by Jane Haddam
If she’d had a normal marriage, or even a normal May—December arrangement, she would have relied on Josh to get her away from it all. He could have put her into that car she’d bought him and taken her for a ride; Because she didn’t have a normal anything, Josh was not around. He had gotten into that car very early this morning and taken off on his own. Since he couldn’t be with Ann-Harriet Severan—Miriam had taken care of that for the weekend by giving Ann-Harriet a great deal of last-minute, must-rush extra work—Miriam hadn’t any idea at all where he had gone.
If you want to find a banker on the weekend, the last place you look for him is at the bank. Miriam’s father had taught her that. That was why, as the sound of church bells died away in the air over her head, she was standing at the bank’s back door, fishing keys out of her purse. It was very cold and very bright, the kind of day that looks warm when you’re standing inside. Outside, the wind was high and stiff and rigid and threatening to get worse. Miriam got the key turned and the door open and pressed herself inside.
The back hall was where the rest rooms were, and the storage closets, and the stairs to the basement. Miriam passed through it, listening to the sound of her heels on the hardwood floor and feeling a little foolish. Back at home, she had tried to convince herself that getting dressed to go into the bank on a day it wasn’t open was silly. Anyone else who had come in to do some extra work would be lounging around the office floor in jeans. She hadn’t been able to convince herself. She’d never come in to the bank on a weekend before. If she had extra work to do, she took it home. Before coming out, she had struggled into yet another Chanel suit and another layer of makeup—and then she had wasted time resenting it all.
She made absolutely sure the back hall was empty—she even checked the ladies’ room, although not the men’s; she didn’t have the courage to check the men’s—and then started up the stairs to the office floor. From up there, the sound of a soft voice talking drifted down at her. It was only one voice, so Miriam assumed it was talking into a phone. She reached the landing, paused to listen, then went up the rest of the flight. She reached the second floor and paused to listen again. The voice was low and hummingbird sweet, but strong. It was the voice of a girl of twenty-two.
The floor of the upstairs office hall was made of checkerboard marble. There was no way Miriam could walk down it without being heard. She didn’t bother to try. From where she was standing, she could see the door to Ann-Harriet’s office, pulled back and propped open. Every once in a while, she could see Ann-Harriet’s arm, drifting gracefully through the area the open door revealed.
“But this is terrible,” Ann-Harriet was saying. “How could something like this happen?”
There was a seductive note in that voice, but it wasn’t the right seductive note. Whomever Ann-Harriet was talking to, it wasn’t Josh. Miriam began to walk down the hall toward the open office, going slowly, thinking herself into an Alfred Hitchcock frame of mind.
“Just a minute,” Ann-Harriet said, “someone just came in.”
There was the sound of a chair being pushed back and then of heels on carpet. Ann-Harriet’s head appeared in the open doorway. She caught sight of Miriam, nodded, and disappeared again.
“It’s the boss,” Miriam heard her disembodied voice say a moment later. “I don’t know if she’s heard about this or not. I’ll call you back later.”
The phone clicked in the receiver, too sharply, too loudly. The wheels on Ann-Harriet’s desk chair creaked. Miriam walked the rest of the way to Ann-Harriet’s office door and stood in the door frame, checking out a scene she checked out at least once every weekday. Ann-Harriet was the kind of person who cluttered up her desk with personal things: pictures of brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces; the scroll she’d received for being half of the “cutest couple” in high school; her life horoscope engraved in brass. Miriam stared at the life horoscope and frowned—this was a Catholic town, for God’s sake—and then wrenched away from it, to look Ann-Harriet in the face instead. Miriam always looked Ann-Harriet in the face. It was one of her operational absolutes. It also raised the tension level of their every encounter by six or seven points on the Richter scale.
Ann-Harriet had stood up when Miriam first walked in. Now she stepped back a little and tried out a smile that didn’t quite make it.
“Miss Bailey,” she said. “I didn’t expect you in.”
