True Believers

by Jane Haddam

“Marvelous. Lida doesn’t even trust us to know how to heat something up in the microwave.”

  “She’s right. You want to come?”

  “No,” Gregor said. “Don’t worry about it. I want to stay here and think. You go eat baklava at eight o’clock in the morning, and I’ll be back later.”

  “If Tibor finds you in here, he’s going to declare it a miracle,” Bennis said. Then she shimmied down to the end of the pew and onto the carpet runner that muffled the sounds of her clogs on the floor of the center aisle.

  Gregor did just what he’d said he was going to do. He sat where he was and tried to think. He didn’t really believe that there was something peculiarly evil about the effects of religion. People were people, and human nature was human nature. Most of the religious people he knew were perfectly sane, and Bennis was right. There were fanatics of all kinds out there. Lots of them didn’t even believe in God.

  He closed his eyes and imagined the scene in Scholastica’s office the night before, with Sister Harriet Garrity just being taken down from the chair behind Scholastica’s desk, and the little half-hardened mound of vomit next to her on the floor. There was no sign anywhere of anything she might have eaten or drunk, no plate, no cup, no glass. Gregor was still convinced that she had died in that room. If she had, then she almost surely must have ingested the arsenic in that room. The only other possibility was that she’d taken it in one of the other offices on that same floor and been able to walk the few steps to Scholastica’s office before the poison really hit. But that didn’t make a lot of sense, either. The door was locked. Somebody must have come in with her, or watched her die and come in after her, and that would have to be the person who killed her. Gregor couldn’t think of a reason why anybody else would want to lock that office door.

  He got up and slid down to the end of the pew nearest the center aisle. The church was dark. The windows were stained glass in deep reds and purples, letting very little light in even on the brightest days. The only lights that were glowing were the small ones on the sidewalls that always reminded him of Christmas bulbs. What did Sister Harriet Garrity have in common with Scott Boardman? What would Bernadette Kelly have in common with Scott Boardman? Gregor could think of a million things that Sister Harriet and Bernadette Kelly had in common with each other. The key would have to be in the other connection.

  He was already out of the church and on the sidewalk when it suddenly struck him: why the name Edith Lawton was so familiar and where he had seen it before.

  There was an Edith Lawton on the list of subjects for questioning that the homicide detectives had drawn up the night before, before they allowed anybody in the church to go home.

  THREE

  1

  Edith Lawton knew she was in trouble, but through the long night since the riot and the discovery of Harriet Garrity’s body, she hadn’t been able to think straight. She hadn’t been able to sleep, either, which was worse. There were people who could get along on almost no sleep, but Edith wasn’t one of them. If she got less than eight full hours, she felt fuzzy all day. If she got less than five, she was walking into walls. This morning, she was sure she had had less than three, but all she could really remember was lying alone in her bed with the lights off, listening to Will moving around in the living room. In the old days, she would have told him what was wrong and asked him to straighten it out for her—or, really, to rearrange the facts so that they would begin to make sense. Now, of course, she couldn’t say a thing. She didn’t even want him to know that she had been questioned by the police, or that she would be questioned again. She had no idea how long she would be able to keep that from him. The police would probably come here, one of these days. Either that, or they would find Will where he worked, and ask him about her then. He would tell them all about Ian. Then the police would talk to Ian. Eventually, the news would hit the papers or the television stations or both. If she became a serious suspect, her face would be everywhere. Then what would she do? There was a cold place at the pit of her stomach that said this was not the kind of publicity she could afford, if she expected to make something of her life someday—and then she felt ludicrous, because by the time you were fifty you should already have made something of your life. Still, she could see it, everything that could go wrong from here on out. Once you got a reputation, you could never get rid of it. And if it all came out—Ian, for instance, and all her attempts to get published in places that didn’t want her, and the fact that Will was going to file for divorce—

  It was cold in her bedroom. The pipes needed to be bled. The boiler was acting up. Something. She kept thinking that these murders were like winning the lottery. She didn’t expect to be arrested, but she might be exposed, and that would be … shameful. The sort of thing that happened to trailer trash. The sort of thing that didn’t happen to people who were real writers who got their pictures in Vanity Fair. She had written a beautiful essay once on the stupidity of the lottery, but the fact was that she was afraid to win it. She didn’t want to be one of those people with their pictures in the Inquirer and the Star, holding oversize checks, never to be taken seriously again. There had to be a reason why so many of the people who won the lottery were convenience-store clerks when they won it, and never did much else with themselves ever afterward.

  Now it was much later, nearly noon, and Edith didn’t know what to do with herself. The Inquirer had turned down her op-ed. She had sent a copy to the Star and hadn’t heard back yet. She didn’t want to work. She was too tired, and too jittery, to make any sense. She kept going from the papers to the television to the front windows to the papers again, and coming up blank. Earlier in the morning, there had been cleanup crews on the street, hosing down the last of the mess from the riot. Now there was nobody. The only sign that there had been trouble was the fact that one of the windows on one of the town houses nearest St. Stephen’s Church was broken, but it could have been broken by anything. Every once in a while, she pressed her face to the window glass and tried to see farther up or down the street, but she never got anything but the fog of her breath on the pane.

