by Jane Haddam
“The Fearless Epicure?” John O’Bannion grinned. “I know Sam. He’s been The Fearless Epicure for a long time now. He wouldn’t have been if he hadn’t been able to recognize hemlock and had sense enough not to eat it.”
“True,” Gregor said, “but he’s probably some kind of local celebrity. There are probably a few dozen houses in town with copies of his cookbooks in them. Somebody might have—no, that won’t work, will it? If somebody had cooked up hemlock greens and fed them to Brigit Ann Reilly innocently, there would be somebody else either dead or very sick.”
“Exactly.”
“I wonder if that means the murder was premeditated,” Gregor said. He shook his head. “It’s impossible to tell from this vantage point. You’d think making a decoction from hemlock would take planning, assuming that was how the coniine was obtained, but once you think about it you realize it wouldn’t, necessarily. You said there was a hemlock border around the library’s lawn. Somebody could have simply grabbed a handful and made some tea—”
“It’s not just around the library,” the Cardinal said. “It’s everywhere. If there’s one thing I’ve learned since Brigit Ann Reilly died, it’s that hemlock is an extremely common plant in this part of the United States. There’s hemlock in the window boxes outside the second floor offices of the local bank. There’s hemlock in Mrs. Ramirez’s flower garden down in the Hispanic section of town. There’s even hemlock at the convent, growing wild and being treated as a weed at the edge of their property where it fronts the road. Before this death, I’d always thought of hemlock as something native only to ancient Greece.”
“So that leaves only the snakes,” Gregor said, “where they came from, what they were doing on the body. I put a call in to a friend of mine last night. I’m supposed to call him back when I get to Maryville. He knows something about snakes.”
“Does he really? Does he know that these had had the poison glands, sacs, whatever they are—at any rate, they’d been rendered harmless.”
“Had they?”
“Oh, yes,” the Cardinal said. “That’s one of the things we managed to keep out of the papers—we did really well on this one. We managed to keep almost everything out of the papers. I don’t know how long that will last. But you realize, once you know that the snakes were harmless, you must know—”
“Somebody’s pets,” Gregor sighed.
“Exactly,” the Cardinal said again. Then he got to his feet and began to make his way across his office, to the far side of the room where he kept his two personal filing cabinets. Gregor had always wondered what he actually kept in those cabinets. He had seen the Cardinal retrieve files from them, but the drawers always looked half empty. Now the Cardinal retrieved a pair of files from the top drawer of the cabinet on the right, and that drawer looked as empty as the others Gregor had seen the year before.
“As to the snakes,” the Cardinal said as he lumbered his way back to the desk and sat down again, “I suggest that when you get to Maryville, you ask Sam Harrigan about those. I’m not saying they belonged to him, but he did start his career as a herpetologist, and he is somewhat whacked. You’ll see. Right now, let me tell you about these.”
“What are those?”
“Round seven trillion, eight billion, six million nine hundred eighty thousand three hundred sixty-six in a war game called Reformation and Counter-Reformation. You’d think people would get tired of this sort of anti-Catholic posturing, but they never do. It’s like an addiction. Have you heard about the beatification of Margaret Finney?”
“I’m not even sure I know what a beatification is,” Gregor said.
The Cardinal waved this away. “I could go into a lot of technical detail, but what it really amounts to is that beatification is the first official step on the road to official canonization in the Catholic Church. Margaret Finney was the foundress of the Sisters of Divine Grace—”
“I see,” Gregor said. “So this is good for them. That their foundress would be on the way to being canonized.”
“Well, yes, Gregor,” the Cardinal said, “but it didn’t fall on them out of the air. It almost never does. Somebody usually has to bring a case for the person to be beatified—to bring a case to Rome. Some religious orders mount entire campaigns, and even with the campaigns it can take decades, sometimes even centuries, before anything official happens. The Sisters up in Maryville had been working on this for a long time, since before the present Reverend Mother General was a postulant. And the Sisters founded that town, by the way. The first thing in it was their Motherhouse. All of Maryville has been very, very involved in this effort to have Margaret Finney canonized—which, by the way, if it happens, will make her the first Irish immigrant ever to be made a saint. And Maryville to this day is very, very Irish.”