“You shouldn’t have expected me in,” Miriam told her. “I never come in on weekends.” She nodded toward the phone. “Someone was telling you about Don Bollander being dead.”
“Oh,” Ann-Harriet said. “Yes. That was Bob Corliss, Miss Bailey, who works at the Chase branch out in Wender. You know.”
“No,” Miriam said. “I don’t know.”
“Oh. Well. He was telling me about Don Bollander, or as much as he’s heard. He was telling me Don Bollander had been murdered.”
“Maybe he has been.”
“Oh,” Ann-Harriet said again. Her desk was covered with computer sheets, some of them flat and some of them crumpled and still others folded neatly in half. She pushed her hands into them to no purpose and cleared her throat. “I was right in the middle of doing all this stuff,” she said, “when the call came, and then I forgot all about it.”
“Because Don Bollander had died,” Miriam said.
“Because he’d been murdered,” Ann-Harriet said. “And that girl was murdered, too.”
“So what did you think?” Miriam said. “That you were the most likely candidate for the next one?”
Ann-Harriet flushed. “I didn’t think anything, Miss Bailey. I was just shocked. Do you want to go over these papers? Is that why you came in?”
“It might be.”
Miriam was still standing in the doorway. Ann-Harriet looked at her there and seemed to make up her mind about something. Miriam could just guess what. Ann-Harriet shuffled her papers more decisively and sat down in her chair.
“I’ve been over these several times today,” she said, “and I’ve back-checked them with every confirming report. In my estimation, you were right to be concerned—”
“I’m always right to be concerned.”
Ann-Harriet flushed. “There’s leakage,” she said decisively. “Not very much leakage at any one time, but going back at least a year, and it adds up. To the best of my knowledge, after just a few days’ investigation, what it’s added up to so far is about a hundred thousand dollars. Is that what you wanted to know? Is that what you were looking for?”
“Maybe.”
“You need someone better than I am to tell you who’s doing it. I don’t have the expertise to trace something like this.”
“I haven’t asked you to.”
“What have you asked me to do?” Ann-Harriet demanded, beginning to sound a little wild. “I’ve been here all afternoon. I was here all night last night and all night the night before that. If I’m not looking for the right thing, you ought to tell me I’m not looking for the right thing.”
Outside Ann-Harriet’s single office window, the sky was beginning to cloud up again. It reminded Miriam of her last conversation with Josh, and started a whole stream of questions tumbling through her mind—but they were questions about the web of sex, and useless to ask. Besides, she didn’t really want to ask them. She just wanted to go on making Ann-Harriet uncomfortable. She had already made Ann-Harriet afraid.
Miriam left the door frame and sat down in Ann-Harriet’s single visitor’s chair. She wondered how Ann-Harriet felt about her office. There were secretaries on the first floor with better offices than this.
Miriam bent over Ann-Harriet’s papers and said, “I’m going to stay here for a while. I want you to take me through it, step by step, all the paper trail you’ve managed to find. I want to see what it looks like.”
“Now?”
“Of course now.”
“It’s Saturday afternoon.”
“I’ve worked most of the Saturday afternoons of my lif
e.”
That wasn’t quite true—but Miriam thought it was more than justified. She hadn’t spent any of the Saturday afternoons of her life in bed with somebody else’s husband, and that ought to count for something.
