by Jane Haddam
“No, I’m not,” Pete said. “We’re not that far north. And besides—”
“Besides what?”
Pete didn’t want to tell her besides. Linda Erthe was nobody to go confiding in. She was certainly no one to tell about his nervousness on the subject of the Great Demarkian, Master Detective. Ever since the Cardinal had called to say that Demarkian was coming down, Pete had been in a sweat.
Now he swiveled in his chair again and pushed his papers around again and listened to the phone ring. He watched Linda pick up, speak into the receiver for a while and grimace.
“You can take this call if you want,” she said, punching in the hold button on her set. “It’s Mrs. MacBrae out near the flats. She said she found a body in the hay and now it’s gone, but you can—”
“Never mind,” Pete said. “Just tell her I’m out on a call.”
Four
[1]
FOR GREGOR DEMARKIAN, ARRIVING at the Motherhouse of the Sisters of Divine Grace was something of a revelation. He didn’t know what he’d expected a Motherhouse to look like—college Gothic, maybe, with spires and turrets—but it wasn’t this redbrick, sensible structure that reminded him so strongly of a public elementary school. Nor, in his imaginings, had it been so profusely decorated. The Motherhouse occupied the highest piece of ground in town and its gate used Delaney Street like an extended private drive. That gate was covered with shamrocks made of silk and as big as wedding cakes. What’s more, the shamrocks must have been dusted. There was no snow on them at all, in spite of the fact that the rest of the landscape was crusted and hard and sparkling white in the sun. Then there was the drive that led from the gate to the Motherhouse door. Gregor was fairly sure it had to be deep Lent. It was that time in the Orthodox calendar, and the two calendars did overlap. John Cardinal O’Bannion hated secular decorations during Easter and Lent. He had a passionate repugnance to fluffy pink bunnies, fuzzy yellow chicks, and representations of smiling buttercups in chocolate and icing. Maybe he felt differently about secular decorations that happened to be Irish. The drive was lined with them. There were tiny leprechauns nestled around the glass balls of the lamps, large gilt harps on lawn stakes pounded into the frozen ground, pots of gold made out of cardboard, and Styrofoam balls attached to decorative bricks along the drive’s edge.
Like the town of Maryville below it, the Motherhouse of the Sisters of Divine Grace seemed to be in the grips of a St. Patrick’s Day mania—or at least the outside of it did. Gregor had breezed up to the Motherhouse’s front door in the car John Cardinal O’Bannion had provided for the purpose. Like all the cars O’Bannion provided, it was nondescript and in questionable working order, but it came with a driver. This was a good thing, because although Gregor had a license he couldn’t really drive. Being driven had the advantage of keeping him out of trouble—Bennis Hannaford once said that putting Gregor behind the wheel of a car was like making a solemn vow to God Almighty that you would do everything possible to get a ticket—but it had an added advantage as well, and that was that he could pay attention to his surroundings. In a way, his impressions of Maryville, driving through, had been as startled as his first impressions of the Motherhouse. He had expected a much smaller town, and a much less diverse one. For some reason, he’d thought Maryville was a farming community in the process of metamorphosis into a suburb. He’d got the suburban part without trouble. The route coming in had passed through acres of neat midsize colonial houses on neat midsize one-acre lots. By now he was sure Maryville had never been a farming community. On the other side of town from the neat midsized colonial houses there was a river and along that river there were buildings that bore the unmistakable stamp of warehouses, abandoned and otherwise. Of course, Maryville was very close to the St. Lawrence Seaway, even if it wasn’t on the St. Lawrence River itself. Gregor didn’t know why that information had failed to penetrate, but it had. And yet—
And yet.
