by Jane Haddam
“On your agent, of course,” the woman said. “She had to be your agent. She was definitely a woman, and she kept insisting that her name was Dennis!”
Five
[1]
IN TOWNS LIKE MARYVILLE there are two systems of communication—official and unofficial—and the unofficial one is often the most efficient. When Pete Donovan’s force was calling Don Bollander’s family and Don Bollander’s boss, someone else—no one was ever able to pinpoint who—was calling someone else, who in turn was calling someone else, who in turn was having a bridge party. By three o’clock in the afternoon, everyone in town knew that Don Bollander’s body had been found at the Motherhouse in a utility room sink. Half the town had their theories about who had done it and how. The other half were holding out for the kind of crazed serial killer that had made other places famous. It was almost as if they thought a Son of Sam or a Hillside Strangler would do the town’s image good, at least after he was caught. Glinda Daniels didn’t know what they thought. She had started getting the calls at just around noon. She had started getting the walk-ins fifteen minutes later. Now she didn’t know what to do with herself. If she barricaded herself in her office, the phone rang. If she stood out at the check-out desk, people walked up to her and expected her to gossip. She didn’t know what to do. The only safe spot in the library was in the stacks over near that door, and she certainly didn’t want to go there.
She was standing on a stepladder, rearranging a display of children’s classics on the broad-based revolving wooden pyramid Miriam Bailey had given to the library on the fifth anniversary of its new building, when Sam walked in. He was wearing his big shaggy coat, as always, and attracting attention to himself, as always, and getting waylaid by old ladies, as always. One of them had him in her grip as soon as he came through the door, but she was very short and he was able to wave to Glinda over her head. Glinda waved back and started down the ladder. The ladder was close up against the shelving for children’s science books, and Shelley and Cory must have been on the other side. Glinda hadn’t noticed them because she couldn’t see them. She couldn’t see them now, but she could hear them whispering.
“There he is again,” Shelley was saying. “I’m telling you, I’m not crazy. There’s something going on.”
“What could be going on?” Cory asked her. “Sam Harrigan and the old maid librarian?”
“Glinda Daniels is a very attractive woman. And she’s hardly an old maid yet. She’s only about forty.”
“She’s fat.”
“She’s not fat.” Shelley sounded exasperated. “For God’s sake, Cory, not everybody has to have anorexia nervosa to look good.”
“I’m not talking about anorexia nervosa,” Cory said stubbornly. “I’m talking about Glinda Daniels.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Shelley said.
“Sam Harrigan and the old maid librarian,” Cory said again. “It’s gross. I mean, it pains me just to think about it.”
It was very hard to move the ladder without making any noise, but Glinda did it, millimeter by millimeter, pulling it across the carpet. From the corner of her eye, she could see Sam on the other side of the room, disentangling himself from the old lady. In the back of her mind, she could hear the voice of Donna Leary, a girl she had known in high school and considered to be her friend. “I like Glinda a lot but I wouldn’t want to be that intellectual. Boys don’t like you and it makes you fat.” Fat. Fat, fat, fat. Glinda got the ladder out of the children’s section and began to fold it up. It made a clatter as its parts came together.
“Cory?” she said, much too loudly for a library. “This ladder has to go back in the storeroom.”
Then she walked into her office and shut the door.
“Fat,” she said to herself.
She looked through the window wall at Sam, still caught by the old lady, being polite and impatient at the same time. She had noticed his ability to do that and marveled at it, but now she didn’t want to notice anything about him at all. She didn’t want to notice anything about anybody. She picked up a stack of clippings from Librarian’s Day magazine, all on things to do for children that would encourage them to read. Glinda knew it was very, very important to encourage children to read. She took the clippings and dumped them in the wastepaper basket. Then she thought about setting fire to them. She might have done it except for the window wall. She was afraid people on the other side of it would see the flames and panic. Instead, she took her thin file of newspaper clippings on the progress of the state library budget in Albany and ripped it in two.
She had just started turning her computer-printed annual report into confetti when Sam opened the door, looked at the mess she was making on the floor, and said, “Didn’t quite meet your standards, did it?”
“Go to Hell,” Glinda told him.
“Right,” Sam said. Then he shut the door behind him.
Glinda had finished with the report and gone on to her four-color copies of the last ALA convention booklet. She had six of those in the office, because she had been president of the New York State chapter last year and her picture was on page thirty-six. The annual report would be replaceable by merely pushing the right buttons and running a copy off the printer, but these wouldn’t be replaceable at all. They never ran enough of them for people who wanted extras and nobody would be willing to give up what they had. Glinda ripped them in half and then in quarters and dumped them on the floor with the rest of the mess.
Sam Harrigan cleared his throat. “Glinda?”
“What?” Glinda said.
“Is it my fault? Have I given you reason to be angry with me?”
“No.”
“Fine. That’s a relief. Do you want to tell me who has got you angry with him? Or it?”
“No.”
“Would you like me to find you something else to tear up?”
Glinda had finished with the booklets. She picked up the latest copy of the Library Journal and started thinking about fire again. Ripping things up was fine but fire would be perfect.
