A Great Day for the Deadly(19)

Half an hour, between ten thirty and eleven. Half an hour. It nagged at him. It was just the kind of thing he was supposed to be good at—working through timetables, seeing the hidden patterns in random occurrences. He didn’t believe that that half hour was insignificant. It stood out too baldly to be that. He just couldn’t figure out what it meant.

That was the kind of thing that was driving him crazy, keeping him awake, burning him out. Last night, when it had finally begun to get to him, he had reached for the phone to call Bennis and stopped. Bennis was in the middle of her draft, or near the end of it, or something. She wasn’t talking to anyone who couldn’t qualify for the Distressed Damsels union  . She had her phone off the hook. He had put his own phone back into its cradle with what felt like desolation. He wasn’t used to being cut off from Bennis like this. He didn’t like it. God only knew what was going to happen to him if she up and married somebody.





[2]


Now it was ten o’clock on the morning of Saturday, March 2, and Gregor was standing in the Motherhouse’s front foyer, out of the cold and away from the relentless Irish mania that accompanied what was apparently Maryville’s favorite holiday. The Motherhouse foyer was bare of decoration of any kind, except for a large crucifix that hung on the wall facing the front door and a square oversize portrait in oils of a gentle-faced woman with thick eyebrows and fierce black eyes. This, Gregor thought, was probably the Blessed Margaret Finney, and she looked like a woman and a half. He looked around some more. The floor at his feet was black and white checkerboard marble and very clean. The walls around him and the ceiling above him were both plain, sane white. It was a relief to be away from all that green madness—and from his nattering wondering about why there was so much of it. Everybody in town couldn’t be Irish or of Irish descent. Those people he had seen down near the warehouses had definitely been Hispanic of some kind—and they had been decorated, too, right to the point of wearing shamrocks on the lapels of their coats. It was enough to make him think he’d swallowed something he shouldn’t.

At his side, Sister Mary Scholastica—née Kathleen Burke and a familiar face from Gregor’s stay in Colchester—was just shutting the front door and shaking the cold out of her habit. She was an extraordinarily tall woman with bright red hair that kept escaping from her veil, and Gregor thought she was not behaving naturally. He could think of a hundred conversations they should have been having at just this time. There was the one about everything that had happened in Colchester—months ago, the people who had died and the person who had killed them, and how she felt about that now and how she was coping. There was the one about Brigit Ann Reilly, a girl who had been in her charge, and how she felt about that. Gregor found himself wondering if nuns weren’t allowed to talk about their emotions to laypeople—or even to show them. He could think of nothing else that would explain her manner, efficient and automatic and as cold as ice.

“The Cardinal,” Sister Scholastica was saying, as she kicked at the bottom of the door the way people did when weather stripping made a corner stick, “has already been on the phone to Pete Donovan. Pete Donovan is our chief of police, which you probably already know. I can’t believe the Cardinal wouldn’t have told you. At any rate, you won’t have any of the trouble you may have had other places. Pete had no objection to your being called in.”

“That’s good,” Gregor said blandly. In fact, it was imperative. He had never had to work against the wishes of a local police department. He wasn’t sure he would agree to work if a local department was against him. God only knew it would make an investigation practically impossible. “What about you?” he asked her. “Do you have any objections to my being called in?”

“Of course not.” Scholastica looked startled. She had finished with the door and was now looking around the foyer, as if she were trying to remember something she had forgotten. “If you really want to know the truth,” she said, “it was my idea. Calling you in, I mean. The Cardinal had thought of it—”

“It seemed to me like a natural for the Cardinal.”

“It was. But before he called us about it, I mentioned it to Reverend Mother General. That was the day after it happened, a little over a week ago. I just kept looking at the whole situation and thinking—”

“What?”

If Scholastica hadn’t been a nun, she would have shrugged. It was Gregor’s experience that nuns—or at least the old-fashioned kind—didn’t shrug when you expected them to. Instead, she turned to the right and headed for the doors there, obviously expecting Gregor to follow. The soles of her shoes were rubber and her feet were soundless on the marble, but she still made noise as she moved. She had a ring of keys at her waist that jangled.