“And?”
“Take a look at this.” The Cardinal passed the thicker of the two folders across the desk, and Gregor took it. “These started coming just after the announcement was made, that Margaret Finney had been beatified. That was just before Brigit Ann Reilly died. It got quite a bit of play in the local papers up here, for obvious reasons, the beatification, I mean. We haven’t told anyone about these. Take a look.”
Gregor flipped open the folder and found what he had half expected to see, considering the way the Cardinal was talking. The folder was stuffed with anonymous letters, carefully paper-clipped to the envelopes they had come in. Most of them were written on cheap notepaper with blotchy pen or crayon. Gregor read through one or two and flinched.
“This is quite a stack,” he said, trying to hand the folder back to the Cardinal. “Didn’t you tell me the last time I was here that you had a problem with sort of redneck anti-Catholic feeling in the rural towns out here?”
“Oh, yes,” the Cardinal said, paying no attention to Gregor’s offer of the folder. “If that’s all I had, I wouldn’t be worried. Unfortunately, I’ve got something more. Look at this one now. This is what came after Brigit Ann Reilly was killed.”
The second folder was nearly flat. Gregor took it from the Cardinal’s hand and opened it up. It contained only one letter, and although that letter was anonymous, it was not written on cheap notepaper and it was not written in crayon. It had been produced on a letter-quality computer printer on cockle finish heavyweight bond.
I FED HER POISON AND I DRESSED HER IN SNAKES AND I TOOK HER MIRACULOUS MEDAL FOR A SOUVENIR. SHE’S ONLY THE FIRST AND ONLY A WARNING. WAIT AND SEE.
Gregor put the letter back in the folder, very carefully. “I take it that’s accurate, about the Miraculous Medal?”
“Oh, yes.”
“And it hasn’t appeared in the press?”
“Oh, no.”
“Is this the only letter from the same source?”
This time, the Cardinal did take the first folder back, to flip through it. He found what he was looking for and handed it across to Gregor, being careful not to dislodge the envelope attached to it.
“Except for it being composed on a computer, I never thought it was any different from any of the others. Maybe I gave half a thought to what it might mean, to be saddled with an intelligent fanatic bigot for once.”
“Mmm,” Gregor said, and then read: THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IS THE SYPHILITIC WHORE THAT IS POISONING THE WORLD. IF SHE DOESNT WATCH OUT, THE WORLD WILL TURN ON HER IN SELF-DEFENSE AND START TO POISON BACK. He handed the letter back to the Cardinal. “The writer is literate,” he said, “and Catholic. He or she wouldn’t have called the Church ‘she’ otherwise.”
“I know,” the Cardinal sighed. Then he forced himself to stand and walk over to his window, making his body move when it so obviously wanted only to sit still. Why he did that, Gregor didn’t know, but he seemed to need to. He leaned against the window glass and made a face at the gray weather outside. “It would be nice,” he said, “if it turned out that these letters were not written by a psychopath who was giving me a warning before embarking on a career of stranger-to-stranger mayhem. It would be nice if
it turned out that the person who wrote these letters had nothing to do with the death of Brigit Ann Reilly. What do you think my chances are of having this work out like that?”
“Better than fifty-fifty,” Gregor said positively.
“You’re an optimist,” the Cardinal told him. “Would you mind sending those things off to whoever might be able to do something about them—trace them, test them, whatever?”
“I wouldn’t mind, Your Eminence. It would be the easiest thing in the world.”
“I’m glad you think so,” the Cardinal said. “Now go up to Maryville for me. That won’t be the easiest thing in the world.”
Gregor Demarkian didn’t need the Cardinal to tell him that. Even before he’d seen those anonymous letters, he knew the Cardinal had another world-class mess on his hands. Somehow, the fact that it was also a mess on Gregor Demarkian’s hands seemed, to Gregor, to be entirely natural.