If Gregor had had to put a name to his malady, it would have been information overload. When the Cardinal commissioned a report, he commissioned a report, not the usual police officialese outline that might or might not tell you what you wanted to know. With the Cardinal’s reports, if someone had seen something or heard something or just thought something, it was there. If there was some bit of background you might need, it was there, too. Last night, Gregor had plowed his way through “a few extra things” the Cardinal had handed him at the Chancery, and those included a history of the local Immigrants National Bank, complete with a biography of its present owner-president and the Cardinal’s personal opinion of every part of the operation. (“Miriam runs a good business. Much better than her father did. Holds the mortgage on the Motherhouse and all the other Church property in town when we need them to be mortgaged and she’s always been good about them, too. Surprised she didn’t invite you to stay at her house. Usually does that with visiting celebrities and she knows you’re coming, I told her myself. Let me tell you, though, I’m counting on Miriam. All this mess the banks have got into. Miriam was telling me just the other day that they’re starting to do spot audits, the Feds are, and the Immigrants is due March the fifth. Miriam says she’s going to show these WASP nellies how to run a bank. Of course, there is the little problem of her husband...”) Then there had been chapter and verse on Margaret Finney, the Maryville Public Library. (“Miriam gave the money for the new building. Glinda Daniels has been librarian forever.”) And the Maryville Volunteer Fire Department (hopeless). By the time he finished reading them all, Gregor felt as if he’d lived in town forever, but always underground. He knew about everything conceptually, but nothing in terms of personality.
Still, if the overwhelming amount of local information had been difficult to take, the witness reports that skirted the murder of Brigit Ann Reilly had been worse. Just getting the times right had been enough to give Gregor a headache. Pete Donovan had included the statement of anyone anywhere who claimed to have seen Brigit Ann Reilly on the day she died, and there were a lot of them. Gregor had managed to whittle this list down to a very short one that he was sure he could trust:
10:00 Brigit leaves Motherhouse
10:06 Brigit talks to Jack O’Brien on Delaney Street
11:15 Brigit spotted near river by Sam Harrigan using telescope
1:00 Brigit found under snakes by Glinda Daniels in library storeroom
Reading carefully, Gregor thought those were the reports he could trust absolutely. The problem was, he couldn’t really dismiss the others. He hated to admit it, but they just didn’t sound crazy enough. They also tended to take place during that crucial two hours between the time Sam Harrigan had seen Brigit walking and the time Glinda Daniels had found her body, or in the hour between the time Jack O’Brien had talked to her and the time Sam had seen her. There were such great big spaces of time. She could have been doing anything or been anywhere. Maybe Mrs. Moira Monohan had seen her walking up Londonderry Street at 12:17. Maybe Mr. Thomas Reeve had seen her on the levee at just about 11:00. Their reports got a little shot of credibility from the fact that they, like the others, failed to see her anywhere at all between 10:30 and 10:55. For that half hour at least, mass hypnosis had ceased to exist in Maryville.
Half an hour, between ten thirty and eleven. Half an hour. It nagged at him. It was just the kind of thing he was supposed to be good at—working through timetables, seeing the hidden patterns in random occurrences. He didn’t believe that that half hour was insignificant. It stood out too baldly to be that. He just couldn’t figure out what it meant.
That was the kind of thing that was driving him crazy, keeping him awake, burning him out. Last night, when it had finally begun to get to him, he had reached for the phone to call Bennis and stopped. Bennis was in the middle of her draft, or near the end of it, or something. She wasn’t talking to anyone who couldn’t qualify for the Distressed Damsels Union. She had her phone off the hook. He had put his own phone back into its cradle with what felt like desolati
on. He wasn’t used to being cut off from Bennis like this. He didn’t like it. God only knew what was going to happen to him if she up and married somebody.
[2]
Now it was ten o’clock on the morning of Saturday, March 2, and Gregor was standing in the Motherhouse’s front foyer, out of the cold and away from the relentless Irish mania that accompanied what was apparently Maryville’s favorite holiday. The Motherhouse foyer was bare of decoration of any kind, except for a large crucifix that hung on the wall facing the front door and a square oversize portrait in oils of a gentle-faced woman with thick eyebrows and fierce black eyes. This, Gregor thought, was probably the Blessed Margaret Finney, and she looked like a woman and a half. He looked around some more. The floor at his feet was black and white checkerboard marble and very clean. The walls around him and the ceiling above him were both plain, sane white. It was a relief to be away from all that green madness—and from his nattering wondering about why there was so much of it. Everybody in town couldn’t be Irish or of Irish descent. Those people he had seen down near the warehouses had definitely been Hispanic of some kind—and they had been decorated, too, right to the point of wearing shamrocks on the lapels of their coats. It was enough to make him think he’d swallowed something he shouldn’t.
