by Jane Haddam
“Also by Don Bollander at the bank about fifteen minutes before Glinda Daniels found Brigit’s body in the library.”
“Is that true?” Scholastica asked.
“Of course, it’s true,” Reverend Mother General snapped. “Why would he say so if it weren’t true? It does make our conclusions even more—conclusive. From what I remember about the police reports, Glinda found the body at approximately one o’clock?”
“That’s right,” Gregor said.
“Well, by quarter to one we’d all been organized in teams to help Father Doherty and the other people who had come up to Iggy Loy to get out of the wet, and if anybody else had been missing, I would have noticed.”
“If it had been a postulant, I would have noticed,” Neila Connelly put in. “We were all very nervous with the weather and Brigit missing. We were all packing boxes in a big room and we kept counting ourselves over and over to make sure.”
“I didn’t think any of you were missing,” Gregor said, “but I had to be sure. You have no idea how many great ideas have foundered on the rocks of not making sure.”
“I think I have,” Reverend Mother said. “I once spent ten years teaching English composition in a high school. Now. The other matter is the witness of Neila Connelly here, and I use the word witness advisedly. I have talked the matter over with her and I believe her. I think it would be a good idea if you believed her, too.”
“I intend to,” Gregor said.
Neila Connelly had gone very pale. Scholastica knelt down next to the girl’s chair and touched her arm. “Neila, if you can’t go on with this I’ll send you straight to the infirmary, no matter what Mr. Demarkian wants to know. Brigit and Mr. Bollander are dead. There’s no reason on earth why you should kill yourself.”
“I’m all right, Sister.” Neila started to cry, a squeezed outcry that dripped tears from the corners of her eyes like the tail end of a tube of toothpaste coming out onto a brush. Neila didn’t notice that the tears were there and let them run down the sides of her face. “The thing is,” she said, “I don’t really know much of anything at all.” She turned to Gregor pleadingly. “I told Sister Scholastica everything I could think of the first three minutes after I started talking. I was supposed to be Brigit’s best friend, but I didn’t get to know much more than anybody else did.”
“But you did know about this—uniform, or whatever it is,” Gregor said gently.
“Oh, yes.” Neila nodded vigorously. “Brigit took it out of the habits room the night before she died. After Compline. We’re supposed to observe Grand Silence after Compline, but Brigit had been getting worse and worse at that over the last few weeks, so she was talking away. And I was scared to death, because during Grand Silence you can hear a butterfly flap its wings in this place, I’m not kidding. So I thought we were going to get caught.”
“Stealing this postulant’s dress?”
“Talking,” Neila said. “And she didn’t just take a dress. She took a veil and stockings and shoes, too.”
Scholastica watched Gregor consider this. “They wouldn’t have been missed?” he asked finally. “A set like that can go out of the convent without anyone noticing?”
“Not forever,” Reverend Mother General told him, “but for a while, yes. We don’t have the staff we used to. We can’t spend time checking for things every day. We do inventory every month on the fifteenth unless the fifteenth is a Sunday. Then we do it on the following Monday. Until then, no one would necessarily know where anything was.”
“Oh,” Scholastica said, “I wouldn’t put it that strongly.”
“I would,” Reverend Mother General said.
“She thought she’d get them back long before they were missed,” Neila told them. “She hid them under her mattress that night and then just before she was supposed to leave for the library she came up here and stuffed them all under her skirts. The way this skirt is made, we’ve got a kind of extra belt under there, a rope thing that goes around the waist to keep the top part in place—I’d have to show you and I don’t think I should.”
“That’s all right,” Gregor said.
“Well. She tied everything to that. It would never have worked if she’d had to go down to chapel that way, because it was noticeable. Not as noticeable as you’d think, though. I had no idea there was so much material in these skirts. Anyway, after she tied the things to herself, she wrapped herself up in a shawl, and the shawls we use cover everything. I mean they’re enormous. If you wrapped one the right way, you could probably cover a ninth-month preg—I’m sorry, Reverend Mother.”
