True Believers

by Jane Haddam

  She wondered what Gregor would make of that.

  She got up and went to the television and started flipping through the channels with the remote. She hoped that Gregor really was involved in a murder again. It would be a relief, to fret about a murder that did not belong to her.

  Donna got down a tin of baklava and put that on the table, too.

  “Try CNN,” she said. “Even if they don’t have the news of the murder, they’ll have the latest about Hillary Clinton. Why does that woman make me so insane?”

  Bennis switched to CNN, and sat down to eat baklava by the fistful.

  2

  Father Robert Healy wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do next. He had been warned that, once the press conference had happened, he was unlikely to be left alone. Even if nobody knew that he was the chief suspect in these two killings, that he had bought the poison himself and laid it out in traps in the church basement, they would know that the deaths had happened here, and they would come to see. People had been telling him for years that he was out of touch. For the first time in his life, he had begun to agree with them. It hadn’t seemed possible to him that people would behave in the way the Cardinal Archbishop had warned him they would behave. Why would people—not policemen, but just people, not even Catholics—who had nothing to do with these deaths, who had never known any of the victims and did not know him, come to this church just to … look? Look at what? It was a beautiful church, of course, exquisite in its way. It had been built by people who had been trying very hard to measure up to the sort of display that had been committed across the street. They had done very well for their time and place. The ceilings in the main body of the church were high and arched in that way that made them seem to rise to the very majesty of heaven. The paintings and the statuary were not the usual Catholic kitsch, but brought from Europe and made by artists who had taken themselves and their work seriously. The pews were hand-carved and polished. Father Healy was proud of this church as his first real parish, proud of its people as well as its art, but he still couldn’t understand why a lot of gawkers would want to come from the other side of town, just to stare at it. He especially didn’t understand why they would want to come to stare at him, but they did.

  The first thing he had done was the first thing he had thought of to do. He had gone to the private chapel that the rectory shared with the convent and got down on his knees. This place was not as majestic as the church, but nobody knew about it but the priests and the nuns, and it was empty. He had gone to the kneeler in front of the Blessed Virgin and knelt there. Whenever he was in trouble, he went to the Blessed Virgin first. Some people said they could feel Jesus standing at their sides or hear the voice of God whispering in their ears, but for Robert Healy the only aspect of the immortal that had ever been present to him had been Mary. He took out the plain black wood rosary that he carried in his pocket and began to pray the Sorrowful Mysteries. He had no idea if it was the right day of the week. If you did a third part of the rosary—the five-decade short rosary, instead of the fifteen-decade long one—you were supposed to say the Glorious Mysteries on Sunday, Wednesday, and Saturday, the Joyful Mysteries on Monday and Thursday, and the Sorrowful Mysteries on Tuesday and Friday. He found he had no idea what day of the week it was, but that the Sorrowful Mysteries somehow felt right. The Scourging at the Pillar. The Crown of Thorns. Next to the sufferings of Christ, his own were less than trivial. Even if he were arrested and tried and wrongly convicted, even if he were executed in the bargain, his sufferings would be no closer to the Passion than a tapeworm is. to a kangaroo on the evolutionary scale. Even so, the thought of execution made him cold at the very pit of his stomach. The cold spread to his legs, and he thought that he had frozen here on his knees. He closed his eyes and stretched out on the floor with his arms flung out at his sides, in the form of a cross, the way they had been taught to do in seminary. He began to say the Hail Mary out loud. The words rose into the air around him like smoke. In a while, they began to cover him. The Agony in the Garden. The Scourging at the Pillar. The Crowning with Thorns. The Carrying of the Cross. The Crucifixion. Death and agony in the desert. The mountains shuddering. The earth cracking apart. The graves giving up their dead. There were people out there who knew nothing of this, who hadn’t even heard the story. He thought that if he could get them by the hands, he could show them the truth of it, unfolding out before them, a Passion play that never closed. Christ had died one dark afternoon in Jerusalem, but he was dying still. Christ had risen one Sunday morning, but he was rising still. The Church was a living body, with Christ as its head. If he remembered that, nothing else could touch him.

  Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee.

  He had reached the last bead on his rosary and begun the Salve Regina, in Latin, because that was how he had learned to pray it in Rome. He was at peace. The jangled agitation of the last few hours had left him. He lay for a few more moments in the position in which he had prayed, just to go on feeling the Blessed Virgin alive and watching over him, then he got up.

  There was still light coming in from the windows, but not very much of it, and it might have been from a lamp. He had no idea what time it was. He was due to say the vigil Mass at seven, but if he had been in any danger of missing that one of the Sisters would have come to get him. He left the chapel and went down the stairs to the first floor. Looking out the front door, he could see that there were still people milling about in front of the church, going in and out. Maybe, if he did nothing at all about them, and just celebrated Mass as usual, they would stay for the Mass and listen. God had done stranger things. He could manage to convert a few rubbernecking fools who had only come to church in the hopes of seeing someone keel over from arsenic poisoning.

  He walked around to the side of the building and looked up at the clock on St. Stephen’s spire. It was only five-thirty. He walked over to the side of his own church and slipped in the door there, near the shrine to Mary. The body of the church really was full of people, just like one of the nuns had told him it was. They were mostly subdued, as if, now that they’d gotten there, it had suddenly occurred to them that they shouldn’t treat the place like a circus tent. Most of them were not praying, though, and most of them were not sitting down. Instead, they were wandering around the aisles and looking at the paintings. They were going right up to the Communion rail and leaning over it to get a better view of the monstrance and the altar.

  He started to withdraw again, then realized that he was not alone in this part of the church. There was someone kneeling in front of the statue of the Blessed Virgin here. This must be the day for people to need Mary—but then, in his experience, every day was the day for people to need Mary. He started to leave, discreetly, so as not to distract this woman in her prayers, when the woman stood up and crossed herself, and he realized it was Mary McAllister.

  “Father,” she said.

  “I didn’t mean to bother you,” he said.

  “You didn’t bother me. I didn’t even know you were there.” They were both whispering. Mary looked out over the church. “It’s awful, isn’t it. The way they treat this place as if it were a movie theater. And you know what’s going to happen. After the scandal and all that. Have they been bothering you?”

  “Not so far, no. I was thinking that if some of them stayed for Mass, we might be able to convert them.”

  “I’ll bet half of them are fallen-away Catholics,” Mary said. “Except for Edith. Did you know she was here?”

  “Edith who?”

  “Edith Lawton.” Mary gestured into the church. “She lives down the block. You know who she is. She’s some kind of professional atheist or something and she writes for that strange little newsletter, all about how awful the Catholic Church is, except she always gets it wrong.”

  “Free Thinking,” Father Healy said, suddenly remembering.

  “That’s it. I don’t know if you read it, but it’s around here all the time. She comes and puts big stac
ks of it in the foyer every time it comes out.”

  “And we leave them there, for people to pick up?”

  “Sure, sometimes. Why not? We’ve got something called the Campus Freethought Alliance at St. Joe’s, and they’re always throwing their newsletter all over everything. People think it’s funny. Besides, it’s good for the Church.”

  “Good for the Church? Why?”

  “Well,” Mary McAllister said, “you know, secularism is so big today, and there are all the problems in the world, and the scandals in the Church, that people might think there’s something to it. But it doesn’t take more than two paragraphs to realize they don’t know what they’re talking about. They get everything wrong. Trust me. Read this stuff for yourself.”

  “Maybe I’ll pick up a copy the next time there’s one in the foyer,” Father Healy said. “Which one is she, Edith Lawton?”

  “The one in the turquoise sweater standing in the front pew on the left. Don’t you hate turquoise?”