Gregor often thought it was a good thing he hadn’t been born Catholic. He had far too great an inclination to accommodate the princes of the Church as it was. If he were Catholic, he’d have an obligation to accommodate them—and he’d probably never get a full night’s sleep again.
Three
[1]
THERE WAS AN ANTIQUE grandfather clock along the west wall of the main room of the Maryville Public Library, and when it rang six o’clock that Friday night of March 1, Glinda Daniels felt she’d won a victory. In fact, she felt she’d won two. Getting through the week that followed the death of Brigit Ann Reilly hadn’t been easy. There had been a million and one everyday details to attend to, most of them the result of water damage caused by the flood. Insurance companies to call, replacement carpets to be inspected and priced, St. Patrick’s Day decorations to be cleaned or remade and hung: Glinda would have been going out of her mind with work even if she hadn’t started feeling sick and dizzy every time she had to pass in front of the storeroom door. That was her first victory, that it all got done, in spite of how she felt or how little sleep she’d had. She had been getting very little sleep, and not much rest when she was awake, either. Her head always seemed to be full of dreams, and the dreams followed her. Sometimes, unavoidably back there in that corner of the room, Glinda thought she could hear them, hissing and snapping, getting ready to strike. It was like the only other time she had ever been forced to live through something awful, the other time that she never thought of anymore because it made her head ache. It followed her—there was no other way to describe it—but when she thought about telling other people, she felt struck dumb.
Her second victory had to do with the state of the library itself at six o’clock this Friday night. It had been a big week for library patronage. It might have been so even without the death, because in spite of what Cardinal O’Bannion had told Gregor Demarkian, the news of the beatification of Margaret Finney had not “got a big play” in Maryville before the flood. The Colchester media had made a fuss about it, but the local media hadn’t had a clue. The local paper had been bought out five years ago by a chain based in North Carolina, and their present hand-picked, specially shipped-in editor-in-chief didn’t know a beatification from a banana split. Then there had been the flood and the murder and the snakes. With one thing and another, it wasn’t until the day before yesterday that the paper had got around to mentioning it, and then the inevitable had happened. There were a lot of lost souls out there, the kind of people who watched the 700 Club but not the TV news, the kind of people who pored through the back pages of the papers for messages from God. They were the spiritual cousins of the people who drove thousands of miles to visit the Shrine of the Blessed Taco, and this week they were visiting her library.
Of course, most of the strange people who had wandered into the library this week weren’t in the least interested in the beatification of Margaret Finney. They were following a blood scent to its source—and Glinda thought it a victory within a victory that she had managed not to kill one of them. They slid along the edges of the main room’s walls, trying the doors to the closets. They came up to her and asked questions so blatant and gory, even the police hadn’t thought of them. They made her skin crawl. For a while there, Glinda thought she was going to be stuck with them, doing involuntary overtime on Friday night. It seemed grudging to call it only a victory, that she could look out the glass wall of her office now and see nobody in the place at all, except Sam Harrigan standing at the check-out desk with a book in his hand. Sam Harrigan often made Glinda Daniels nervous—had, in fact, been making her especially nervous over the past few weeks—but not because he was the kind of jerk who thought of murder as a spectator sport. He just made her nervous, that was all.
Glinda got her camel’s hair coat from the coat rack in the office’s far left corner, slung it over her arm, and headed out to the desk. Her purse was right there, under the counter next to the extra cards for the check-out pockets. Sam heard her coming and shifted on his feet, standing up a little straighter.
“There you are,” he said. “You were wandering around in there so long, I was afraid you’d taken ill.”
“I’m fine,” Glinda said, and didn’t say: You ought to know, because you could look through the glass at everything I did. Sam had been in and out a lot in the past week—he’d even formally introduced himself and asked her to call him “Sam”—and in that time Glinda had learned something about him she never would have guessed. Sam Harrigan was a socially awkward man. She would have thought he had too much experience for that, what with doing a television show and going on book tours and having movie stars wander in and out of his house, but there it was. Every time he tried to talk to her, he seemed to lose any sense of what he ought to do with his hands.