“That’s quite all right, Neila. Of course, in my day there were girls who entered the convent without ever once having heard that word spoken in their lives, but there were others who knew a few you probably don’t. Including myself. Mr. Demarkian, as far as I know, this is all the information Miss Connelly has.”
“It is,” Neila Connelly said. “It’s all I ever knew. Brigit didn’t tell me anything.”
“Did she tell you what she was going to do with the outfit?” Gregor asked.
“Oh, that,” Neila said. “Yes. She told me what she was going to do with that. She was going to give it to a friend of hers, a new and special friend and that friend had a friend who had just begun to realize she might have a vocation—I got the impression that Brigit thought this friend of a friend business was all made up. That whoever had asked her for the dress was the one who was going to wear it around and see if she liked the feel of it.”
“What size was this dress?” Gregor asked.
“Twelve,” Neila said. “The shoes were tens but I wouldn’t put too much into that. Brigit didn’t know the right shoe size. She kept saying that whoever this was had bigger feet than she did and then she got the biggest because you could stuff them, you know, and still wear them, but if the shoes were too small there was nothing you could do with them at all.”
“I wonder who’s size twelve,” Gregor said.
“I am,” Scholastica told him. “So are half the women I know, in the convent and out. Alice Marie. Ann-Harriet Severan and Miriam Bailey both, that’s a joke. Glinda Daniels. We’ve all got big feet, too.”
“Miriam’s feet aren’t big,” Reverend Mother General said. “I don’t think they’re even sevens.”
Scholastica turned to Gregor. She had meant to make some passing comment about the shoes not counting, but she didn’t. The look on his face was very familiar. She remembered it from Colchester, and it frightened her.
“Oh,” she said. “You know?”
“What?” Gregor looked up at her. “No. I don’t know. I almost know. Are you acquainted with a woman named Barbara Keel?”
“Senile,” Reverend Mother General said.
“Well, she may or may not be, but she said something very intelligent to me tonight. I knew there was no such thing as a locked-room mystery.”
“What?” Scholastica said.
The phone on Reverend Mother General’s desk rang and she leaned over to pick it up, barked hello into the receiver, and listened. A few seconds later, she handed the receiver across the desk.
“It’s for you,” she told Gregor Demarkian. “It’s Pete Donovan and he sounds half out of his mind.”
Three
[1]
GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD A driver’s license, but he did not drive. According to Bennis Hannaford—and to everyone else who had ever had the misfortune of spending time with him when he was behind the wheel—he was a world-class menace on four tires, especially to the car. He was bad even with small machines. Blenders and electric pencil-sharpening machines seemed to come apart in his hands. Cars seemed to blow up. Once he had set a brand new 1979 Honda Civic on fire in the parking lot of a Stop & Shop in Brookfield, Connecticut, nobody ever knew how. Fortunately, he wasn’t a man with much of a yen for high-speed car chases—just a little one. Mostly he considered all that sort of thing silly and beneath his dignity. Sometimes, watching Bullit late at night on television, he
wondered what it would feel like. If he was ever going to get the chance to know—which he was sure he wasn’t—this call from Pete Donovan would have been it. Reverend Mother had understated the case. Pete Donovan wasn’t half out of his mind. He was all the way out of it and on his way to becoming a form of free-floating electricity. Gregor knew that tone of voice all too well. Here was a man who kept watch over a small town. Small towns were warm places, full of routine and predictability. Now the routine was in ruins and the predictability had been shot to hell. Sanity did not look likely to make a reappearance soon. The world was a mess and getting messier by the minute. No wonder Pete sounded as if he wanted to strangle somebody, preferably God.
“It’s Miriam Bailey,” he said, when Gregor had taken the phone from Reverend Mother General. “Dead as a doornail and—never mind, and. You can see for yourself. I’m coming to get you.”