  “I’ve never really thought of it.” Edith Lawton seemed to be a pleasant-looking woman on the cusp of middle age, or maybe just into it, but with good luck in genes. Father Healy shrugged. “She doesn’t look at all impressive.”

  “She isn’t impressive. And I can’t believe she came here today. Like some kind of vulture. Except, of course, Sister Harriet had to suck up to her—excuse me, Father.”

  “What do you mean, Sister Harriet had to suck up to her?”

  Mary McAllister winced. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard a priest use that term before. Anyway, I don’t really know. They were standing with their heads together in the foyer when I came in today. I’m not sure what they were talking about, except that it had something to do with the ‘legitimate aspirations of women.’ That’s the phrase they used.”

  “Which you accidentally overheard.”

  “Well, Father, I tried to overhear more, but I couldn’t do it without being obvious. And Sister Harriet doesn’t trust me as far as she can throw me. She says I’m a male-identified woman. Whatever that means.”

  “It means your aspirations are actually legitimate.”

  Mary McAllister laughed, loud enough so that some people turned their heads to look at her. Father Healy had a short feeling of panic, sure that he would be found out and inundated by people wanting to know what he thought had happened to Bernadette Kelly, but he must have been in a shadow. Nobody noticed he was there.

  “Anyway, Father,” Mary McAllister said, “I couldn’t just stand there, because Father Burdock was waiting with some things he needed doing for the Joint Charities fund drive. And Sister Harriet seems to have disappeared, so we’re both safe at the moment. Did you need something, or were you just coming in to look at the sightseers before you had to face them at Mass?”

  “I was looking for Sister Scholastica,” Father Healy said.

  “She’s gone off to do some errands. She’s not expected back until Mass. I think she’s even having dinner out Is it important for you to get in touch with her?”

  “No, not really. I just wanted a shoulder to lean on, so to speak.”

  “Because if it’s important, I think Sister Peter Rose knows how to get in touch with her. She’s got a cell phone.”

  “Nuns with cell phones,” Father Healy said. “Nuns in full habit with cell phones.”

  “Sister Scholastica says that she’s not really a nun. She’s a religious Sister, because nuns take solemn vows and the Sisters of Divine Grace only take simple vows. Do you get all that?”

  “Yes,” Father Healy said, “but it doesn’t matter. What about you? Are you all right? You were praying up a storm when I came in. Is there something wrong at school, or at home, that I could help you with?”

  “Not exactly. It’s just—did you ever feel that something was missing? I mean, that something was just not there, so that even though your life was just perfect, it just wasn’t enough?”

  Father Healy blinked. “Well, yes,” he said. “Of course I did.”

  “You did?”

  “Do you get this feeling a lot, or did it just sort of show up this morning and hit you on the head?”

  “I don’t know. It’s been going on for a couple of months, I guess. Maybe from the beginning of the year. And I’m getting to be impossible to live with, really. I’m not satisfied with school. I’m not satisfied with the homeless shelter. I’m not satisfied with my boyfriend, and that’s really unfair, because he really does try and he’s good to me. And half the time I’d rather stay home, except when I do I’m all dissatisfied with that, too. Even my mother says I’m irritable all the time, and all I do is talk to her on the phone.”

  “Ah,” Father Healy said. “Well.”

  “I’d better let you go, or they’ll figure out you’re here and just inundate you. Sister Scholastica told Sister Peter Rose that they might have to protect you from being harassed while you’re celebrating Mass. It bothers me that people are so awful all the time.”

  “It bothers me, too,” Father Healy said. “Do you know which way Sister Harriet went?”

  “So that you can go in the other direction?” Mary McAllister laughed. “I think she went over to her office. At least that’s the way she was headed. Maybe you’d better go over to the convent and talk to Sister Peter Rose. Sister Harriet never wants to go over there.”

  “True,” Father Healy said.

  “See you later,” Mary McAllister said.