[2]
It was one o’clock when Josh Malley showed up at Sam Harrigan’s front door, and by then Sam was in a very peculiar mood. On the one hand, he was happy—and happy to a degree he found embarrassing, considering the smallness of the incident that had made him so. At twelve forty-five he had received a phone call from Glinda Daniels. She was calling from the library—if she’d been calling from her little house, he’d have walked down the hill to her as soon as they’d hung up—and the news she had was not good. To Sam, the news didn’t much matter. It had been less than twenty-four hours since he had taken Glinda home after buying her dinner. He had spent that short period of time worrying about it. Had she liked him? Had she not liked him? He really was behaving like a fourteen-year-old—and yet, he wasn’t. Not exactly. There was something strange about the way Glinda Daniels responded to him. She was too hesitant and too afraid—and God only knew there wasn’t a single bloody thing about Sam Harrigan for a woman to be afraid of. One of those movie stars who periodically flitted through his life, more passionate about ecology than she was about him, had told him contemptuously that he was the least sexually aggressive man she had ever met. What she meant was that he took no for no whether she wanted him to or not. Sam Harrigan had made his rule about that long before the present feminist movement came to flower. He didn’t know enough about women to know if they always meant no when they said no, but he did know enough about people to understand that any woman who said no when she meant yes needed to have her head examined. The movie star had definitely needed to have her head examined. Aside from her attraction to rape games, bondage movies, and a host of frighteningly bizarre sexual devices, she thought the trees were giving her advice on the best way to murder Dan Quayle.
With Glinda Daniels, though, there should have been no ambiguity of any kind. One of the other rules Sam Harrigan had made for himself long ago was never to try to take a woman to bed on a first date. He’d tried it a few times and even succeeded a few times, but he hadn’t liked it much. His impression was that the women hadn’t liked it much either. It seemed that in this late decade of the twentieth century, sex had become obligatory. Women went through with it for the same reason they put on makeup in the morning—because it was expected of them, whether they liked the idea or not. Sam Harrigan wanted more than that out of his sex life. He wanted more than that out of himself.
He had taken Glinda out for a steak and bought her a big piece of triple-chocolate cake and two glasses of champagne for dessert. He had tried to bring the conversation around to something personal and had failed utterly. The whole time they were together, Sam had had the impression that Glinda was more than a little annoyed with him, he didn’t have any idea why. By the time he brought her home, he thought he was in for one of the more spectacular failures of his career. Glinda wasn’t simply not attracted to him. She loathed him. She wished he wouldn’t impose on her time any more. She wished—
Getting up this morning, Sam had changed his mind about all of it—he just wasn’t sure to what. He had asked and she had accepted. If she hadn’t wanted to accept, she had only had to say no. He hadn’t been pushy or crude. He at least ought to give the whole thing another shot, especially because, after several hours in her exclusive company, he was finding her more attractive than ever. It was the “extra” twenty pounds that made all the difference, physically. Sam didn’t find them “extra” at all. He found them crucial.
He was on phase three of this mental mess—wondering if Glinda was secretly and perhaps hopelessly, but of course irretrievably, in love with someone else—when the call came. He was also sitting out on his screen porch potting nettles. Potting nettles when your mind is occupied elsewhere is a very bad idea. You forget not to touch the leaves with your bare hands and your fingers begin to sting. When the ringer on the phone went off, his fingers had probably been stinging for some time. He hadn’t noticed. He did notice as soon as he had the receiver in his hand, because it stung.
“It was Scholastica who told me about it,” Glinda said, after she’d given him the news of Don Bollander’s death. Sam didn’t think he knew Don Bollander. Once the name was mentioned, he tried and tried to put a face to it, but he couldn’t do it. “Scholastica was there,” Glinda went on, “so I suppose I have a good chance of having heard the straight story. Within ten minutes after I finished talking to her, four people came into the library with other stories—”
“Oh, no.”
“Oh, yes. I don’t know what I look like. One of those cork sounding boards or something. Everybody who wants somebody to tell something to tells it to me. And that was what I was thinking about, Sam. People telling me things, I mean. Don Bollander telling me things.”
Sam Harrigan considered this information. One of the things he and Glinda had done the night before was to use up a large quantity of cocktail napkins trying to solve their little local murder. They had taken as their starting point the various “sightings” of Brigit Ann Reilly as they had been reported to Glinda over the week since the death. In Sam’s mind, this had been his best conversational gambit. It had released Glinda from a tension that had nothing to do with him, but wasn’t doing his cause any good. It had also been interesting.
