True Believers

by Jane Haddam

  “Mrs. Lawton,” Sister Scholastica said.

  “Hello, Sister.”

  “What are you doing this morning? You look ready to go skiing.”

  Edith Lawton stopped, and hesitated, and looked at the church. “I was going to go to Mass. That’s all right, isn’t it, even if I’m not Catholic.”

  “It’s more than all right. We encourage it.”

  “Even if I’ve never been a Catholic?”

  “Even if you’ve never been a Catholic. I thought you didn’t believe in God.”

  “I don’t. God is just a fairy tale, like Santa Claus. People only believe in him because they’re afraid of dying. Do you mean I can’t go to Mass if I don’t believe in God?”

  “No,” Scholastica said wryly. “We especially encourage you to go to Mass if you don’t believe in God.”

  “Religion is a terrible thing,” Edith Lawton said piously. “Look at all the harm it causes. Look at what happened to those poor boys and right here in this very church. Don’t you think it’s a shame, that those boys were hurt and then the faithful gave their donations just so that they could be used to pay the lawyers? The Church has a lot to apologize for.” Then she turned her back and hurried down the walk into the church.

  Scholastica watched her go with some amusement. Then she folded her hands under her scapular—to get them warm; in the old days they walked with their hands like this all the time, to keep them out of sight—and crossed the street to St. Stephen’s.

  There was going to be a big prayer service over there for the victims of the riot, and she had volunteered the Sisters to help out with the details.

  She wondered if Edith Lawton would have a vision at the Consecration and want to become a nun. She could just see the program on EWTN, with Edith in a postulant’s habit, telling the story of her conversion.

  The road was empty of traffic, so she crossed the street. If she went on like this much longer, she was going to give herself a serious case of the giggles, at a time when she had no right to laugh at all.

  2

  Bennis Hannaford had never been one of those people who could tell herself that God arranged all things for the best. If she lost her bank card, she didn’t think it was because God was protecting her from a trip to the theater, since a trip would have ended in an accident. If she couldn’t sleep one night, she didn’t think God was trying to make her so exhausted that she wouldn’t have the energy to worry when something came along to worry about. Part of that was the simple fact that Bennis had a hard time believing in God, but more of it had to do with the fact that she was a pessimist. Bennis Hannaford did not think things worked out for the best. In fact, if she believed in any occult power at all, it was the one that was working overtime to make sure things worked out for the worst. That was why, when she found the capital-punishment essay up on Edith Lawton’s website, she didn’t gloat about its being there. The only reason it was going to be up on the web was that Edith had found it impossible to publish. Web publication was just as bad, as far as Bennis was concerned. Millions of people would be able to read the thing, and, what was worse, it was tucked in among all of Edith’s other obsessions, like the priest pedophilia scandal and the endless blather about the Catholic Church and abortion. Bennis couldn’t understand why so many secular writers presented the Catholic Church’s stand on abortion as if they’d just uncovered a well-hidden scandal under a very large rock. It was like people who were shocked—just shocked—to realize that cigarettes caused lung cancer. The only people who didn’t know those things by now had to be brain-dead.

  She was, she thought, having a nicotine fit, except that these days she didn’t actually feel like smoking, only like killing someone. Edith Lawton would have been a good choice, but she wasn’t available on Cavanaugh Street in the early afternoon, and probably never would be. Bennis tried to imagine what Father Tibor would make of Edith Lawton. He’d read some of her work—that’s what happened when you pointed Father Tibor to a website—but all he’d been willing to say of her was that she “lacked seriousness.”

  I am avoiding the issue, Bennis told herself, and then she let herself out the front door of the small apartment building. On just the other side of the street, Donna Moradanyan was standing near the top of a tall ladder, putting red and white crepe paper across the front of the facade of Lida Arkmanian’s house. The crepe-paper strands were curled on each other, so that they made a kind of barber-pole effect, except sideways. Lida was standing at the bottom of the ladder, in her three-quarter-length chinchilla coat, fussing.