  Father Healy looked out over the church again, and found his eyes fixed on Edith Lawton. He hadn’t known that copies of Free Thinking were being given out in his own church foyer, but he had seen the magazine, or newspaper. It was hard to know what to call it, since it was in the shape of a large newspaper like the New York Times, but on better paper than newsprint. And Mary McAllister was right. It got everything wrong. It got everything so wrong, it was hard not to think that the editors felt it was too much of an effort to look things up in the dictionary.

  He looked at Edith Lawton again—not impressive, not at all. She lacked even the casual sophistication of the Philadelphia suburbs, and her face was as round as a chipmunk’s—and then he turned away and went back out of the church. He considered it a grace that no one had noticed him, and gave thanks for it. He would consider it an even greater grace if he managed to get back to his own bedroom without running into anybody he would rather not see. If things were like this when all anybody knew was that Bernadette Kelly had died of arsenic poisoning and Scott Boardman had died of arsenic poisoning, too, what would it be like when the details of this case became too clear for anybody to misunderstand?

  He looked at Edith Lawton again and decided he was treating her like a rare animal in a zoo: the village atheist, in captivity. He went out the side door he had come in and felt better for being in the cold air. He thought of himself laying down the rat poison in the boiler room in the church basement and felt a little sick to his stomach.

  It was odd how the smallest thing you did, the most innocent thing, could look so damning when it was cast in the wrong kind of light.

  3

  There was a clock in the window of the newsstand across the street from the small restaurant where Sister Scholastica had had an early dinner, and it startled her, when she saw it, that it was only six o‘clock. Like most nuns in traditional orders, she was used to having dinner early, just as she was used to having breakfast early. When you woke up at four and went to bed at nine, you did almost everything early. The one great exception, for the Sisters of Divine Grace, was lunch. Lunch had to be provided at the times most convenient for the students at St. Anselm’s school. Because of that, Scholastica sometimes found herself dizzy with hunger at eleven o’clock, because it had been so long since she’d eaten and because she had never been able to choke down more than a piece of toast when she first woke up. Of course, they prayed the Office and went to Mass before they actually sat down to breakfast, but that didn’t seem to matter. Scholastica’s internal clock did not adjust. Ear
ly morning was early morning. She didn’t want to eat in the early morning.

  The friends who had taken Scholastica to dinner were really only one friend and a husband—a woman who had been in Scholastica’s high-school graduating class, and who had suddenly decided, five years ago, that it was time to have children. Scholastica had done the math a couple of times—Genevra would have been forty when the first baby came along, and forty-three when she had the second one—but the age question didn’t bother her as much as the way Genevra responded to having children in her life. Maybe there was some truth to the things some people said about women waiting too long to have children. Genevra was wound tight as a drum, so hyperactive that the smallest noise seemed to make her jump out of her skin. She was never satisfied with the children, who were, in their turn, unruly and sullen. Scholastica had spent the whole meal not saying the things she wanted to say. Even the parents of her own students didn’t want to hear her ideas on child rearing, on the rather strange assumption that a woman who spent all day with people under the age of twelve couldn’t possibly know what they were like because she’d never given birth to one from her own personal womb. They had gone to an Arabic restaurant, and the children had refused to eat anything that could be had from the menu. They wanted Mc-Donald’s. If they couldn’t have that, they wanted to tell everyone in the room how gross the food here was, and how if they even touched it with their little fingers, it would make them puke. The little one had perfected a high-pitched whine that could have cut through glass. By the time they had reached the small cups of mud-thick coffee, Scholastica was wishing she had begged off this evening even if it meant appearing to be rude.

  Out on the sidewalk, the children tugged at Genevra’s arms. The older one, the boy, sat down on the sidewalk and would not let himself be pulled up.

  “I’m sure everything will be all right,” Genevra’s husband Tom was saying. “It’s not like the scandals. It doesn’t have anything to do with the Church. It isn’t the fault of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia that some kid murdered his wife and walked into a parish church to commit suicide.”