Like the town of Maryville below it, the Motherhouse of the Sisters of Divine Grace seemed to be in the grips of a St. Patrick’s Day mania—or at least the outside of it did. Gregor had breezed up to the Motherhouse’s front door in the car John Cardinal O’Bannion had provided for the purpose. Like all the cars O’Bannion provided, it was nondescript and in questionable working order, but it came with a driver. This was a good thing, because although Gregor had a license he couldn’t really drive. Being driven had the advantage of keeping him out of trouble—Bennis Hannaford once said that putting Gregor behind the wheel of a car was like making a solemn vow to God Almighty that you would do everything possible to get a ticket—but it had an added advantage as well, and that was that he could pay attention to his surroundings. In a way, his impressions of Maryville, driving through, had been as startled as his first impressions of the Motherhouse. He had expected a much smaller town, and a much less diverse one. For some reason, he’d thought Maryville was a farming community in the process of metamorphosis into a suburb. He’d got the suburban part without trouble. The route coming in had passed through acres of neat midsize colonial houses on neat midsize one-acre lots. By now he was sure Maryville had never been a farming community. On the other side of town from the neat midsized colonial houses there was a river and along that river there were buildings that bore the unmistakable stamp of warehouses, abandoned and otherwise. Of course, Maryville was very close to the St. Lawrence Seaway, even if it wasn’t on the St. Lawrence River itself. Gregor didn’t know why that information had failed to penetrate, but it had. And yet—
And yet.
If Gregor had had to put a name to his malady, it would have been information overload. When the Cardinal commissioned a report, he commissioned a report, not the usual police officialese outline that might or might not tell you what you wanted to know. With the Cardinal’s reports, if someone had seen something or heard something or just thought something, it was there. If there was some bit of background you might need, it was there, too. Last night, Gregor had plowed his way through “a few extra things” the Cardinal had handed him at the Chancery, and those included a history of the local Immigrants National Bank, complete with a biography of its present owner-president and the Cardinal’s personal opinion of every part of the operation. (“Miriam runs a good business. Much better than her father did. Holds the mortgage on the Motherhouse and all the other Church property in town when we need them to be mortgaged and she’s always been good about them, too. Surprised she didn’t invite you to stay at her house. Usually does that with visiting celebrities and she knows you’re coming, I told her myself. Let me tell you, though, I’m counting on Miriam. All this mess the banks have got into. Miriam was telling me just the other day that they’re starting to do spot audits, the Feds are, and the Immigrants is due March the fifth. Miriam says she’s going to show these WASP nellies how to run a bank. Of course, there is the little problem of her husband...”) Then there had been chapter and verse on Margaret Finney, the Maryville Public Library. (“Miriam gave the money for the new building. Glinda Daniels has been librarian forever.”) And the Maryville Volunteer Fire Department (hopeless). By the time he finished reading them all, Gregor felt as if he’d lived in town forever, but always underground. He knew about everything conceptually, but nothing in terms of personality.
Still, if the overwhelming amount of local information had been difficult to take, the witness reports that skirted the murder of Brigit Ann Reilly had been worse. Just getting the times right had been enough to give Gregor a headache. Pete Donovan had included the statement of anyone anywhere who claimed to have seen Brigit Ann Reilly on the day she died, and there were a lot of them. Gregor had managed to whittle this list down to a very short one that he was sure he could trust:
10:00 Brigit leaves Motherhouse
10:06 Brigit talks to Jack O’Brien on Delaney Street
11:15 Brigit spotted near river by Sam Harrigan using telescope
1:00 Brigit found under snakes by Glinda Daniels in library storeroom
Reading carefully, Gregor thought those were the reports he could trust absolutely. The problem was, he couldn’t really dismiss the others. He hated to admit it, but they just didn’t sound crazy enough. They also tended to take place during that crucial two hours between the time Sam Harrigan had seen Brigit walking and the time Glinda Daniels had found her body, or in the hour between the time Jack O’Brien had talked to her and the time Sam had seen her. There were such great big spaces of time. She could have been doing anything or been anywhere. Maybe Mrs. Moira Monohan had seen her walking up Londonderry Street at 12:17. Maybe Mr. Thomas Reeve had seen her on the levee at just about 11:00. Their reports got a little shot of credibility from the fact that they, like the others, failed to see her anywhere at all between 10:30 and 10:55. For that half hour at least, mass hypnosis had ceased to exist in Maryville.