  If she hadn’t been known to be an atheist, she wouldn’t be in this much trouble. She knew that was true. The police were all believers. That Gregor Demarkian—who was a friend of Bennis Hannaford’s—had a best friend who was a priest. It would be so convenient for all of them if they could just pin these murders on her. It was too bad for them that she had never bought any arsenic and never been known to talk to any of the victims, except this last one, who was on the street all the time. If she managed to escape the worst sort of publicity, she could see how to make something of this. It would make a good essay for Free Thinking, or for her site on the web: the prejudice visited on unbelievers; the mortal peril of the freethinker in a believer’s society. It might even get some wider play in the freethought press. She had never had the chance to be a martyr before. It gave her an odd sense of exhilaration.

  The exhilaration was followed by another wave of nervousness. She couldn’t stay in the house anymore, by herself, talking to no one. She was going to go crazy. What did it mean that she couldn’t think of a single person to call? She got her coat off the newel at the bottom of the stairs, picked up the little change purse with her keys attached that fit into her pocket, and stepped outside. She should have brought a hat and gloves.

  There was a little corner store at the end of the block opposite the one with the churches on it. Edith went there first and looked through the papers, even though she subscribed to all the ones in town. She finally bought a York Peppermint Patty and went back out onto the street. Going back up the block, she passed Roy Phipps’s town house “church” and saw that it looked the way it always had. Nothing was broken, and there was no indication that half the church’s members had spent the night in jail. That was material for a column, too—what the Phipps people had done during the riot, how violent they were, how dangerous—but Edith had the depressing feeling that she had said it all before. She
wandered past her own house and to the walk in front of St. Anselm’s. She looked across at St. Stephen’s and thought she had done that before, too. She’d written an essay on how enlightened and forwardlooking churches like St. Stephen’s were, and then she’d been taken aback when Dan Burdock had let her know that he thought that Jesus had really risen from the dead.

  She went up the steps into St. Anselm’s and looked around. There was a noon Mass coming up, and there was a fair-sized group of people at the front near the altar, saying the rosary together. Edith went back out and around the side. The courtyard was deserted, but a big van was pulling into the parking lot. As she watched, it settled into a space, shuddered a few times, and stopped running. The driver’s side door opened and a very young woman with long red hair hopped out. Edith walked in that direction. The van belonged to some kind of homeless shelter. The young woman was somebody she had seen around.

  “What are you doing here?” the young woman said, suddenly, when Edith wasn’t expecting it.

  Edith froze. She hadn’t realized she’d gotten so close to the van, or that the young woman had noticed her. “I’m not doing anything,” she said. “I’m just—walking around.”

  “This area is supposed to be sealed off,” the young woman said. “Nobody is supposed to be here unless they have business here. The police lines are still up at Sister’s office.”

  Edith wrapped her arms around her body. “There wasn’t anything sealing it off. I was in the church, and then I came out and walked around. There weren’t any barriers up. Nobody stopped me.”

  “What were you in the church for this time? If we don’t watch out, there’ll be a million gawkers here all day. We won’t be able to get anything done.”

  Edith shook her head. “Do you work here? You don’t look like you work here. You don’t look like a nun.”

  “Nuns aren’t the only people who work here.”

  “You’re wearing jeans,” Edith said. “Does the Church let you wear jeans when you work for it?”

  “Her,” the young woman said automatically. “The proper pronoun for the Church is ‘Her.’”

  “I don’t think so,” Edith said. “It’s not a her. It’s an it.”

  “Are you always so delicately attuned to the sensibilities of people from cultures other than your own?” The young woman slid the van’s side door shut and went around the back to open up there. “I’ve got to get these boxes into the basement. I’m running late by two hours.”

  Edith went around the back of the van and looked inside. The backseats had all been shut down and the empty space was full of cartons that seemed to be full of cans and other food, pasta, cookies, peanut butter. The young woman propped the van’s back door open with her shoulder and took one of the boxes out.

  “I’m Edith Lawton,” Edith said.

  “I know who you are,” the young woman said. “If you’re going to hang around, will you help me out with this? Go open the door to the basement.”

  Edith looked dubiously at the door to the basement. “Won’t it be locked?’

  “The keys are on my belt. All you have to do is unhook them.”

  The keys were on one of those snap-spring key rings. The young woman jutted out her hip, and Edith got them off.

  “You could tell me your name,” she said. “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble.”

  “My name is Mary McAllister,” the young woman said, “and you already know it. Or you should. You’ve asked three times before.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Get the door.”

  Edith got the door. Mary McAllister went inside. Edith pushed against the door until the spring caught and held it open. Mary McAllister had disappeared down a hallway. Edith went in the only direction she could go, and found herself in a large open room with an industrial-grade carpet on the floor. The room was decorated with children’s crafts, crosses and lambs cut out of construction paper. They gave Edith the creeps.

  “The thing is,” Edith said, “I wouldn’t have done it. Killed her, I mean. I wouldn’t have killed that nun because she was, you know, she was one of the good ones.”

  “One of the good ones.” Mary straightened up. She had been bent over a table, sorting the food in the box into different piles. “What do you mean by one of the good ones?”

