A Great Day for the Deadly(16)

Josh had stepped back, closer to the wall. He caught her looking at him and flushed, embarrassed. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything. It’s just that we don’t have time.”

“Of course we don’t,” Miriam said.

“I’d have to get dressed all over again,” Josh said. “I’d never get downstairs for cocktails. You wouldn’t either. I’d ruin your hair.”

“You would do that, yes.”

“You don’t have to be like this,” Josh said. “You don’t have to go all sour on me just because it’s practically eight o’clock and you’re having a party. I don’t see why you always have to blame it all on me. It’s your committee to—committee to—”

“Committee to advance the cause of the canonization of Margaret Finney,” Miriam recited dutifully.

“Well, then,” Josh said.

Well, then, Miriam thought. And then she drifted away from him, out of the dressing room and into the bedroom proper, to the big bow window overlooking the back lawns. The back lawns were covered with snow and ice, white and daunting, as frozen as the rest of the town since the waters had receded and the temperature dropped. She really couldn’t see anything down there, not in a way that let her recognize it. The gazebo was a huddle of wrought iron near the snow-piled fountain. The menagerie was a single ball of light.

She felt Josh come up behind her and put a hand on her shoulder, tentatively, as an act of propitiation. She shrugged him off and started to laugh.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “I wonder how many people in this town realize that what you’ve got down there is some kind of God-forsaken zoo.”





[3]


Pete Donovan had always considered himself a good police officer. He was young and he was raw. He wasn’t as educated as cops got these days in cities like New York and Chicago. He didn’t have the kind of experience he would have needed to cope with a major suburb like Greenwich or Bryn Mawr. Still, for Maryville, he was a good police officer. He knew the town. He knew its people. Most of all, he knew how to use his common sense. That was how you got through the day in a place like Maryville, as a police officer or anything else. You remembered that Mrs. Cander’s son Jimmy always did like to steal chickens and that Stevie Hall went in for starting fights and that the old ladies down at the Lutheran Benevolent Society were still seeing Communists under their beds, and you took it from there.

It was now nine thirty on the worst Friday night Pete Donovan had ever had to live through—worse even than that Friday night two years ago when Father Doherty had decided to bust head down by the river and clean up the gangs there once and for all—and all Pete could think of was that he really shouldn’t go home. No matter how tired he was, no matter how crazy the day had been, he had an obligation to stay at the station and see the night through. Just why he felt this way, he couldn’t say. He had gone home on the night Brigit Ann Reilly died. He’d even gone to sleep. Today, nothing much of anything had happened except—craziness.

He looked around the “station” and saw what he always saw, a large open room with a waist-high swinging rail used to divide it into two parts. On his side of the rail were the six desks of the six men, including himself, who made up the police force. On the other side of the rail there were chairs and benches and a desk and radio set for their secretary-dispatcher, Linda Erthe. Linda came in at six and stayed the night, since in the experience of the town of Maryville it was at night when she was really necessary.

Linda was sitting with her back to him, working on a crossword puzzle. The radio was silent but unlikely to stay that way. Pete had just sent Davie Burnham down to St. Andrew’s to check on Father Doherty and his clinic, and that always brought in trouble in the long run. Pete cleared his throat and said, “Linda?”

“If you’re going to have another nervous breakdown about those calls you’ve been getting, I don’t want to hear about it,” Linda said. “It’s just mass hysteria. It’ll go away by itself in a day or two.”

“Yesterday, you were telling me the sightings were mass hysteria,” Pete said. “You know, the people who said they’d seen Brigit wandering around town the day she died. All fifty-six of them or however many there were.”

“Well, that was mass hysteria.”

“So this is mass hysteria, too? Do you know how many bodies I went looking for today that weren’t there? Six. Six, Linda, it was crazy. I had three of those little postulants in this morning swearing they’d seen a corpse in the hedge outside the library.”