True Believers

by Jane Haddam

  “Yes,” Gregor said. “But the police talked to her doctors, and she’d had no appointments for two weeks before Marty brought her body to St. Anselm’s. Did she do the shopping?”

  “Not after she got sick. Marty did that.”

  “Fine. Do you remember anything at all about the last time you saw Bernadette? What she was doing? How she seemed, if she was sick, if she was tired—”

  “She was sick. Of course she was fucking sick. What the fuck did you expect? She was talking to that priest from the church she went to. He came out to visit her.”

  “Father Healy?”

  “I don’t know. A priest. In a collar. They were standing right out there in the road talking to each other, and I watched them, too. You know what priests are like. They stick it in any port they can find, they’re so desperate for it. I thought they’d go into Bernie’s trailer and then I’d give it a minute and go over and catch them at it, the fucking sanctimonious saint, but they stayed outside.”

  “Do you know how long they talked?”

  “Nope.”

  “And you’re sure it was Father Healy you saw.”

  There was a bottle of beer on the edge of the kitchen sink. Mrs. Kelly got hold of it and drank whatever was in it, which didn’t seem to be much. Then she made a face and dropped the bottle in the sink. It cracked.

  “I don’t know who it was I saw,” she said, with exaggerated patience, “because I can’t tell one fucking sanctimonious saint from another. Got that? It was a priest, with a black priest suit on and one of those collars. Tall. Christ, what difference does it make? They were always coming out here, the people from that church of hers. They were some kind of fucking support group. Christian community. You should have heard that fucking sanctimonious saint talk about Christian community.”

  “Do we mean Father Healy now, or Bernadette?”

  “Bernadette. I don’t talk to priests. They meddle too much. I don’t talk to nuns too much, either. There were nuns over there all the time.”

  “But not the last time you saw her.”

  Mrs. Kelly got another beer bottle out of the six-pack box on the floor and opened it with a can opener. Gregor found himself wondering why she bought bottles instead of cans. “The last time I saw her,” she said with deliberate slowness, “the priest was gone and she was going into her own damned trailer, which was always as clean as a hospital. Maybe nobody killed her at all. Maybe she killed herself from all the cleaning stuff she had in that place. It’s poison, most of it. It’s worse than cyanide.”

  “Maybe,” Gregor said.

  “She wasn’t sick the last time I saw her,” Mrs. Kelly said. “She was walking just fine, like there was never anything wrong with her. I always thought she put it all on, with the diabetes and all that. I always thought she was going to stage a miraculous cure one day and say she saw the Virgin Mary. You know what I’m talking about?’

  “Maybe,” Gregor said, but he only said it because he was afraid that if he said no she would try to explain. He looked at Garry and Lou and nodded. The trailer door was still open, and cold air was still pouring in. Lou had gathered up the cockroaches and killed them.

  “Right,” Garry said, suddenly perky. “Well, Mrs. Kelly, thank you for your time. With any luck, we won’t have to bother you again.”

  They were out of there so fast, Gregor found himself facing Mrs. Kelly on his own in no time at all.

  It was not a comfortable moment.

  SIX

  1

  When the “exorcism” was over, Sister Scholastica went back to St. Anselm’s convent and sat in the single small chair in her own room, with the chair pulled up to the window so that she could look out. It was not what she should have been doing. At the very least, she should have been at her own desk in her own office, so that anyone who needed her could consult her about—things. She didn’t have much she could have told them. She didn’t know why she and the Sisters had participated in that charade, set up by the Cardinal Archbishop. At base, she supposed, it was mostly anger, because she was so sick and tired of Roy Phipps and his posturing and the way it all intruded on her life. Still, there were a thousand things she ought to be doing, about the school, about the parish, about the Sisters she had been sent to take care of. Mary McAllister’s request papers were sitting on her green felt desk blotter, waiting for her to put them into shape and send them to upstate New York. Reverend Mother General would be waiting for them. Sister Scholastica couldn’t make herself do anything but look out the window and wonder what Roy Phipps was doing now. She had expected him to have some kind of reaction that would be both public and dramatic. Instead, the street was so quiet, it might as well have been deserted.

