“And?”
“Take a look at this.” The Cardinal passed the thicker of the two folders across the desk, and Gregor took it. “These started coming just after the announcement was made, that Margaret Finney had been beatified. That was just before Brigit Ann Reilly died. It got quite a bit of play in the local papers up here, for obvious reasons, the beatification, I mean. We haven’t told anyone about these. Take a look.”
Gregor flipped open the folder and found what he had half expected to see, considering the way the Cardinal was talking. The folder was stuffed with anonymous letters, carefully paper-clipped to the envelopes they had come in. Most of them were written on cheap notepaper with blotchy pen or crayon. Gregor read through one or two and flinched.
“This is quite a stack,” he said, trying to hand the folder back to the Cardinal. “Didn’t you tell me the last time I was here that you had a problem with sort of redneck anti-Catholic feeling in the rural towns out here?”
“Oh, yes,” the Cardinal said, paying no attention to Gregor’s offer of the folder. “If that’s all I had, I wouldn’t be worried. Unfortunately, I’ve got something more. Look at this one now. This is what came after Brigit Ann Reilly was killed.”
The second folder was nearly flat. Gregor took it from the Cardinal’s hand and opened it up. It contained only one letter, and although that letter was anonymous, it was not written on cheap notepaper and it was not written in crayon. It had been produced on a letter-quality computer printer on cockle finish heavyweight bond.
I FED HER POISON AND I DRESSED HER IN SNAKES AND I TOOK HER MIRACULOUS MEDAL FOR A SOUVENIR. SHE’S ONLY THE FIRST AND ONLY A WARNING. WAIT AND SEE.
Gregor put the letter back in the folder, very carefully. “I take it that’s accurate, about the Miraculous Medal?”
“Oh, yes.”
“And it hasn’t appeared in the press?”
“Oh, no.”
“Is this the only letter from the same source?”
This time, the Cardinal did take the first folder back, to flip through it. He found what he was looking for and handed it across to Gregor, being careful not to dislodge the envelope attached to it.
“Except for it being composed on a computer, I never thought it was any different from any of the others. Maybe I gave half a thought to what it might mean, to be saddled with an intelligent fanatic bigot for once.”
“Mmm,” Gregor said, and then read: THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IS THE SYPHILITIC WHORE THAT IS POISONING THE WORLD. IF SHE DOESNT WATCH OUT, THE WORLD WILL TURN ON HER IN SELF-DEFENSE AND START TO POISON BACK. He handed the letter back to the Cardinal. “The writer is literate,” he said, “and Catholic. He or she wouldn’t have called the Church ‘she’ otherwise.”
“I know,” the Cardinal sighed. Then he forced himself to stand and walk over to his window, making his body move when it so obviously wanted only to sit still. Why he did that, Gregor didn’t know, but he seemed to need to. He leaned against the window glass and made a face at the gray weather outside. “It would be nice,” he said, “if it turned out that these letters were not written by a psychopath who was giving me a warning before embarking on a career of stranger-to-stranger mayhem. It would be nice if it turned out that the person who wrote these letters had nothing to do with the death of Brigit Ann Reilly. What do you think my chances are of having this work out like that?”
“Better than fifty-fifty,” Gregor said positively.
“You’re an optimist,” the Cardinal told him. “Would you mind sending those things off to whoever might be able to do something about them—trace them, test them, whatever?”
“I wouldn’t mind, Your Eminence. It would be the easiest thing in the world.”
“I’m glad you think so,” the Cardinal said. “Now go up to Maryville for me. That won’t be the easiest thing in the world.”
Gregor Demarkian didn’t need the Cardinal to tell him that. Even before he’d seen those anonymous letters, he knew the Cardinal had another world-class mess on his hands. Somehow, the fact that it was also a mess on Gregor Demarkian’s hands seemed, to Gregor, to be entirely natural.
Gregor often thought it was a good thing he hadn’t been born Catholic. He had far too great an inclination to accommodate the princes of the Church as it was. If he were Catholic, he’d have an obligation to accommodate them—and he’d probably never get a full night’s sleep again.
Three
[1]
THERE WAS AN ANTIQUE grandfather clock along the west wall of the main room of the Maryville Public Library, and when it rang six o’clock that Friday night of March 1, Glinda Daniels felt she’d won a victory. In fact, she felt she’d won two. Getting through the week that followed the death of Brigit Ann Reilly hadn’t been easy. There had been a million and one everyday details to attend to, most of them the result of water damage caused by the flood. Insurance companies to call, replacement carpets to be inspected and priced, St. Patrick’s Day decorations to be cleaned or remade and hung: Glinda would have been going out of her mind with work even if she hadn’t started feeling sick and dizzy every time she had to pass in front of the storeroom door. That was her first victory, that it all got done, in spite of how she felt or how little sleep she’d had. She had been getting very little sleep, and not much rest when she was awake, either. Her head always seemed to be full of dreams, and the dreams followed her. Sometimes, unavoidably back there in that corner of the room, Glinda thought she could hear them, hissing and snapping, getting ready to strike. It was like the only other time she had ever been forced to live through something awful, the other time that she never thought of anymore because it made her head ache. It followed her—there was no other way to describe it—but when she thought about telling other people, she felt struck dumb.