  “She is going to fall off,” Lida was saying, as Bennis came up. “She is going to break her neck. That is what is going to happen here.”

  “I’m going to put the light cord through the window,” Donna Moradanyan called down. “Then you can plug it in when you get back inside. Or this evening. When it gets dark. You know what I mean.”

  “Please be careful,” Lida Arkmanian said.

  “She cannot be careful,” Hannah Krekorian said. “If she’s careful, she won’t get anything done. She has to be brave.”

  “I don’t understand why she doesn’t just hire somebody to put that stuff up,” Sheila Kashinian said. “I mean, for God’s sake, Russ is a lawyer. He must make a mint.”

  “Don’t say ‘for God’s sake,’” Lida Arkmanian said. “You know what Father Tibor said last Sunday in church. We all take the Lord’s name in vain far too much around here.”

  “I don’t see why anybody should bother me about taking the Lord’s name in vain,” Sheila Kashinian said. “I’m not the one who swears every time I lose the lottery. And what about the lottery? Isn’t that supposed to be against Christian principles?”

  “Only if you’re a Protestant,” Hannah Krekorian said.

  Bennis went around the other side of the ladder. “You okay?” she called up.

  “I’m fine,” Donna said. “I shouldn’t have used crepe paper for this. It gets ruined in the weather. But then I have to worry about the lights, and crepe paper works with the lights. What’s with you? Aren’t you working again today?”

  “I was looking for Gregor,” Bennis said. “He doesn’t seem to be around anywhere.”

  “He left the neighborhood a couple of hours ago. I assumed he was off to talk to the police about the murders. Can you look around down there and see if there’s a red satin heart with a tab on the end of it? I’m missing one.”

  Bennis went to the pile of materials lying in a heap at the bottom of the ladder and started to look through them. Most of what was there was paper, bits and pieces that looked as if they had been wrongly cut and then discarded, but not exactly thrown away. The heart was very small. Bennis nearly missed it. She picked it up and stood back.

  “Do you want me to climb up there and give it to you?”

  “No. I’ll be right down. You ought to do something with yourself. You’re driving yourself and everybody else crazy.”

  “Well, I was going to do something with Gregor, but then he disappeared. You’re not going to be able to reach over to the other side of the building from where you’re standing.”

  “I know.”

  Donna let the crepe paper fall from the last place it had been taped. It hung down the front of the building like a ponytail. Then she came down the ladder and rubbed her hands against her slacks.

  “Thanks,” she said, taking the heart. “I’m going to move the ladder. You should move yourself. When is your brother coming in?”

  “It depends on which brother you’re talking about. Christopher will be here at the end of the week.”

  “Are the other two coming? I thought they weren’t coming.”

  “Teddy’s already here. He’s in a hotel somewhere holding press conferences. Or he would be, if this whole thing hadn’t been overshadowed by the problems at St. Anselm’s. What do you think Hannah would say? Maybe that the murders happened so that they would chase Anne Marie off the front pages and save my privacy.”

  “What
about Bobby?”

  “God only knows,” Bennis said.

  Donna took the heart and went back to the ladder. Then she performed what seemed to Bennis to be an unnecessarily complicated series of tugs and bumps to get the ladder to move down the front of the building and rest somewhere near the middle.

  “Do something,” she said. “Why don’t you write a column about being harassed by what’s-her-name. I’ll bet you anything you can get it published somewhere good. The Atlantic Monthly. Harper’s. That ought to make you feel better.”

  “Don’t you ever wonder where people like that get their money?” Bennis asked. “I mean, I was born with money, and I still had to work before I started to get seriously published. And I know she’s married, but still—”

  “Maybe her husband makes a mint.”

  “It’s like other people know where to find money and I don’t,” Bennis said. “It’s like some secret nobody ever let me in on. Not that I need money now, of course, but when I was first starting out and nobody would take my stuff, I couldn’t have lived in a town house in a major city and bought my bags at Coach. And her hair clips, too. Did I tell you she buys her hair clips at Coach?”

