister Scholastica smiled a little. She picked up her coffee, stared at the ceiling, and said, “Ah, yes. The peace and serenity of the convent. The womb of the Church, a refuge from the struggles and terrors of the world. A place of repose, of timelessness, of unspoiled community.”

  Gregor took the cover off his plate and found himself looking at two pieces of dry matzo, three wedges of lemon, and a pile of lentil beans cooked in tomato sauce.

  [3]

  The saving grace of breakfast was that Scholastica stayed true to her word. She kept him company. Unlike Pete
r Rose, she didn’t chatter; but unlike Benedict Marie, she didn’t keep her mouth shut except to scold, either. For a while, she simply talked lazily about Holy Thursday and what it meant to a parochial school, especially one in as conservative an Archdiocese as this one.

  “What we try to instill in the children is a commitment to the totality of the Holy Week experience,” she said. “Too many Catholics think Easter is the only important thing. In reality, there’s a lot more going on. Especially during the Easter Tridium. The Cardinal has been particularly upset at the lack of attendance at the Holy Thursday evening Mass. It’s the only Mass on this day at all, and it can’t be held without—”

  “Wait,” Gregor said. “Didn’t you just come from Mass?”

  “Mass?” Scholastica looked confused. “Oh. You must have seen us in church. No, we didn’t come from Mass. We were setting up for the ten o’clock and some of the Sisters were saying devotions. We have a chapel, but it’s always nice—”

  “Wait,” Gregor said. “What about the ten o’clock? I thought it was ten o’clock in the morning.”

  “It is. The Cardinal gave permission for the churches that have parochial schools attached to have an extra Mass in the morning. For the children. Most of them are too young to come out for the evening Mass. It tends to be held late. The priests all have to go up to the Cathedral for the Chrism Mass at eleven-thirty—”

  “Chrism Mass?”

  “A special Mass where priests renew their ordination vows. It’s held once a year on Holy Thursday.”

  “I think this is getting very complicated, Sister.”

  “Oh, it is,” Scholastica said. “I always get to the end of Holy Week feeling as if I’d been drunk. The rules are fairly straightforward, but there always seem to be special permissions or changes in the details. The altar servers never seem to last from year to year, either, so nobody knows what they’re doing. It’s enough to give you a migraine.”

  “I can see how it would be.”

  “You’re enough to give me a migraine, too.”

  Gregor raised his eyebrows slowly and deliberately up his forehead, but Scholastica waved the gesture off.

  “Don’t work so hard at looking politely shocked,” she said. “Ever since you came into this room, I’ve been waiting for you to get to the point. I’m beginning to think you’re never going to do it.”

  “What point is that?”

  “Cheryl Cass, of course.” Scholastica reached across the table for the pot to refill his empty coffee cup. “One of the things they teach you in the convent—or one of the things they used to teach you, in the old days—is how to be direct when you need to be. You’d be amazed at how many women never learn to do that in ordinary life.”

  “I’d be amazed if you hadn’t,” Gregor said. He meant it. Sister Mary Scholastica seemed to him to be the kind of woman who had been born on her way to becoming a femme formidable, although she was prettier than most of the breed. Even her body language was forthright. “You’re a very—commanding woman, Sister.”

  “When I entered this order, I was a mouse. I was worse than a mouse, really. I was one of those people who panic every time somebody gets mad at them.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “Everybody does, but it’s true.”

  “All right. The convent changed your life. What does that have to do with Cheryl Cass?”

  “Nothing. I’m just saying that I’m sorry if I seem to be rude, or aggressive, but I want to know and I don’t know any other way to find out.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “About Cheryl Cass,” Sister Scholastica repeated. She sounded exasperated. “It’s so hard to get any information out of anybody that makes any sense. Not that the Chancery ever makes any sense. It’s a bureaucracy. It can’t. But ever since Peg Monaghan identified that picture—”

  “Who’s Peg Monaghan?”

  “She’s who identified Cheryl Cass,” Scholastica said. “Did the Cardinal tell you about this?”

  Now that Gregor thought of it, all the Cardinal had told him was that somebody with connections to Father Andy Walsh and a lot of other people in St. Agnes Parish had turned up dead of nicotine poisoning. “The impression I got,” he said, “was that this Cheryl Cass had turned up somewhere in the vicinity—”

  “In the vicinity of the Cathedral, maybe, but not in the vicinity of St. Agnes’s.”

  “Isn’t the Cathedral close?”

  “It’s only a few blocks away. But Cheryl was found in an alley on the other side of it. And that wouldn’t have made any difference, you know. People have been found dead there before. Junkies, mostly, I guess. The Tribune only ran her picture on a back page just in case. And the local news ran it twice, at six and eleven, as a favor to the police. It was because of the wedding ring.”

  “What wedding ring?”