Glinda put her coat down across the check-out desk and took the book out of his hand. It was called Edible Fungi of North America, and she couldn’t believe he needed it. She couldn’t believe he didn’t own it. She opened its back cover, took out its card, and went searching through the center drawer for her date stamp.
“So,” she said, “you were saying. You were listening to the radio on your way into town—”
Sam shifted on his feet again. “I was listening to ‘Golden Oldies Rock and Roll,’ to tell you the truth. That’s how you know you’re living in a small town, when they interrupt ‘Peppermint Twist’ for a press conference by a Cardinal Archbishop. I was speechless.”
“It’s a Colchester station,” Glinda said drily, “and it’s owned by Catholics. For all you know, the Archdiocese has a piece of it.”
“I try to know as little as possible about the Archdiocese,” Sam said. “It’s like St. Patrick’s Day. Ever since those idiots got caught down in Queens, trying to supply arms to the Irish Republican Army, all I do for St. Pat’s is contribute to the mission fund when the Sisters come calling and go down and watch the parade. Anyway, they interrupted ‘Peppermint Twist.’ And there I was, listening to this man sound even more embarrassed than I would have been, saying nothing at all.”
“This man meaning Gregor Demarkian,” Glinda said.
“Exactly. My impression was, the Cardinal got him in front of the microphones very much against his will. But he’s coming here anyway. I don’t think that was against his will. I suppose it might have been.”
“I wish I’d had the radio on in the office,” Glinda said. “I was so wrapped up in things here, so worried I wouldn’t get those terrible people out the door in time—”
“You never have to worry about that,” Sam said. “If they give you any problem, you just call me up. I’ll get them out of here in no time.”
“You’ll get me fired,” Glinda said. She looked down at the book in her hand. It was duly stamped and ready to go, but Sam didn’t seem to have noticed. She closed the cover and pushed it away from her. “I just wish I’d heard it, that’s all,” she told him. “I mean, you read so much about the man. He’s always in the magazines, and the cases he handles—” Glinda shrugged. “I don’t know. I would have liked to
hear his voice.”
“Well,” Sam said reasonably, the Scots burr becoming just a little thicker, the way it always did when he thought he was about to utter the obvious, “you’ll find out soon enough, won’t you? He’ll be here any day now. Tomorrow.”
“I know,” Glinda said, “but then he’ll be investigating. He’ll be—someone not to trust.”
Sam looked down at the book, saw that it was closed, and pulled it toward him. Then he looked at the ceiling. He couldn’t look her in the face without blushing. That had been true since the first day he’d come in to talk to her. Glinda found it—endearing.
She opened the center drawer again, checked a lot of things that didn’t need checking, and closed it. Then she got her keys out of her pocket and said, “Well. I guess I’d better be going. Any minute now, somebody’s going to come by and see the lights, and I’m going to be stuck here half the night.”
“You could always refuse to let them in.”
“I could,” Glinda agreed, “but doing that kind of thing makes me feel guilty. Thank you for coming and telling me about Demarkian, though. I think it makes me feel better that he’s coming.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe just because it’s all been so strange, with the way I found her and then all the people in town who keep saying they’ve seen her. It’s been like a UFO incident or something.”
Sam looked surprised. “Have you had more of those people? The ones who say they saw her?”
“Like you?” Glinda asked him.
Sam shrugged. “I came up front the next day and told Pete Donovan everything I saw through my little telescope. It’s been a week now. You’d think that sort of thing would be over.”
“I think it’s a form of mass hysteria.” Glinda sighed. “It’s like those people who write in to The Weekly World News about how they’ve seen JFK or Elvis. I had two today. Don Bollander said he’d seen Brigit in the bank the day she died, and Mrs. Murchison swore she’d seen her down on Diamond Place. What Mrs. Murchison was doing down on Diamond Place, I don’t know.”
