Great Day for the Deadly

by Jane Haddam

  He got out of his chair, and stretched again, and looked out his window again. He had to get going. Fitzsimmons might be right. There might be no flood in the long run. Even Fitzsimmons didn’t think Michael ought to be taking chances. Michael leaned against the window glass, squinted out, and cursed to purgatory the idiot who had built an art deco replica of the St. George campanile right in his line of sight. What kind of neighborhood had this been all those years ago, when it was first put up?

  He was about to give it all up when he saw it, what he would later think of as The Strange Thing. She was coming down Beckner Street from the direction of Clare Avenue, seemingly headed for the parish church. Michael had never seen her before, but he knew what she was. With the long black dress and that tight sided black head covering, there was only one thing she could be, a postulant from the Motherhouse up the hill. Michael found himself feeling caught, half-paralyzed. One of the things he had been intending to do was to call back Reverend Mother General and tell her he would need those vans after all. Now he wondered if he had to. Maybe she had misunderstood him and sent the vans as soon as they’d hung up earlier. On the other hand, maybe this postulant had nothing to do with vans. Postulants and novices from the Sisters of Divine Grace came down here every Wednesday to teach literacy classes and tutor high-school students who were having trouble with their work. Michael never saw them, because Wednesday was when he went out to visit the prison and then stopped in at the county hospital on his way back to town. Maybe this postulant was one of those, and she was here on some errand about books or writing supplies.

  The idiocy of this idea—the stupidity of thinking that any of the nuns up there would send a child out into this storm just to check on something that could as easily have been checked on by phone—struck him at the same time that he lost sight of the girl. She had been walking rapidly, holding the umbrella stiffly, directly over her head, and she had passed out of his range. She was too close now to be seen unless he stood on the church’s front steps. He turned away from the window, left the office and strode out into the vestibule. All of a sudden he had taken a positive dislike to this entire situation. There was something about her being out there like that alone that made him cold. He wanted to get hold of her and give her a talking to.

  The church’s front doors were great double oaken things with cast-iron handles instead of knobs. Michael grabbed both the handles at once and swung both the doors inward, feeling his biceps ache the way they had when he’d been twenty-odd and in boot camp. Then he stepped out into the rain, and stopped.

  To the left of him, Hernandito and a half dozen other boys were huddled together under the plastic awning of Number 36, apparently getting ready for their apartment-to-apartment search. To the front of him, Beckner Street shot through the rain to Clare Avenue, empty. To the right of him, the steps to Number 37 were empty. For a moment, Michael thought he saw something black fluttering in the crack between Number 37’s door and the frame it hadn’t quite been shut into, but that might have been imagination, or wind. The storm was getting worse and there was a great deal of wind.

  What bothered Father Michael Doherty was that the postulant he’d been watching for he didn’t know how long had disappeared, completely, as if he’d made her up.

  [5]

  “IF I WERE YOU, young man,” Reverend Mother General was saying, “I would sit very still in my chair and listen very carefully to what I was about to hear. I am going to repeat myself exactly once more. Try to get it through your thick head that Cardinal Archbishops may come and Cardinal Archbishops may go, but I will be here forever.”

  Standing at the front of the small classroom directly across the hall from Reverend Mother General’s open office door, Sister Mary Scholastica got the almost irresistible urge to chuck her lesson, abdicate her responsibilities, sit down on the nearest desk and tell her postulants, “You want to know how to be a nun? Well, listen to that, there. That’s a nun. That’s a real nun. Not one of these wimpy little political angels that keep showing up on television.” Actually, she might as well have done just that. Since Reverend Mother General had started to get thoroughly exasperated, Scholastica certainly hadn’t gotten any teaching done. First, she’d found herself thanking God that the young man involved—probably in his forties and at least a monsignor—was fifty miles away in the relative safety of the Chancery in Colchester. Then she’d started to wonder what was the matter. Reverend Mother General was a dragon, but she didn’t usually chomp at the bit in her eagerness to tear the Cardinal Archbishop into certified Irish confetti. Reverend Mother General knew how to pick her spots. Finally, Scholastica began to worry about what she had been worrying about all morning, because as soon as her mind began to stray from whatever task was at hand that was what she did. It was now quarter to twelve on the morning of Thursday, February 21, and the schedule was not being adhered to. Scholastica was teaching her class on Principles of Interior Silence, just the way she was supposed to be according to the agenda Sister Alice Marie had drawn up in September. Out there in front of her, crammed into the tiny desks that had been designed for large college lecture halls, twenty-one of her twenty-two postulants were listening to it. And that, of course, was the problem. There were twenty-one. There were supposed to be twenty-two. Brigit Ann Reilly was missing.

  Missing.