  “Cheryl’s. She was wearing it when she died. And it was expensive, I think. She had it on when I saw her, and it looked heavy.”

  “I see,” Gregor said. “The police probably thought if she was wearing an expensive ring—”

  “She might have family who cared. That’s the way I read it, too. Anyway, the Tribune ran Cheryl’s picture and Peg Monaghan—she used to be Peg Morrissey, back in high school—saw it. She called the police and told them who it was. That was when all—heck broke loose. And nothing’s made any sense since.”

  Gregor studied her face, curious. “I talked to your police department,” he told her, “and they seemed to think they’d made as much sense of it as they needed to make.”

  “Did you talk to John Smith?”

  “No. I talked to a number of people. One of them had a Polish name—”

  “Maveronski,” Scholastica said. “He’s useless. He just doesn’t want to go to the trouble of investigating anything. Benedict Marie had him in the sixth grade, and she says he was always that way.”

  “Yes. Well. At the moment, Sister, willful suicide is the official verdict on this case, and there’s a certain amount to be said for it—”

  “Andy Walsh thinks the Cardinal got you up here just to cause him trouble,” Scholastica said. “I think he’s wrong. I think the Cardinal got you up here because he’s not any more happy with that verdict than I am. There might be a certain amount to be said for it, Mr. Demarkian, but there’s a lot to be said against it.”

  There was no sugar on the table and no cream. Gregor had checked when he first came in. Now he checked again, to give himself a chance to look away and think. Sister Scholastica was simply voicing the same concern he himself had voiced to Father Tibor. If he hadn’t had that concern, he wouldn’t have come up here. He had only one creditable reason for spending the American Easter weekend in this arctic snow zone, and that was that the reports he had received on the death of Cheryl Cass were fishy.

  What he wanted to know was why he was so bothered by the fact that Sister Scholastica agreed with him. Come to think of it, he was bothered by Sister Scholastica herself. He hadn’t been, either last night or when he first saw her this morning, but the more he talked to her the more she stirred in him a faint feeling of unease. There was something—off—about her whole performance. On the one hand, she was just as forthright as she appeared to be. Gregor had pegged her in an instant as one of those people who could only lie by omission. A direct falsehood would cause too much strain on her character. On the other hand—

  He turned away from the nonexistent cream and sugar to find her staring at him. “I’m sorry,” he told her. “I was woolgathering.”

  “If you were thinking about Cheryl Cass, I don’t blame you. There is something wrong with that verdict, isn’t there? And the Cardinal knows it.”

  Gregor shook his head. “The Cardinal didn’t say anything about being unsatisfied with the verdict.” As far as Gregor could tell, the Cardinal had been in love with the verdict, although it was possible he’d changed his mind since the day before yesterday. O’Bannion had a habit of that. “A
s for me, Sister, all I can say is that I really don’t know yet what happened. I’ve talked to people, but always on the phone, and always for relatively short periods of time. I haven’t seen any of the physical evidence. I haven’t even laid eyes on most of the people who saw Cheryl Cass on Ash Wednesday. I know nothing about Colchester. I couldn’t give you anything at all like an informed opinion.”

  “But that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To find out all those things and come to an informed opinion?”

  “I’m here to oblige a friend of mine, an Armenian priest named Father Tibor Kasparian. He’s a friend of your Cardinal’s.”

  “Everybody’s a friend of the Cardinal’s, Mr. Demarkian. Even Andy Walsh. Although neither of them wants to admit it.” She tapped her fingers against the tablecloth. Then she seemed to come to some decision, and nodded. “I think what you ought to do,” she said, “is go out and talk to Lieutenant John Smith. I know that sounds like a joke, but it isn’t. It’s his name.”

  “I’m sure it is. But what am I supposed to find out from this Lieutenant John Smith?”

  “Everything,” Scholastica said simply.

  She stood up, shook out the skirt of her habit, and straightened her veil. “Have a good day, Mr. Demarkian.” She held out her hand. “It’s getting on to eight, and I’ve got to get over to the school. It is Holy Thursday.”

  Gregor was about to hold out his own hand—and tell her he knew how busy she was, for that matter—but before he got around to either, she was gone.

  FIVE

  [1]

  AT FIRST, WHAT GREGOR wanted to do with the rest of his morning was a little exploring: off the grounds of St. Agnes’s, onto the streets of Colchester, and through the doors of the nearest first-rate diner. If he’d known where the nearest first-rate diner was—or where any diner was—he might have gone. Armenian Lent had finally laid him low. His craving for meat was so strong, he kept imagining himself ripping into great raw dinosaur thighs, like a caveman in a badly researched movie. He wanted to go somewhere where they would serve him a steak and potatoes fried in cholesterol at eight o’clock in the morning—and then stay there, for hours, maybe right through lunch.