  “She’s got a husband.”

  “She’s got a husband who does something with computers. He can’t be making that much money. Oh, I don’t know. She probably has it from her family, or her husband’s got it from his. Except I know everybody with family money in Philadelphia and on the Main Line, and I’ve never heard of them.”

  Donna unearthed something that looked like Christmas lights, except the bulbs were all either white or red. She wound the strand around her arm and started up the ladder again.

  “Go do something,” she said again. “Go buy food for when Christopher gets here, unless he’s staying at Lida’s, then go buy him something else. Go buy Gregor a Valentine’s Day card. You’re making us all nuts. You’re worse like this than you were when you first quit smoking.”

  “When I first quit smoking, I threw an end table through my living-room window.”

  “I know. Trust me, it was less annoying. Go down to the Ohanians and volunteer for the Armenia Relief Committee. Just do something.”

  “Right,” Bennis said, but all she did was to step back a little and watch Donna on the ladder, stringing lights through crepe paper. The things that went through her head at times like this—that she wished somebody would rent the top-floor apartment in the building she shared with Gregor and old George Tekemanian; that she wished she had remembered to buy chocolate at the little store she liked near Independence Hall—were sane enough, but didn’t have to do with anything. Donna would probably find them … annoying. She watched as Donna taped the strand of lights to the brick and then taped crepe paper over it, to hide the wires. Then she nodded a little to Lida and Hannah and Sheila and went down the block toward the Ararat and the church and Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Foods. Lida’s coat was the most spectacular, but all three of them had fur. Bennis couldn’t imagine herself wearing something like that in public.

  At Ohanian’s she stopped and bought a copy of the Inquirer. She paged through the first section and checked the editorials and op-eds, but it was all right. There was nothing about Anne Marie today. She folded the paper up and put it in the nearest wastebasket. She wouldn’t read any more of it today, or any other day. She couldn’t make herself concentrate on the news. She thought about going to the Ararat and decided there was no point. She wasn’t hungry, and the last thing she needed was more coffee. She thought about going to see Tibor and decided that she couldn’t sit still for a tour of his fifteen latest websites, even if some of them would be funny and others would be scary as hell. Some people visited websites for research. Some people visited them because they were looking for a cause that would let them vent their rage. Tibor visited them out of curiosity—not about hate, but about human nature.

  In the end, she went back to the wastebasket and retrieved the paper. Then she checked her bag and made sure she had both money and credit cards. Then she walked all the way to the corner past Ohanian’s and looked up the cross street for a cab. There were cabs. There were always tons of cabs near Cavanaugh Street, because cabbies loved to pick up people who lived there. Generations of being told not to be stingy about tips had had its effect.

  Bennis got in and asked to be taken to Gump’s. She had no idea why she wanted to go there, since she never bought any jewelry but earrings, and she almost never bought those.

  She settled in the cab’s backseat and went back to reading the paper, looking now through the stories that bored her silly, the announcements of weddings and funerals, the two-paragraph squibs about Little League games and zoning-commission meetings on the Main Line. She looked over the television listings and realized that she had never heard of half the shows being listed. She looked over the book and movie reviews and realized that, although she had heard of most of what was mentioned, she wanted no part of any of it. She was about to fold the paper up and tuck it away in her bag, when she saw the picture of a man she thought she recognized. She stared at him for a moment and came up blank. She was sure she had met him, but not where, or why, or with whom, if it had been with anybody. She leaned over and read the caption under his picture. “Ian Holden,” it said, “senior partner at Brady, Marquis and Holden.” She looked for the story and found another two-paragraph squib, announcing some charitable committee he had been named to chair. She rubbed the side of her face compulsively.

  Brady, Marquis and Holden was the law firm that handled the work for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Gregor had mentioned that. She didn’t remember his mentioning Ian Holden, or any other lawyer in particular. Besides, she was convinced that she’d actually met him, shaken his hand, seen him in the flesh. Something like that. She had no idea why.