  In this order, Sisters did not have clocks in their rooms, unless they were serving as bell ringer, which Sister Scholastica never did. They did have watches, but Scholastica hadn’t turned on the light when she came in, and in the deepening dusk she found it impossible to look at hers. Outside, the streetlights had begun to glow, faintly, against the failing light. She always thought of February as the deepest part of winter. She forgot that it was really a time when the light had begun to return to the early evenings. She wished she could see beyond the courtyard to the street itself. If Roy Phipps wasn’t doing something to mark the exorcism, maybe the people of St. Anselm’s were, or the men of St. Stephen’s. She wished she knew, for certain, how she felt about the entire question of homosexuality. It wasn’t enough to know what the Church said and to believe that the Church was bound to be right—that the Church was right, really, when it came to questions of faith and morals. Right and wrong were not the issue here. She wanted to know what she felt, and every time she tried to get to the bottom of that, she stumbled over a pit of confusion. She didn’t know how she felt. She didn’t know what she thought. She only knew that she wished she could stop obsessing about it, and both St. Stephen’s and Roy Phipps stood in the way of that.

  When the courtyard outside was dark enough so that she could no longer see the grass, Sister Scholastica got up and put on her cloak. Somebody else might have called it a cape, which it was, technically. It was black and had a rounded collar like a raincoat’s, with slits at the sides near the slash pocket openings for her hands to come through. She buttoned the top four buttons and let it go at that. The cloak had buttons going all the way down, but she had never seen anybody use all of them. She left her room and went down the convent stairs, listening for the sounds of Sisters in the parlor or the kitchen. She heard nothing, which possibly made sense. It was likely to be much earlier than she thought it was. They were probably all over at the chapel for Office, or maybe even in the cafeteria.

  When she got to the convent’s front door she went out, and then across the courtyard and around the side of the church to the street. St. Anselm’s was lit up for the evening, its front doors propped open so that the homeless men and women Father Healy had been so meticulous about admitting would be admitted still. There was no way to know if the new priest, brought in from God only knew where, would maintain the practice. When they released the body from the medical examiner’s office, it would lie in its plain pine casket in front of this altar. Father Healy’s family would come in from wherever they lived in suburban Philadelphia. She thought about going in and looking at the attar—why?—and then she passed by down the street on the St. Anselm’s side. St. Stephen’s was lit up, too, but, as usual, it looked far more deserted than St. Anselm’s ever did. Far more deserted and far less chaotic. There was something concrete she could hold on to. In a church whose parishioners were mostly gay men, life was far less chaotic.

  She thought she was going all the way down the two-block stretch to Roy Phipps’s church, although she had no idea why, but when she was halfway there, she found herself stopping in front of Edith Lawton’s house. It was dark, except for a light way in the back on the first floor that Scholastica assumed must be the kitchen, or a room just off the kitchen. All the town houses in this neighborh
ood were alike. She looked at the door and the steps in front of it, but they were no different than the doors and steps in front of any of the other houses on the street. She looked at the narrow driveway to her left and saw that it was empty of cars. Either everybody was out, or whoever was in didn’t drive. Then she wondered what it was she was looking for. Everybody in the neighborhood knew that Edith Lawton made a profession of being an atheist. Were there symbols that atheists hung on their doors, the way Christians hung crosses? Scholastica shook her head slightly and backed away from the door. The cloak was heavy but not as effective against the cold as she wished it could be.