  “Oh, you know,” Edith said. “One of the ones who think. Who live in the real world. Not like the ones in the habits who think they’re still in the sixteenth century.”

  “Right,” Mary said. “I’ve got to get another box. Carry boxes if you want to hang around and talk.”

  Edith didn’t know if she wanted to hang around and talk. She only knew she didn’t want to go home. She followed Mary out into the parking lot and took the box she was handed. It was heavy.

  “What’s this for?” she asked. “Is the church having a picnic?”

  “It’s from the food bank,” Mary said. “We do the food bank down at the homeless shelter mostly. There isn’t much need for it in this neighborhood. But there’s some, and there are always people who would rather come here than get their stuff somewhere there’s likely to be a drive-by shooting, so once a month we do a distribution from the church. Watch out for that box. It’s got jars in it.”

  It felt like it had rocks in it. Edith wondered how old Mary was. Eighteen? Nineteen? She was stronger than Edith had ever been. The box she was carrying was bigger, and she was balancing it on her shoulder. Edith followed her across the parking lot and down the steps into the basement again. Mary put her box down next to the table. Edith put her box down next to Mary’s box.

  “We used to make up bags for people to take,” Mary said. “Then I realized, that was stupid. They’re like everybody else. They like some things. They don’t like other things. Now we put the stuff out and give everybody a bag to fill and they can put whatever they want in it that will fit. I wish we could make it two bags for everybody. We never have enough food.”

  “The Church should sell some of its art and give the money to the poor,” Edith said virtuously. “That’s what they’d do if they really believed all that crap they put out.”

  “Is that so?”

  “The Church is full of hypocrites,” Edith said. “You must know that. You can’t miss knowing that. You’re not stupid.”

  “Everything is full of hypocrites.”

  “The history of the Catholic Church is nothing but tyranny and oppression. It’s been the enemy of humankind from the word go. It stifles science. It promotes superstition. Every place it’s in power, it holds back civilization until its power is destroyed. Think about it. The last time the Church had control of society, it was called the Dark Ages.”

  “No it wasn’t.”

  “What?”

  “The Church didn’t have control of society in the Dark Ages,” Mary said patiently, looking up from a pile of pasta packets. “The Dark Ages are the period between the fall of Rome and the rise of Charlemagne. They were dark because nobody had control of everything. All of Western Europe was overrun by warrior tribes. Nobody could keep a government or a city or a society going for very long before another invasion happened, so nobody could keep agriculture going or run schools. It would be like trying to do those things in Kosovo or Bosnia now. The Church wasn’t in charge of society during the Dark Ages. You’re thinking of the Middle Ages.”

  “The Dark Ages and the Middle Ages are the same thing.”

  Mary moved down the table to the jars of peanut butter. “Look,” she said, “you need to get hold of a halfway decent history of Europe. The Dark Ages and the Middle Ages are not the same thing. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You never know what you’re talking about. Doesn’t it bother you to get things wrong all the time?’

  “I don’t get things wrong all the time,” Edith said. “You’ve just been fed a biased view of history. The Church doesn’t want you to know the truth, and so it tells you a lot of lies.”

  “The definitive history of the period is Ca
ntor’s Civilization of the Middle Ages. Cantor teaches at Columbia, and he’s not a Catholic. Go look it up.”

  “You’ve never been taught to think,” Edith said. “That’s your problem. The Church doesn’t want you to think, so it teaches you with rote and drills and then you can’t make up your mind for yourself. You’ve been brainwashed.”

  “I at least know that the Middle Ages and the Dark Ages are not the same thing,” Mary said. “Now, if you don’t mind. I have to unload these boxes, and then I have to go back for another set. I’ve spent all morning at the hospital with a friend who is not in good shape and I have to get across town and to class before three. I’m in no mood to put up with your nonsense. Come back and talk to me when you’re able to say a complete declarative sentence without getting six facts wrong.”

  “It’s not my facts that are wrong,” Edith said, hearing the high thin rise in her voice that was the start of something like hysteria. “I’m not the one who’s mired in fear and superstition. I don’t go to bed every night begging some fantasy who doesn’t exist not to send me to hell.”

  “Good,” Mary said. “Neither do I. I’ve got to hurry.’

  Edith stepped back. Mary strode out of the room into the hall. Edith followed her. The closer she got to the open basement door, the colder it was. She stepped outside and looked around. Mary was at the van, hoisting another large box onto her shoulder.

  “It’s not me who’s mired in fear and superstition,” Edith said again, but her voice came back to her on the wind. There was nobody else who could hear it. She was shaking, but that might be the cold. Her head hurt. There were a million things she wanted to do right then, but none of them were looking up the Dark Ages in a book by somebody named Cantor. Mostly, she just wanted to scream.

  What she did instead was to walk away from the basement door and from the parking lot, to the side path that went around to the front of the church. By then, her muscles were twitching uncontrollably. If she hadn’t been keeping strict hold on herself, she would have looked like a Parkinson’s patient. She went around to the front of the church and headed up the street to her own house and her own living room and her own coffee. When she got there, she thought better of it and kept going.