  Outside the cab, the traffic was getting worse and worse. It was the middle of the day, and too many people wanted to be in the same place at once. Had Holden been an assistant district attorney, back when Anne Marie was tried? He looked too old for that, and he seemed too senior. She rubbed her eyes again.

  She met people every day, in all kinds of situations. She met them at workshops and signings. She met them at cocktail parties given by the organizations she supported. She met them on the street, when they recognized her from Vanity Fair or Good Morning America. It was probably nothing, really. She was making too much of it, the way she made too much of everything lately, because it was either that or deal with reality.

  She folded the paper firmly into quarters and put it in the pocket on the back of the front seat. Then she stretched out her legs and closed her eyes.

  If she was going to act like a ninny, she might as well get some rest while she was doing it.

  3

  Out at St. Joseph’s University, in the middle of a class called Roots of the Western Philosophical Tradition, Mary Mac-Allister had a sudden revelation. Actually, she had two, but she was only aware of the first one, the answer to her moods of the past several months, the light at the end of her particular tunnel. The class was being taught by a priest who tended to lecture in the same way he had once given homilies at Mass. He modulated his voice until it sounded as if it were coming from a synthesizer. He gestured with his arms, moving them in big arcs from the shoulders, so that some of the students in the first row had to flinch away to avoid being hit. Worst of all, he explained too much, and too often. Mary already knew St. Thomas’s proofs for the existence of God, and why they didn’t really prove anything. She could do the Argument from Design in her head, and recite the sophisticated spins that had been put on it by modern religious philosophers like Plantinga and Swinburne. She was doing a minor in theology, and sometimes—like now—she didn’t know why, because what she really wanted to do with her life was what she was already doing with it. Bag ladies and winos didn’t care about the Argument from Design, or the Argument from Morality, or even the Argument from Miracles. Most of them were too far gone to understand anyth
ing but brutality and kindness, and most of them weren’t really human anymore, most of the time. “Respond not to the man but to Christ in the man,” Mary’s favorite grade-school nun had told her, over and over again, as the very core of religion. It had taken her a while to figure it out, but finally she had. Mr. Morelli and Mrs. Carstairs and Mr. Hemmelwaite and Miss Janns were old and sick and crazy, but she was called to see beyond that. She was called to see inside each of them, where they really were still human, because Christ lived in them, Christ was part of them, as Christ was part of all people everywhere even if they had banished

  Him from their hearts. It didn’t matter that Mr. Morelli wouldn’t be the way he was if he had only been able to stop drinking. It didn’t matter that Miss Janns had never had a chance at anything, because she was born with the schizophrenia she had never been able to shake. Nothing mattered except that they were human, and they deserved to be treated as human, and if nobody else would do that, then she would have to.

  You need two different documents, a voice in her head said, when you’ve got two different files.

  She came to, startled, and realized that she had zoned out completely, she had no idea how long. Father was talking about the philosophy of the Scholastics and the importance of the Aristotelian synthesis to the medieval construction of reality. Some of the students around her were taking notes. Others were only doodling, the way you could often in this class, because Father repeated everything four or five times. Mary wondered what his parishioners had thought about it, all those years ago, when he had been assigned to a parish and expected to preach. She suspected that he hadn’t lasted at that parish very long, much the way she expected Father Healy wouldn’t last long at St. Anselm’s.

  You need two different documents when you’ve got two different files, the voice in her head said again, and then she looked up, past Father’s shoulder, and saw the crucifix on the wall above the chalkboard. It was an odd moment. Like most other Catholics she knew, Mary had devotions she felt comfortable with and devotions she couldn’t make meaningful at all. For her, Christ Crucified had always been an uncomfortable image. Even Christ Triumphant, in the Resurrection, had made her feel oddly out of place. Christ on the cross had sometimes made her cringe. She liked mangers, and Virgins, and the star floating over the cold desert night in Bethlehem far more than she would ever be able to like the Stations of the Cross.