“Shouldn’t you stay at the scene?” Gregor asked him.
“I’ve got half the local state police barracks at the scene, and they’re not going to do any more good than I would. I’ll be there in five minutes.”
“Five minutes,” Gregor repeated dutifully.
“I’ve got Josh Malley here and when I get the other one, I’m going to strangle her with my bare hands. Just for the aggravation.”
Pete Donovan slammed the phone in Gregor’s ear and Gregor handed the receiver back to Reverend Mother General.
“I’ve got to go,” he said.
[2]
Five minutes later, Gregor was standing on the stone steps outside the front door to the Motherhouse with Scholastica beside him, feeling the wind under the collar of his coat. Pete Donovan turned in at the gate with a squeal of tires, rolled up to the steps and popped the passenger door open with the motor still running. How he managed it, Gregor never knew.
“Get in,” he said.
Gregor said something reasonably polite to Sister Scholastica and got in. He slammed the passenger door after him and looked expectantly at Donovan. Donovan was in no mood to satisfy expectations. He gunned the motor, popped it into gear and slammed his foot on the gas pedal. Unfortunately, he slowed to make the turn that led to the gate. Otherwise, Gregor thought, his performance would have been perfect.
Gregor waited until they were out on the main streets of Maryville before he started talking. Then he went about it in as careful and uncontentious a manner as possible.
“So,” he said in a neutral voice, “where are we going?”
“Huntington Avenue,” Pete told him, running a red light at Delaney and Sands. “Miriam has a house up there. I should say the Baileys have a house. Miriam’s grandfather built it.”
“Miriam’s grandfather who founded the bank?”
“That may have been her great-grandfather,” Pete said. “I can never remember those things.”
“It comes down to the same thing,” Gregor said dismissively. “The family. Always the family. How did you find Miss Bailey dead?”
“We didn’t.” They were now at Delaney and Londonderry. A right turn would have taken them to Diamond Place and Clare Avenue and Beckner, an area of town which Gregor had never seen but of which he had heard in detail. They turned left instead, up another hill, but a more gentle one than the slope of Delaney Street itself.
“Josh Malley found Miriam,” Pete Donovan said, “or at least that’s what he’s telling us at the moment. He’s the one who called.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive. I took the call myself. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. He must have called me just before he called the fire department.”
“The fire department?”
“The house has had a nice little job of arson done on it,” Pete Donovan said. “Kerosene splashed all over the floor of the conservatory and lit. It caught the conservatory windows just as we got there, but it had been going a good long time before that.”
“Hmm,” Gregor said. “What about the body?”
“The body is the kicker,” Donovan told him. “The conservatory leads to a greenhouse kind of thing. It’s where Josh keeps that menagerie of his. The only way you can get to it is through the conservatory. The body is on a second-level ledge in the greenhouse.”
“Can’t you come at it from outside?”
“According to the fire department, no. The trees are too thick and too close. Also too old. By the time you hacked through them the house would have burned to the ground. If she was alive in there—” Donovan shrugged.
“You’re sure she’s not?” Gregor asked him.
“Positive. I can use a pair of binoculars as well as anyone else. You can see the body, Gregor, you just can’t touch it.”
“Hmm,” Gregor said again.
Pete turned the car off Londonderry Street and onto something called Farrow. Farrow wound around the base of a small hill and turned into something called Fox. From Fox, Gregor could finally see it: first a glow on the horizon, then the pulsing red of fire about to go out of control. The car spun off Fox onto Huntington and he was faced with what could only be the very best part of town. It was a street of graceful brick two-stories on graceful wide lawns, a uniformity broken only by the great stone pile with the fire engines and police cars parked in front of it: Miriam Bailey’s Huntington Avenue house. The neighbors on either side of it and across the street were out on their front steps, watching the action. Pete Donovan skidded by them with a shudder of disgust.