  She intended to turn around and go back up the street to St. Anselm’s, or, if she were still feeling restless, down a little farther to look at Roy Phipps’s place once and for all. Instead, she went down the short drive and around to the side of Edith Lawton’s house. From there, she could see even more light. It looked as if whatever was lit was some kind of sunroom. She went farther to the back and pushed against the door of the high wooden fence. It slid open without protest. If it were meant to be some kind of security, it was woefully underused. She stepped through the fence and into the backyard and looked around. The ground was mostly taken up with paving bricks. At the far end of it, there was a brick barbecue that looked blackened and worn in the light that spilled out of the back windows. The overhead security light was not on. Past the wooden fence at the back, the nearest neighbor’s house was absolutely dark.

  I should turn around and go home, Scholastica thought. What am I doing here?

  She went farther around to the back again. The windows were indeed to some kind of sunroom. It jutted off the kitchen like a wooden rendition of a sugar cube, and there was enough light coming from inside it to have served adequately as illumination for major surgery. There was light in the kitchen beyond, too, but with both the overhead and the desk lamp lit to full in the sunroom that hadn’t been immediately apparent. Scholastica pulled her arms inside her cloak and held them against her body, hesitating. She most certainly ought to go home. She just didn’t want to.

  She went to the door of the sunroom and tried it, telling herself that if it didn’t open she would take it as a sign from God that she ought to turn around and go straight back to her convent. It opened easily and without complaint. She stepped into the sunroom and looked around. The computer was on and set to a word processing program and a file entitled “The Evils of Public Piety.” Behind the computer, there were piles of papers that looked like manuscripts and another pile that seemed to be copies of a single magazine. That pile had a huge black glass cat sitting on top of it as a paperweight, so that all Scholastica could read of the title was Free Think.

  She turned away from the computer and went into the kitchen. There was nobody there, either, and for the first time since she had begun this nonsense she began to feel ashamed of herself. What was she doing, breaking into somebody’s house, and especially this somebody, who would surely make a fuss about it if she were ever to discover it? Scholastica could see the headlines now, from the pages of everything from the Philadelphia Inquirer to the specialty atheist magazines. The Housebreaking Nun. Sister Home Invader.

  The hall next to the kitchen was dark. Scholastica turned on the light at the switch just outside the kitchen door and looked down into the dining room and the living room. Then she went down to the dining room and turned the light on there, too. On the dining-room table there was a copy of the Vanity Fair that had the interview with Bennis Hannaford in it. She went through the dining room and into the living room and stopped.

  For some time now, she had known she was not alone in the house, but she hadn’t been able to put her finger on why. Now she understood. She could hear breathing, heavy, labored breathing, as if somebody with emphysema had fallen asleep. She felt around on the walls closest to her for a light switch, but found nothing. She reached out to see if her hand would hit a lamp on the floor or on a table, but found nothing of that, either. Finally, she just moved forward, toward the breathing, thinking that if she could just find out who was here and where they were, she could get them to tell her where the lights were.

  “Hello?” she said.

  All that answered her was yet more breathing. She moved forward inch by inch and then her shins hit a low table. She bent down and put her hands on the table’s surface and leaned across it. The breathing was closer now, but just as labored.

  “Hello,” she said again.

  Her eyes had adjusted to the lack of light just enough for her to know that somebody was lying on the couch. She put her hands out to touch whoever it was, to shake them awake—

  —and then the lights went on.

  They went on right over her head, so that she was blinded for a moment, and stumbled. She would have fallen if she hadn’t felt so desperately that she mustn’t do any such thing. A moment later, the form on the couch began to come clear. It was a man, apparently fast asleep, bound hand and foot and mouth in masking tape. Scholastica had the sudden, inexplicable urge to laugh out loud. What else could you do in this situation but laugh out loud? She even knew who the man was. She’d seen him a dozen times. It was Ian Holden, the lawyer for the archdiocese, but he was wearing a shirt and no trousers and he had on green argyle socks.

  “Turn around,” somebody said.

  Scholastica turned, and saw that Edith Lawton was standing over her, holding a gun pointed more or less in her general direction. The more or less was important. Edith Lawton was shaking, and every time she inhaled the gun wobbled in her hands. Scholastica wasn’t afraid at all. She almost felt as if she were playing a part in a soap opera. The scene felt unreal, and was unreal, and nothing Edith Lawton did from here on out could change that.