“Don Bollander,” he said. “Is that the one who saw her in the bank?”
“That’s right. He was Miriam Bailey’s assistant at the bank. And he came in on Friday and told me he’d seen her. At eleven thirty.”
“Isn’t he one of the ones we decided was impossible? I seem to remember our working out a timetable—”
“I know,” Glinda said. Then she sighed a little. “Scholastica’s half-hysterical, you can just imagine. And she said Pete Donovan’s even worse. He was with Gregor Demarkian when Neila showed up talking about a body, and he just didn’t believe her. Apparently, he’s had his office full of hysterical postulants for days now, and laypeople too, all seeing ghosts and goblins and God only knows what else. He hadn’t told Demarkian about it so Demarkian was furious. Scholastica said it was very tense. I keep thinking of what he looked like on television and wondering what he’s like when he’s furious.”
“Gregor Demarkian, you mean.”
“Mmm. Sam? We’re not really detectives, you know. We could have had it wrong. About Don’s information being bogus.”
“I suppose we could have, yes. Do you think he was killed for that, because he’s seen her in the bank?”
“I don’t know. I just know I haven’t been feeling very well since that call. And the library is packed.”
“Do you have any help?”
“Oh, I have a lot of help. I even have The Library Lady. That’s how I’ve been able to lock myself in here and talk to you.”
Sam had more than nettles to pot. He had thistles, too, and wild heather. There were plants and pots of dirt everywhere, and Miracle-Gro and seeds everywhere else. He was sitting in a rocking chair he couldn’t rock, because any movement he made tipped something over. He took the pot of nettles he had left in his lap when the phone rang and put it on the floor. He tried to think clearly through the growing excitement of his realization that she had decided to call him first. There were a hundred possible reasons for that that had nothing to do with his sincere hope that she was in the midst of falling in love with him back, but he had no bloody damn intention of considering any of them. Illusions could be a lot of fun.
“Listen,” he said to her, “you haven’t met this Demarkian yet, have you? He hasn’t come to talk to you?”
“Of course not. He just got here—I forget when. Scholastica said, but it slipped my mind. Not very soon before they discovered the body, though.”
“When did they discover the body?”
“Around eleven o’clock, I think.”
“All ri
ght,” Sam said. “Right now, for the next couple of hours at least, he’s going to be busy over at the convent and Pete Donovan’s going to be busy with him. You always take care of the immediate crisis first. So, they’ll be there, then—then it depends. He’ll probably check in to wherever he’s staying—”
“I know where he’s staying,” Glinda said. “It’s the St. Mary’s Inn. Edith Jasper told me about it herself. The arrangements were made by the Chancery at absolutely the last minute, but Edith is Edith. She wasn’t going to say no to the Cardinal and she wasn’t going to give up a chance to make herself sound important, either. This is the biggest thing that’s happened to this town since—since I don’t know what.”
“The beatification of Margaret Finney?”
“Maybe the ’53 flood.”
“I was just feeling sorry for the Sisters of Divine Grace and for Margaret Finney,” Sam said. “Here it is, one of the biggest events in the history of their order, and it’s being buried under a lot of melodrama and blood and guts.”
“Just a minute,” Glinda said.
She must have taken the phone away from her ear, because the next time Sam heard her voice it sounded faint and very far away. “Those go in the science section,” she was telling someone he couldn’t hear. “They’re not fiction, no matter what they look like. Put them there.” There was a pause and then, “Yes, I understand that, but I’m busy right now—yes, I’ll be out as soon as I’m done—yes, I do understand, I just don’t think this is the kind of crisis you seem to. I’ll be out in a little while.
“They’re going to drive me insane,” she said, back into the phone. “I don’t know what it is with people these days. They can’t do anything you don’t tell them to do right down to the last detail. I’m sorry. You’ve been so patient listening to me and now as soon as you start talking, I’m going to have to get off the phone.”