“You’d think people like this would know better,” he said. “My mother always told me it wasn’t good manners at all to chase fires.”
Gregor had known a president of the United States who liked to chase fires. “Maybe they’re chasing a murder,” he told Pete Donovan.
They turned into the Bailey house’s drive and went up as close as the knot of vehicles there would allow them.
“Come out to the back and see it while you still can,” Donovan said. “By now the kerosene fumes ought to be mostly cleared out. They were so strong when I got here, I almost vomited.”
“Really,” Gregor said.
Pete hopped out onto the drive and waited for Gregor to follow him. “We go this way around back. It gets you the closest you can be. God only knows what’s left of her now.”
The import of that statement became clear almost as soon as Gregor got out of the car. Because of the way the house was built, it was difficult to see anything of what was going on at the back. Gregor discovered later that the floor plan was a fat tee, with the short wide end at the front. It was possible, however, to feel what was going on. Now that it was full dark, the air was hard and cold. The stars above their heads looked like chips of mica against black velvet. The wind was cold, too, but it brought with it intimations of something else, short gusts of heat that came and went so quickly, they might have been fantasy. That they weren’t was attested to by the glow of red and the spirals of black smoke rising up from the back. Pete Donovan got Gregor by the wrist and pulled him along.
“Move,” Donovan said. “We really don’t have much time.”
Gregor moved as fast as he was able, and in no time at all he could see what Donovan was getting at, about everything. Donovan had been wrong about the kerosene. The smell of it was thick in the air. Gregor found himself thinking that she must have poured it on in buckets. God only knew where she’d gotten hold of all of it. Then there was the position of the conservatory, and the greenhouse. Donovan had brought Gregor around the building to the right. Farther to the right were broad lawns covered with untouched carpets of snow. To the left were trees, ancient and massive. Up from the middle of them rose the glass panes of the roof of what must have been a three-story greenhouse. Just behind those panes, just where the trees cleared, the house was in flames.
“You’ve got to climb the wall,” Donovan told him. “I mean, you’re supposed to climb the wall. It’s got a ladder built into it. Miriam’s father built it as an observation post for sky watching. He used to have the local Boy Scouts out here. You jus
t—”
But Gregor shook his head. There was indeed a ladder in the wall Pete Donovan was talking about. The wall itself created a division between the property’s front and back yards. Gregor and Donovan had had to walk through the gap between it and the house to get to where they were now. The wall was made of stone and the “ladder” was made of the lack of stones, here and there, in a hand-over-hand pattern that made Gregor seasick just to look at. It went up three stories and ended in a little square roofless turret.
“I don’t think so,” Gregor told Donovan. “I don’t think it’s my kind of thing. Is this as close as you’ve been able to get?”
“Hell, no,” Donovan said. “When we first got here I walked right up under her practically. I put on one of those asbestos suits they’ve got and went right through the fire until I was standing in the middle of all those animals. I broke a couple of windows and let the animals out.”
“Good idea.”
“I wanted to get her out,” Pete Donovan went on, “but the fireman said there wasn’t enough time. The conservatory was going up really fast and you can’t get to the greenhouse any other way. It’s like I told you. With those trees you’re stuck going in through the conservatory or not at all.”
“You said she was on a ledge?”
“Like a shelf,” Pete Donovan said. “The greenhouse has got these glass shelves, or clear shelves anyway—”
“Could they have been some kind of plastic?”
“I guess. Do you need that for something?”
“No.” Gregor sighed, “not exactly. Go back to telling me about this shelf. How far off the ground was it?”
“Ceiling of a room second story up,” Donovan said promptly. “I could reach it without a ladder, and there wasn’t a ladder.”
“In a greenhouse? In a greenhouse where they keep animals?”
“I thought that was fishy, too,” Donovan said. “The way I look at it is, we were never supposed to find her—Miriam, I mean—but she took the ladder away just in case. Ann-Harriet I’m talking about now.”