At his side, Sister Mary Scholastica—née Kathleen Burke and a familiar face from Gregor’s stay in Colchester—was just shutting the front door and shaking the cold out of her habit. She was an extraordinarily tall woman with bright red hair that kept escaping from her veil, and Gregor thought she was not behaving naturally. He could think of a hundred conversations they should have been having at just this time. There was the one about everything that had happened in Colchester—months ago, the people who had died and the person who had killed them, and how she felt about that now and how she was coping. There was the one about Brigit Ann Reilly, a girl who had been in her charge, and how she felt about that. Gregor found himself wondering if nuns weren’t allowed to talk about their emotions to laypeople—or even to show them. He could think of nothing else that would explain her manner, efficient and automatic and as cold as ice.
“The Cardinal,” Sister Scholastica was saying, as she kicked at the bottom of the door the way people did when weather stripping made a corner stick, “has already been on the phone to Pete Donovan. Pete Donovan is our chief of police, which you probably already know. I can’t believe the Cardinal wouldn’t have told you. At any rate, you won’t have any of the trouble you may have had other places. Pete had no objection to your being called in.”
“That’s good,” Gregor said blandly. In fact, it was imperative. He had never had to work against the wishes of a local police department. He wasn’t sure he would agree to work if a local department was against him. God only knew it would make an investigation practically impossible. “What about you?” he asked her. “Do you have any objections to my being called in?”
“Of course not.” Scholastica looked startled. She had finished with the door and was now looking around the foyer, as if she were trying to remember something she had forgotten. “If you really want to know the truth,” she said, “it was my idea. Calling you in, I mean. The Cardinal had thought of it—”
“It seemed to me like a natural for the Cardinal.”
“It was. But before he called us about it, I mentioned it to Reverend Mother General. That was the day after it happened, a little over a week ago. I just kept looking at the whole situation and thinking—”
“What?”
If Scholastica hadn’t been a nun, she would have shrugged. It was Gregor’s experience that nuns—or at least the old-fashioned kind—didn’t shrug when you expected them to. Instead, she turned to the right and headed for the doors there, obviously expecting Gregor to follow. The soles of her shoes were rubber and her feet were soundless on the marble, but she still made noise as she moved. She had a ring of keys at her waist that jangled.
“I don’t know what kind of information you’ve gotten from the Cardinal,” she said, “but we got a great deal of it right away. Maybe that was because Reverend Mother General did the expected thing for once and called the Chancery immediately.”
“Immediately when?” Gregor asked.
“Immediately period,” Scholastica said. “As soon as Pete Donovan called us. We’re supposed to call the Chancery for any death, really, even when a retired Sister of ninety-seven passes away in her sleep, but with that sort of thing we often take a day or two while we get ourselves organized. With an accident of any kind—”
“Did you think it was an accident?” Gregor asked her. “In the beginning?”
“In the beginning, we didn’t know what it was,” Scholastica admitted. “When Pete called it was still early, maybe two o’clock at the latest, and he didn’t really know what had happened either. That was when he still thought the cause of death was going to be the snakes and he was beside himself. I mean, we all knew the snakes probably belonged to Sam—”
“Did you?”
Scholastica blushed a little. “Well, we didn’t tell the press, if that’s what you mean. We wouldn’t. We got so sick of them hanging around, amusing themselves—oh, never mind. Their behavior was deplorable. And word came from the Cardinal in no time at all that he didn’t really want to have anything get out, so we—managed.”
“Better than I would have thought possible,” Gregor said.
“Yes. Well. In the old days, the Church was a great teacher of discipline. Anyway, I think everybody thought they were probably Sam’s snakes because he’s had stuff like that up there before, it drives the old nellies at the Town Governing Board wild, but then they could have been Josh Malley’s—”
“Who’s Josh Malley?”
