True Believers

by Jane Haddam

  Support Advisory was more problematic, but since there were so many people in it who had been on the innocent victim side of The Scandal, the Cardinal Archbishop wasn’t likely to use it against her. Catholics for a Free Choice, on the other hand, could get her bounced—not only out of St. Anselm’s Church and the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, but out of her order, and maybe out of the Church as well. Harriet wasn’t really entirely clear about the sort of thing that made it possible for the Church to pronounce a formal anathema.

  At the moment, she wasn’t clear about much of anything, so she got up from her chair and went out into the hall. Her office was in a long single-story annex that connected the church and the rectory, along with the offices of all the other people who held administrative posts of any kind in the parish. Sister Scholastica had an office in the parochial-school building, but she also had one here, because she was not only the school principal but the parish’s delegate to the Archdiocesan Office of Education. Sister Thomasetta had her office here, too. She was the new comptroller, brought in by Father Healy only a year ago, to replace the nun of Sister Harriet’s own order who had held that position for fifteen years. Sister Thomasetta, needless to say, was a Sister of Divine Grace and wore a habit. All the other people who worked in the offices were laywomen, of the type Harriet thought of as Daily Communicants, and most of them did go to Mass every day at seven o’clock before they checked in for work. Harriet had only begun to realize how much change Father Healy had brought with him. Her own office was now the only one that did not have a picture of the Madonna on the wall, or a holy water font just inside the door. In the old days, Harriet couldn’t remember a single time when the women in these offices had prayed the rosary together, or spent their lunch hours studying Catholic doctrine. Now it happened every noon, and there were copies of The Catechism of the Catholic Church on every desk top. Copies of The New American Bible had disappeared. Copies of The Ignatius Bible, which boasted that it was the only translation in English that had not given way to inclusive language at all, were everywhere. It was as if a sea change had happened in this parish while Harriet wasn’t looking. The waters that surrounded her were cold as ice, and the air was darker than any ordinary darkness could be. She had said a lot of things about the way the Church was marching back into the Dark Ages, but she had never really believed them. In the back of her mind, she had always been sure that progress was inevitable. Now it frightened her to realize that she might have been wrong. It might really be possible for the Church to go back, and it was going back, returning to a time when it would have ground a woman like her into powder. In a world of devotional rosaries and First Friday Devotions and weekly confessions in a dark curtained box, she would be invisible.

  She stopped in front of Sister Scholastica’s office door and saw through the window that the office was empty. She went down the hall to Sister Thomasetta’s and found the door open and Thomasetta pecking away at a computer keyboard. Harriet didn’t think anything looked as odd as nuns in full habit pecking away at computers.

  “Can I help you?” Thomasetta asked, not bothering to look up.

  “I was hoping Scholastica was over here, that’s all,” Harriet said. “I was hoping not to have to go all the way over to the school.”

  “Well, you don’t have to. Sister isn’t there, either. She’s been out all morning.”

  “Out? Where?”

  “The chancery.”

  “Why would she go to the chancery?”

  Thomasetta shrugged. “How am I supposed to know? The Cardinal Archbishop calls, and Sister goes. Oh, and I think she was stopping to see friends afterward. At any rate, she took Peter Rose to the chancery with her and Peter Rose is back, but Scholastica isn’t, and she isn’t likely to be until after lunch. Would you like me to leave a message?”

  “No,” Harriet said. “No, that’s all right. It’s about the First Communion breakfast. I can get to her later, or Father Healy would know. What time is it exactly?”

  “Ten-thirty-two-oh-six.”

  “Thank you.” It figured, somehow, that Thomasetta would know the time down to the fraction of the second. Harriet left Thomasetta’s office door and went down the hall again. She passed Scholastica’s office and tried the door. It opened easily. Like many traditionalist nuns, Scholastica almost never locked any personal space, because she didn’t think of herself as having personal space. Harriet went down the hall to her own office and sat.

  The difficulty was this: Harriet had no idea why Scholastica had gone to the chancery, but she was sure it had to be about something important, because the Cardinal Archbishop did not waste time on trivialities. She was equally sure that it was going to be something important that concerned her, because at the moment she was the biggest problem the Cardinal Archbishop had. She had to be, because Father Healy was making waves, and the Cardinal Archbishop knew she wouldn’t take being bullied lying down. She might even be in a fairly strong position, if only because this Cardinal Archbishop hated publicity more than he hated any other thing. That was entirely natural, considering the damage the child sex abuse scandal had done to this archdiocese when it had finally broken in the papers and been spotlighted on CNN. And 60 Minutes. And The CBS Evening News. Even so, if she didn’t know what was coming, she might easily make mistakes. This man was not the fool the old cardinal had been. He was more like Cardinal Richelieu.