  Across the hall, Reverend Mother General was reading someone the riot act. From the tone of her voice, it was probably John Cardinal O’Bannion himself. Scholastica tucked stray wisps of hair under the edge of her veil and wondered what it was she was supposed to do in a situation like this. It wasn’t as if she’d done anything wrong. Somebody had to go to the library every day. Scholastica had thought it would be a good idea to send Brigit, because Brigit was getting claustrophobic. Some postulants were like that. Scholastica had been like that herself. Postulants were young and newly away from home and lonely and not entirely sure they should have gotten themselves into all this. You had to be careful with them or you ended up destroying their vocations before God had had a chance to test them. Still, one of the things Scholastica was supposed to determine was who among the postulants was responsible and who was not. What did Brigit’s disappearance say about that? Did it matter that Brigit had been going to the library, without incident, every day except Sunday since the first of the year?

  There was a sharp click from the other side of the hall, the sound of a phone being not quite slammed, because Reverend Mother General never slammed phones. Across the classroom, postulants giggled, hiding their mouths behind their hands. Scholastica shook her head at them and smiled.

  “Don’t laugh,” she said, “wait until you’re out on mission somewhere and your bishop decides he wants you to teach catechism standing on your head. Bishops may be our shepherds, but they’re also crazy, and they get crazier the higher up the hierarchy they get. When you run into one who’s gone entirely off his nut, you’re going to wish you had Reverend Mother’s talent for—argumentation.”

  “Argumentation,” someone repeated in the back of the room. There were more giggles, and a few of the girls covered their faces entirely, so they wouldn’t be too obvious in their mirth. Scholastica had no idea why. She was hardly the gorgon Postulant Mistress of legend. She scanned the faces before her and came to a halt at the one with no amusement in it at all: Neila Connelly, Brigit Ann Reilly’s best friend. Neila was worried, too.

  Scholastica was standing reasonably near the door. She leaned over, opened it wide, and stared across the hall at Reverend Mother General’s office. Hanging over the transom there was a bouquet of papier-mâché leprechauns sent up by the children at Iggy Loy. Taped to the wall next to the door was a shamrock cut out of white construction paper and plastered over with green glitter. There weren’t supposed to be any secular ornaments in that part of the convent considered part of the cloister—which this was—but somehow the rule always seemed to get relaxed around St. Patrick’s Day.

  Reverend Mother General had go
t up from behind her chair and gone to stand at her window. Scholastica could just see the back of her, stiff and straight and still as a wooden doll.

  “Just a minute,” Scholastica said to her postulants. “I want to talk to Reverend Mother now that she has a minute. Why don’t the bunch of you look at chapter five in the Merton again and we’ll discuss it when I get back.”

  “Can we talk?” Cara Fenster asked.

  “Yes,” Scholastica said. “Quietly. If you get loud enough for Sister Alice Marie to come in here, we’ll all be in trouble.”

  There was an outbreak of giggling again. Scholastica smiled indulgently at the pack of them, nodded encouragingly to the ever-more-worried Neila Connelly, and took off across the hall. Scholastica knew what Neila was thinking. The same thought had been bothering her. Brigit hadn’t been very happy here the last few months. That happened—girls came up and found out they just weren’t suited to the life—but when it did it was supposed to be hedged about by custom and ritual. There were things to be done and said and promised and performed when a girl left before the end of formation. The Order liked to keep in touch with girls like that. It even ran a kind of alumnae organization. Every once in a while, though, a girl would let her unhappiness get too deep and the pressure build up too high. Then one day, in the middle of everything, she would just snap. Snap, crackle, pop, Scholastica thought. A mile’s walk down to Exit 56 on Route 144. A thumb in the air. A ride to Colchester. Gone.

  Reverend Mother General had opened her window and was leaning out, into the rain. Scholastica knocked sharply on the open door and waited for her to turn around.

  “Oh, Sister,” Reverend Mother General said, when she did, “one of the people I wanted to see. Are you in the middle of a class?”

  “A formation class, Reverend Mother, yes.”

  “Sister Alice Marie is rehearsing the novices for the folk singing. Maybe I can send one of your postulants to get her. I’m afraid we’re going to have a very disrupted day.”

  “Your day has already been disrupted, Reverend Mother. I heard you on the phone to the Chancery.”

  “What? Oh. That. You know, Sister, the finances of this Order would be in a good deal worse shape than they are if John O’Bannion wasn’t such a pigheaded, arrogant old Irishman.”

  “Is that what he is?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You’ve known him most of your life. You know he is. Do you know what he pulled this time?”

  “No, Reverend Mother.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you. He decided that he had a wonderful idea. Margaret Finney had been beatified. He was going to come up here on St. Pat’s and say a Mass of petition for her canonization, give one of his great day for the Irish speeches and watch the town parade. It was the perfect time, the absolutely perfect time, for us to throw a party.”

  Scholastica was confused. “We are throwing a party, Reverend Mother. I had the postulants making posters about it all yesterday afternoon. We’re inviting their parents and the whole town.”

  “I know that,” Reverend Mother said, “and you know that, but John didn’t know it. He didn’t bother to call and ask, either. He just had that assistant of his send invitations to forty people. Do you know what that means?”