  “Go and sit down in the chair,” Edith Lawton said.

  “I don’t think so,” Scholastica said.

  “Go and sit down in the chair or I’ll shoot you,” Edith Lawton said. “I should have shot him, you know. I could do it right now.”

  “I don’t think so,” Scholastica said again.

  Then she took three large steps across the room to where Edith Lawton was and took the gun out of the woman’s hand.

  “You can’t shoot a gun when the barrel’s open,” she said gently, chucking the two bullets still left in the chambers into her hand. “What’s the matter with him? Does he have a concussion?”

  “He’s a thief. I hit him on the head.”

  “He’s probably got a concussion. He looks all right, though. We ought to call him a doctor. Do you have emergency numbers next to your phone?”

  “There’s another one,” Edith Lawton said. “In my bedroom. He’s awake, though. I’ll bet he doesn’t have a concussion.”

  Sister Scholastica blinked. “Another one? Another man? You’ve got another man tied up in this house?”

  “He’s my husband. Will. He came in and I—” Edith Lawton looked around, confused. “It isn’t fair. Did I tell you that? It isn’t fair. But I couldn’t do anything about it. And I wanted them both to stop yelling at me. So I hit them on the head. What do you think of that?”

  Sister Scholastica thought Edith Lawton had had a psychotic break, but she didn’t say it. She put the gun in the pocket of her habit and nodded toward the stairs.

  “Let’s go,” she said. “Let’s get the other one, and call the ambulance, and sit down and talk. I think you’re going to be in a lot of trouble.”

  2

  Bennis Hannaford had wanted her brother Christopher to come to Philadelphia by plane. After all, what sane person came to Philadelphia from California any other way? Christopher had had another way, one that involved going to New York first and seeing some people and coming on by Amtrak from Penn Station, and now Bennis was standing next to a long bench in the train station, wondering where all the homeless people came from. She wasn’t unaware that some people were homeless. She’d written an op-ed about it for the New York Times, and several times a year she forked over a significant a
mount of cash for one of Father Tibor’s relief funds. What bothered her was how the homeless seemed to congregate in some places rather than others. There were none living on Cavanaugh Street, or on any of the blocks near it, but here there seemed to be dozens, and the police were making it clear that they were barely welcome. Or worse. Bennis wrapped her arms around her body and paced back and forth in front of the ticket booths, listening to the sound of her clogs on the hard floor under her feet. Once, after one of her novels had been chosen for Oprah’s Book Club, she had been recognized in this station, and approached, too. It was the only time in her life she had ever been asked for an autograph on something besides one of her own books. She didn’t expect to be approached today. She had a feeling that she didn’t look anything like herself today. Her hair, thick and wild and as black as a little help from L’Oreal could make it, felt flat against her head. Her body felt four inches shorter than it normally was, and she wasn’t tall by anybody’s measure. “Bennis Hannaford,” somebody had once said, “is the sort of person who glows in the dark.” Bennis was fairly sure she didn’t glow in the dark at the moment. She barely had wattage in reflected light.

  There was a newspaper vending machine against a wall near the benches. The paper was full of the death of Father Robert Healy. It even had a picture of St. Anselm’s Roman Catholic Church on the front page, in badly tinted color. It bothered Bennis a little to realize that she thought of this as good luck. Four murders on Baldwin Place meant that Anne Marie’s story had almost ceased to exist as far as the media were concerned. This was not turning into a circus, the way the execution of Karla Faye Tucker had. On the other hand, maybe it couldn’t have. Anne Marie was no Karla Faye Tucker, except maybe in bloody viciousness. Anne Marie was not a creature of the camera, and nobody in her half-long life had ever called her attractive. Anne Marie, the ugly one. Anne Marie, the stupid one. Anne Marie, the one without prospects.