  Harriet got up and went back into the hall. It was empty. Everybody working on this floor was in her office, minding her own business. Harriet walked down the hall to Sister Scholastica’s office. Nobody looked up to see her pass. She went into Sister Scholastica’s office and shut the door. The door’s window had a curtain that could be pulled across it for privacy, just as the window in her own office door had. Harriet pulled it closed. The door itself had a turn lock. It wouldn’t keep a burglar out, but it would stop the casual visitor or the wandering nun looking for something she thought she might have left on Scholastica’s desk. Harriet locked up and went to sit down in Scholastica’s chair. Scholastica wasn’t due back until after lunch. Lunch at the convent was an hour and a half away. Harriet had plenty of time.

  It might have been easier if she had known what she was looking for, but she didn’t. She found Scholastica’s discipline in its little cotton bag and took it out, a set of knotted cords that a nun used to strike herself on the back while she was praying the Miserere. It was supposed to be done lightly, over clothes, but Harriet had known sisters who used it on their bare backs until they bled. Her own order had given up the practice when they had given up the habit. She found Scholastica’s Little Office and was surprised at how annoyed she felt that it was so obviously used. Nobody had to pray the Little Office anymore. They prayed the Divine Office together. That should have been enough conformity for anybody. The top of the desk was full of things that nuns were once enjoined from having: pictures of friends and family, a small giftwrapped box of chocolates from which only one piece had been taken, Scholastica’s old varsity cheerleading letter.

  Harriet was just tapping into the computer files—so very easy, because all the Sisters of Divine Grace used either Ave Maria or Benedicamus Domine as their passwords—when somebody came to the door and tried the knob. Harriet stopped still, and everything inside her stopped as well. She was so rigid, she might have been an extension of the steel on the chair. When the door wouldn’t open, whoever was there knocked, twice, very loudly.

  “Scholastica?” Harriet didn’t recognize the voice.

  “Is it locked?” someone else said—Thomasetta, Harriet was sure. “How very odd. Sister never locks up.”

  “Maybe she did it absentmindedly,” the first person said, and now Harriet did recognize the voice. It was Mary McAllister. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll come back later. I just wanted to ask her something about that pray-in—”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about the pray-in,” Thomasetta said, her voice fading slightly. She and Mary must be walking away. “I’ve had it on
good authority that there isn’t going to be a pray-in this year, and like everybody else around here I’m very relieved. I mean, really, with that idiot right down the road—”

  Harriet sat up straight, and stretched, and forced air into her lungs. It was all right. She had not been caught. She would still be able to get out of here without being found out if she would only hurry.

  The problem was, now that she was in the files, she did not want to hurry. She had always been outside the gossip loop in this parish. People didn’t tell her the things they automatically told each other. They saw her as an outsider and a threat. So far, the things she had seen were not very important, or very interesting, but she was sure there had to be something, somewhere, that would allow her to—

  What?

  She grabbed the desk clock and turned it so that it faced away from her, so that it would not panic her.

  She didn’t think she had felt this free, or this exhilarated, since the day she entered the convent.

  FOUR

  1

  For most of the time that Gregor Demarkian was with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he thought of murderers at one remove, as if they were objects in a window, on display for purposes of evaluation. It was only near the end, when he was head of the Behavioral Sciences Unit, that his attitude had begun to change, and then the change had been gradual. The truth was, homicidal maniacs were not very interesting. He could never understand why millions of people paid good money to read novel after novel about some detective chasing after a serial killer, when most serial killers made as much sense, and had as much relation to the human spirit, as rice pudding. The exceptions were very rare, and never, in his experience, as fascinating as Thomas Harris’s Hannibal. The ordinary run of murderer wasn’t much better, though. He got too drunk or too stoned to think straight, and then he let loose at the first thing that annoyed him and killed it. If that happened to be his girlfriend, or his best buddy, or his girlfriend’s baby, he landed in jail. If that happened to be the store clerk and two of the customers in a convenience store he was trying to rob, he ended up strapped to a gurney while the prison doctor administered a lethal injection. Maybe that was why his opposition to the death penalty had grown, day by day and year by year. There wasn’t enough ceremony to it anymore. It had become a kind of prophylactic, almost a medical procedure. The murderer was a bunion. The doctor was suited up in hospital green to take the bunion off.