  “No, Reverend Mother. But it shouldn’t be any problem. The plans we’ve worked out will accommodate—”

  “I’m sure they will, Sister. I’m sure you’ve all been very efficient. There is absolutely no reason to tell the Archbishop about that. I’ve got him feeling thoroughly guilty. The Archdiocese is going to pay for the food.”

  “Ah,” Scholastica said.

  “Exactly,” Reverend Mother General said. “Now I’ve got more immediate matters on my mind. Have you looked out the window lately?”

  Technically, outside of Reverend Mother General’s office, there wasn’t much in the way of windows to look out of in this part of the Motherhouse. There were openings in the walls with glass in them, but they looked onto the courtyard and were sheltered by trellises and hanging vines. The hanging vines were of so venerable an age that their twisted stems were thick and matted enough to cut off any access to the sun, even in winter when they were denuded of leaves. At the moment, they weren’t even denuded of leaves. The thaw had been a kind of false spring,

  “I stick my head out every once in a while,” Scholastica said cautiously. “It’s raining very hard.”

  “It may be doing something worse than that. Were you alive in 1953?”

  “No, Reverend Mother, as a matter of fact, I wasn’t.”

  “Of course, you weren’t,” Reverend Mother General said. “You’re only thirty-six. Well, I was not only alive, I was assistant to the Mistress of Novices in this house—that was in the days when we needed assistants. Anyway, there was a flood. You may have heard about it.”

  “I have, Reverend Mother. I’ve heard it was horrible.”

  “It was. Now, I’m not saying that what’s going on out there is going to be as bad as that, but there was a lot of snow and ice on the ground before the thaw, and now we’ve got all this rain and the river is rising. I’ve had a call from Father Doherty down at St. Andrew’s. They’re going to evacuate the whole neighborhood up to Iggy Loy as soon as possible. They need our vans.”

  “Yes, of course, Reverend Mother.”

  “They probably need our new gymnasium as well,” Reverend Mother General said. “Oh, what we couldn’t have done with that in ’53. We ended up putting cots and mattresses in the hallways of the cloister and the whole house had to be prayed over right and left when the waters receded. Silliest thing I ever heard of in my life. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that Vatican Two was an unqualified disaster. It wasn’t. Have you ever been part of a disaster relief team before?”

  “No, Reverend Mother.”

  “Sister Alice Marie has. She’ll know what to do. Go find her and get her up here, and in the meantime assign one of your postulants to monitor the weather reports. Uh—good grief, I’m becoming disorganized. Are you standing there like that for some reason, Sister? I thought I just asked you to go.”

  “Yes,” Scholastica said. “Yes, you did. The thing is—”

  “What?”

  Sister Scholastica had spent most of her life dealing with people like Reverend Mother General. She had wanted to be one from the time she was six or seven years old. She had certainly long gotten over the inclination to be intimidated by sharp eyes, black habits, and spines as straight as executioner’s swords.

  What was making it hard for her to speak was this: Less than ten minutes ago, she had been worried (and slightly annoyed) at the possibility that Brigit Ann Reilly might have done a bolt. She had called Jack O’Brien first at his shop and then at home. She had found out that Brigit had stopped in to say hello at just the usual time. Then she had called Glinda Daniels at the library and found out that Brigit hadn’t been there at all, although Glinda wouldn’t have seen her if she had been. Glinda had overslept. Scholastica had talked to the young woman who had been at the check-out desk in Glinda’s place. At that point, she had had to admit it. It really did look as if Brigit had run away. She had disappeared so completely, into nowhere and never been.

  Now it looked like something else might be going on, something Scholastica was having a far harder time admitting to. She seemed to have sent one of her postulants out into dangerous weather, and that could mean—anything.

  Scholastica thought of feet slipping on mud, heads cracking on pavement, bodies sucked down into swelling waters—and told herself she was crazy. She still had no reason at all to think that Brigit Ann Reilly had done anything but take off for parts unknown.

  On the other hand, before she told Reverend Mother General about it, she did ask Reverend Mother General to sit down.

  [6]

  IT WAS ONE O’CLOCK by the time Glinda Daniels managed to get her life put together well enough to be operating at anything near her ordinary efficiency, and by then it was obvious that all she had left to b
e efficient about was leaving. The one weather report she’d heard on her racing drive into work had dismissed the possibility of another flood out of hand. Forty-five minutes later, as sirens and church bells began to ring noon all over town, the storm had kicked into double time. Glinda had seen weather like this once or twice in her life, but never in Maryville. It might have been like this here during the last flood, but Glinda didn’t remember. She had been only two years old at the time, and asleep. What this reminded her of was the kind of storm they used to get before the tornadoes came when she was at the University of Nebraska, picking up her master’s degree in French. Glinda Daniels had a bachelor’s degree in archaeology from Bryn Mawr, a master’s degree in French from Nebraska, a master’s degree in Far East Asian Languages (Chinese and Cambodian) from Michigan, a master’s degree in classics from Columbia, and a doctorate in library science from Simmons College. She and Father Doherty had a standing joke that they got on so well together because they were the only people they knew who had spent so much of their lives in school.