“Do you know what?” she said. “When I went to college—I went to Bryn Mawr—when I went to college, I studied archaeology. Do you know why?”
“It interested you?”
“I wanted to go to Egypt,” Glinda said. “I’ve still never been to Egypt. Later on I went to graduate school and got a degree in French. I’ve never been to France. I’ve never been anywhere but one school or another and Maryville, New York, and let me tell you, I’m sick of it. I am sick of the library, I am sick of my house, I am sick of my life, and most of all, Mr. Harrigan, I am sick of myself. I have half a mind to chuck my job right here, check into someplace like the Golden Door, lose twenty pounds and start living.”
“Chuck your job,” Sam said quickly, “but for Christ’s sake don’t lose twenty pounds. I’ll take you to Tahiti.”
“Don’t be facetious.”
“I’m not being facetious. Tahiti’s very nice. If you’re conventional, we can make it a honeymoon.”
“These days, if I were conventional we’d have to make it an affair. Look, um, I know, we’re supposed to go over to find Mr. Demarkian. I called you. You’re doing me a favor. I can’t stop talking fast. Give me a minute, all right? I’ll calm down.”
“I don’t want you to calm down,” Sam said seriously. “I will take you to Tahiti. It is nice. You could even use your French.”
“Why not?” Glinda said. “I have very good French. I can listen to people saying ‘How is it possible, Sam Harrigan and the old maid librarian’ in a different language.”
She hadn’t meant to say it—she really hadn’t meant to say it. She’d had a lot of experience being the fat, intelligent one. She knew better. It was just that she was holding the Library Journal in her hands, looking at the drawing of a frazzled librarian on the cover and thinking she didn’t even like libraries, when she wanted a book she bought one—and it just came out. A second after it did, the office was so quiet it felt like the
inside of a vacuum jar. Even the sounds coming from outside the office seemed to have been cut off, the people in the library rendered mute.
“I’m sorry,” Glinda said, and thought: They’re probably all out there staring through the glass at me, wondering if I’m having a nervous breakdown or what. She put the Library Journal back down on the desk very softly and refused to look through the glass. If they were staring at her, she didn’t want to stare back. “If the ALA heard me talking, they’d probably have me arrested for egregious stereotyping. We’re not supposed to say things like ‘old maid librarian’ these days.”
“Did somebody call you that? Did they say that to you? ‘Sam Harrigan and the old maid librarian.’”
“It was something I overheard.”
“Were you meant to overhear it?”
“No.”
Sam had been standing against the door. Now he came across and sat down on the edge of the desk, as close to her as he could come, so that Glinda could feel the heat of him.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?”
“For your having had to hear that. It was my position that did it, after all, and maybe the way I’ve gone about all this. I mean, without the show, what am I? A shaggy old fart with gray hair who smokes cigars and hasn’t bothered to keep himself in shape.”
“You’re Sam Harrigan.” Glinda smiled. And then she laughed. “And I’m an old maid librarian.”
“Are you?” Sam asked her. “An old maid, I mean.”
Glinda blushed. “No.”
“Well, that’s good, anyway. But you’ve got to stop thinking of yourself this way, Glinda. It’s imperative. Old maid librarian. Lose twenty pounds and start living. I’ve been driving myself crazy all morning trying to figure out what was wrong between us last night and it turns out to have been your insecurity complex. Bloody Hell. It just won’t do. You’ve got to give it up.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s making it damned hard to seduce you.”
Glinda had gone down to the floor in the middle of Sam’s speech, starting to pick up the mess she had made and feeling a little stupid. Now she shot up and grinned. It had been a long time since she’d talked this sort of nonsense with anyone. She’d forgotten how much fun it was.
“Is that what you’ve been trying to do,” she asked him, “seduce me?”
“It depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether or not you want to be seduced.”
And that, Glinda realized later, was when it happened. One second everything was light and teasing. The next it was different, shifted, so that when she came out with the first thing that had come into her head, it sounded much more significant than she had meant it to be.
“Do I?” she asked him.
There was still that window wall, looking out on the check-out desk, making them available for view to a good cross-section of a very small town. Sam seemed to have forgotten about it and Glinda decided that she just didn’t care. He put a hand in the hair at the back of her neck and pulled her close to him. She wrapped her arms around his chest and felt him slide off the edge of the desk and up against her. After what seemed like minutes, they came up for air and Sam answered her last question, courteous to a fault.
“Yes,” he said.
It was then that the first of the growing sounds from the other side of the window wall penetrated to them. It was a measure of their distraction that that sound was a piercing shriek.
“See?” Shelley was screeching. “See? I told you so! I told you something was going on!”
[2]
Sister Mary Scholastica had been present at the scene of a murder before. She knew how long it took for the police to get organized, for the evidence to be collected, for the discussions to take place that would provide the foundation for the investigation to come after. Most of all, she knew how boring it was for the bystanders, innocent or otherwise. There was nothing any of them could do but sit and wait—and it wasn’t like a hospital wait, either. Nobody was hovering in the background, promising to provide them with information as soon as it was available. Nobody thought they had any right to any information at all. They were supposed to keep their mouths shut and their bodies out of the way, until they were called. Then they were supposed to answer questions, not ask them.