  Of course, most people, making the analogy, would have said that the murderer was a cancer, but Gregor couldn’t see it. Most murderers were either so hapless and so stupid it was embarrassing to listen to them, or so mentally ill they didn’t know what was going on in front of their noses. The idea of Jeffrey Dahmer in jail made Gregor’s head ache. The man had talked to furniture. Ted Kaczynski had talked to trees. Literally. Had the country gone completely insane?

  Maybe what it really was was the death of hope. There had been a time when most Americans truly believed that the criminal could be rehabilitated. They wanted punishment. They wanted revenge. They also expected regeneration. Now they only wanted closure. The murderer had ceased to be a human being in any substantive way. He was simply evil, through and through, without so much as a pocket of untainted air, like a solid chocolate Easter bunny. Was he really comparing murderers to chocolate Easter bunnies? It was cold out here. The wind was stiff and constant. He should have taken a cab. Instead, he had decided to walk, to give himself time to think, and now he was thinking things like this.

  The problem, really, was that Bennis’s sister Anne Marie was one of the rare exceptions. She was not an undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic hearing voices and cutting throats in the back alleys of a small American city. She was not a terminally stupid drifter with even less education than brains and no discernible self-control. She was a deliberate killer, the kind who thought and planned, the kind who knew what she was doing and thought she had been right in doing it. It had been eight years since Gregor laid eyes on her, but he was sure she hadn’t changed her mind about that. He could still see her sitting at the defense table during the first appeal, her hands folded in front of her, her face set in stone and as much like a gargoyle’s as anything on the facade of the Rheims cathedral. She believed she had been right to do what she did. She believed she had only been caught because of accidents and coincidences. She believed, most of all, in herself, and she would go on believing in herself, right down to the moment when she was strapped onto the gurney with an IV feed in her arm. If Gregor had believed that personality was genetic, he would have been afraid for himself, and for Bennis—but then, maybe Bennis had received a different set of genes, from her mother instead of from her father, and that was all that was needed to take care of that difficulty.

  It was worse than cold out here. It was freezing. There were thin, slick films of ice on the rounded edges of the sidewalks. Gregor checked his watch and saw that it was almost eleven. He was sure that had to be enough time for Henry to have done what he’d asked him to do. If it wasn’t, maybe he could wait in Henry’s living room while the details were ironed out. He was only a couple of blocks away. He had been circling this neighborhood for half an hour, trying to give Henry enough time. Under the circumstances, he didn’t want to seem as if he were pushing. Still. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his coat, then took them out again to raise the collar of his coat higher on his neck. He was always telling Tibor and old George Tekemanian to wear their hats, and he had no idea what had happened to his. He turned right at the next corner and then right again. He started left along Baldwin Place with his hands back in his pockets. All the houses on this street were made of dead brown stone and jammed right up next to each other. They looked like hundreds of other houses across the city of Philadelphia, and they were probably equally expensive. After decades of losing out to the expensive suburbs of the Philadelphia Main Line, the city was becoming fashionable again—at least with singles and couples without children. The living-room windows had heavy curtains hanging at the sides of them. All the curtains were drawn back, their owners preferring to sacrifice privacy for a chance at sunlight. Gregor suddenly realized why it was the neighborhood depressed him. Nobody had decorated anything here. The houses were blank and unadorned, almost regimented, so that they looked as if they had put on uniforms. He made a mental note not to complain so much about the way Donna Moradanyan Donahue decked out the fronts of the houses on Cavanaugh Street. At least it gave the street a bit of color.

  He got to Henry Lord’s house and looked up at the black front door. The door was shiny as well as black, meaning it must have been painted recently. Gregor had no idea why this should matter. He seemed to be nervous about seeing Henry, although he had known the man for so long now that he might have known him forever. Thirty years, Gregor thought, as he pressed the doorbell and got a detailed mental picture of Henry at the University of Pennsylvania in his sophomore year. Gregor had been a senior. They hadn’t liked each other much.

  The door opened, and Henry, much balder and paunchier and redder-faced than he had been, came out. Gregor reminded himself that he had liked Henry very much once Henry had gotten out of school and joined the Bureau. That was a good thing, because he needed Henry now if he was ever going to be able to help Bennis out. It was interesting to remember, though, how much those things had mattered when both he and Henry had been young: being from the Main Line or not; attending the Assemblies or not; belonging to the country clubs or not. Henry stepped back, and Gregor wiped his shoes on the mat and stepped inside.