Scholastica shot him a strangely amused look. “Josh Malley is the twenty-five-year-old husband of our sixty-something-year-old local bank president. From what I hear—I was in Colchester at the time—she brought him back from Corfu a couple of years ago and has been doing the Lord only knows what with him since. It’s been very strange, really. When people have midlife crises—I suppose this would have been an end of life crisis—when they have these crises they usually change, don’t they? They start wearing silly clothes and have plastic surgery and tell all their friends they’d rather be called Kiki from here on out. Well, Miriam didn’t do that. She’s always been a solid, sensible woman and she’s still a solid, sensible woman. She just has Josh.”
“And what does Josh have to do with snakes?”
“Oh,” Scholastica said, “well. She’s always buying him toys, Miriam is, and one of the things she bought him is a menagerie. It’s a small zoo, really. She had a lion in it for a while—a very small lion, mind you—but the Governing Board went absolutely nuts and she had to give it away. The menagerie has snakes in it.”
“Water moccasins?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hmm,” Gregor said again.
They had passed through a short empty corridor that opened onto nothing, with doors at the front and back like the lock of a canal. Scholastica opened the far set of doors and motioned him through, into another short corridor with more signs of life. This corridor had doors in its walls and crucifixes on them, each crucifix accompanied by a Bible verse in elegant calligraphic script. Gregor leaned close to one and found Hebrews 13:12-15: Jesus died outside the gate. It was, after all, Lent.
Scholastica led him through another set of doors, then around a corner. Gregor thought the Motherhouse hadn’t looked this big when he was still outside it. It hadn’t looked this complicated, either. He let Scholastica take him where she wanted to and forced himself not to try to make sense of it just yet. He could do that later, with pen and paper and Sister’s advice on how to make a map.
“Anyway,” Scholastica said, “if the snakes had belonged to Josh we would have been happy to let the world know about it, but we couldn’t be sure because Sam wasn’t talking. And in the beginning we didn’t know at all, of course. We ju
st thought Brigit had drowned.”
“Was that likely?” Gregor asked.
“After Pete called, no,” Scholastica said. “He did tell Reverend Mother about the snakes. I mean before that, when she was missing and we didn’t know where she was. The rain really was terrible, and there was flooding down at St. Andrew’s. We were helping out by packing up canned goods and getting our gym ready to take anybody Iggy Loy couldn’t handle—”
“Iggy Loy?”
“St. Ignatius Loyola Church. It’s right down the hill on Delaney but not too far down. It was high enough up to escape any water damage, and we knew it would be. And I know the library is just on the other end of Delaney Street and I know it’s not far—”
“This is the library where she was supposed to be going.”
“There’s only the one,” Scholastica said. “Brigit went every day. We’re all supposed to have one or two little practical chores to do around the house, and that was hers. I thought it was a good idea, but—”
“But Brigit was a flake?”
“I wouldn’t say flake, exactly.” Scholastica looked uncomfortable. “Mr. Demarkian, part of me wants to say that Brigit was nothing particularly special. There were always girls like Brigit in postulant classes, immature girls, borderline cases. Before I became Postulant Mistress, I didn’t realize how hard it would be to decide whether to keep them or not. The actual decision is supposed to rest with Alice Marie—Sister Alice Marie is Mistress of Novices—in consultation with Reverend Mother, but in practice it comes down to me. And I just have a hard time making up my mind.”
They had come to the end of the corridor they had turned the corner into. They were now presented with turns to the right and to the left. The place felt like a maze, turning in on itself, folding up like an accordion. It made Gregor dizzy.
In front of him, Sister Mary Scholastica had come to a stop, turning neither one way nor the other. Now she swung around and faced him for the first time since she had let him through the door. Her face was pale and taut, but there was still no real expression in it. Gregor cast his mind back to last year in Colchester and tried to get some take on this. Had Scholastica been so stoic and expressionless then? Had she been so tense? What was wrong with her? Gregor had come prepared to deal with human emotions. He always did, because he knew too well that if he didn’t they would get in the way. That was one of the things the Bureau had taught him, on kidnapping detail especially. Taught or not, he really didn’t have a talent for this sort of thing. He was always being thrown by the unexpected.