That nobody else at the Motherhouse understood these simple rules of procedure was obvious from the way they were behaving. Reverend Mother General had put Scholastica in charge of “keeping order for this unusual day” because she’d had experience—Reverend Mother General herself was going to be busy on the phone to the Chancery, making arrangements for one thing and another with the Archdiocese—but the result of it was that the Sisters were taking their frustrations out on Scholastica instead of on the police. They wanted to know what was going on and were angry with Scholastica because she wouldn’t tell them. They wanted to understand how Don Bollander’s death connected to Brigit Ann Reilly’s and were angry with Scholastica when she didn’t know. Maybe angry was too strong a word. Nuns trained under the old dispensation—and most of the nuns at the Motherhouse had been trained under the old dispensation—had their emotions well under control. Not one of them would have dreamed of shouting or making a scene. They were just all putting out little electric charges of tension into the air. Scholastica felt it as a sharp stinging on her skin, a sure sign that she was under too much stress. She used to feel the same thing when she’d had to take math tests in high school, and all day every day during her postulant year.
Directly after lunch, Scholastica had put her postulants to work folding form letters and stuffing them into envelopes. The form letters were requests for help in establishing a case for the canonization of Margaret Finney, and were going out to the Motherhouse’s entire mailing list, a group of nearly 15,000 people. Major benefactors and small donors, women who had once been members of the order, women who had come for formation but left before taking vows, women who had written with interest but decided not to come or been turned down, former students, former lay teachers, former employees, women who had come on retreat or for the special seminars the order held twice a year on women and theology—it was incredible how many different categories of people were connected to a Mother-house, or how much work it took to contact them all at once. Scholastica thought she’d given her girls enough to do to last them for the rest of the day, and when she looked in on them at three fifteen she saw she had been right. She had put them in the big sewing room. In the old days, when the Sisters had worn a distinctive long habit that had to be made by hand and there had been 3,000 Sisters who needed two habits each, this room had served the Sister Seamstress and her assistants. Now, with the dress of their modified habit bought from a supply house and only their veils made on the premises, it was mostly empty. Scholastica found it cheered her up enormously to see the room full and busy again. She counted heads and came up with one missing. She searched faces and saw that Neila Connelly was not in the room. Then she made herself calm down. She couldn’t panic like this every time she couldn’t lay eyes at will on one of her postulants. She’d go crazy. They had to visit the bathroom in peace periodically.
She went back into the corridor and walked west toward her office and Alice Marie’s. Alice Marie’s door was open and she was sitting at her desk. Scholastica stuck her head in, looked at the phone and winced.
“Has it been bad?” she asked. “I heard you when I came through a few minutes ago. You were using that tone of voice you have that sounds like you’re trying to explain nuclear physics to a five-year-old.”
“I was talking to Thoma Andreotti’s mother.” Alice Marie sighed. “I can tell you when the news hit the network television stations,” she said. “At the one fifteen news break. How do they get on to these things so last?”
“They were already on to it,” Scholastica said. “I mean, they were looking out for any more news about Brigit. They saw the name of the town, they saw the name of th
e convent, they saw it was a murder—”
“I see what you mean. Well, however it works, it certainly was fast. And I don’t know what to say to these people. I don’t feel right telling them their daughters are perfectly safe. I don’t know what’s going on.”
“I don’t either,” Scholastica said quickly.
“I know you don’t. You know Gregor Demarkian, though. Maybe you could get him to tell you something.”
Scholastica didn’t think it was possible to get Gregor Demarkian to say anything he didn’t want to say, and she didn’t think she knew him all that well. She fiddled with the rosary at her belt and said, “He’s gone home. To the inn, I mean. At least, that’s what he told Reverend Mother. The police have locked up the stairwell and gone home, too.”
“And I’m left here fielding phone calls.”
“Do they want to take their daughters home?”
“Yes, to put it bluntly. Of course, their daughters are eighteen years old and legal adults in New York State, but you know how these things are. I’m not too worried about the novices. Once the girls get into habit, the parents tend to calm down a little. But the postulants—”
“Sheila Cormier and Martha Eggars,” Scholastica said. “They’re both on the brink of leaving anyway. I’m on the brink of throwing Martha out.”
“Martha,” Alice Marie said thoughtfully. “The sexual hysteric?”
“Classic case,” Scholastica agreed.
“I know how it is. You want to give everybody the benefit of the doubt and you end up putting up with much more than you have to. You can ask Martha Eggars to leave. Count yourself lucky to have such a large class of normal ones to go on.”
“I will.”
The phone on Alice Marie’s desk rang. She picked it up, said hello, and stretched her mouth into a placating smile. Then she looked up at Scholastica and shrugged.
“Yes, of course,” she said into the phone. “You’re Sister Beata’s mother and I met you at the memorial Mass for the Vietnam War dead. I remember you very well.”
