A Great Day for the Deadly(20)

“I don’t know what kind of information you’ve gotten from the Cardinal,” she said, “but we got a great deal of it right away. Maybe that was because Reverend Mother General did the expected thing for once and called the Chancery immediately.”

“Immediately when?” Gregor asked.

“Immediately period,” Scholastica said. “As soon as Pete Donovan called us. We’re supposed to call the Chancery for any death, really, even when a retired Sister of ninety-seven passes away in her sleep, but with that sort of thing we often take a day or two while we get ourselves organized. With an accident of any kind—”

“Did you think it was an accident?” Gregor asked her. “In the beginning?”

“In the beginning, we didn’t know what it was,” Scholastica admitted. “When Pete called it was still early, maybe two o’clock at the latest, and he didn’t really know what had happened either. That was when he still thought the cause of death was going to be the snakes and he was beside himself. I mean, we all knew the snakes probably belonged to Sam—”

“Did you?”

Scholastica blushed a little. “Well, we didn’t tell the press, if that’s what you mean. We wouldn’t. We got so sick of them hanging around, amusing themselves—oh, never mind. Their behavior was deplorable. And word came from the Cardinal in no time at all that he didn’t really want to have anything get out, so we—managed.”

“Better than I would have thought possible,” Gregor said.

“Yes. Well. In the old days, the Church was a great teacher of discipline. Anyway, I think everybody thought they were probably Sam’s snakes because he’s had stuff like that up there before, it drives the old nellies at the Town Governing Board wild, but then they could have been Josh Malley’s—”

“Who’s Josh Malley?”

Scholastica shot him a strangely amused look. “Josh Malley is the twenty-five-year-old husband of our sixty-something-year-old local bank president. From what I hear—I was in Colchester at the time—she brought him back from Corfu a couple of years ago and has been doing the Lord only knows what with him since. It’s been very strange, really. When people have midlife crises—I suppose this would have been an end of life crisis—when they have these crises they usually change, don’t they? They start wearing silly clothes and have plastic surgery and tell all their friends they’d rather be called Kiki from here on out. Well, Miriam didn’t do that. She’s always been a solid, sensible woman and she’s still a solid, sensible woman. She just has Josh.”

“And what does Josh have to do with snakes?”

“Oh,” Scholastica said, “well. She’s always buying him toys, Miriam is, and one of the things she bought him is a menagerie. It’s a small zoo, really. She had a lion in it for a while—a very small lion, mind you—but the Governing Board went absolutely nuts and she had to give it away. The menagerie has snakes in it.”

“Water moccasins?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hmm,” Gregor said again.

They had passed through a short empty corridor that opened onto nothing, with doors at the front and back like the lock of a canal. Scholastica opened the far set of doors and motioned him through, into another short corridor with more signs of life. This corridor had doors in its walls and crucifixes on them, each crucifix accompanied by a Bible verse in elegant calligraphic script. Gregor leaned close to one and found Hebrews 13:12-15: Jesus died outside the gate. It was, after all, Lent.

Scholastica led him through another set of doors, then around a corner. Gregor thought the Motherhouse hadn’t looked this big when he was still outside it. It hadn’t looked this complicated, either. He let Scholastica take him where she wanted to and forced himself not to try to make sense of it just yet. He could do that later, with pen and paper and Sister’s advice on how to make a map.

“Anyway,” Scholastica said, “if the snakes had belonged to Josh we would have been happy to let the world know about it, but we couldn’t be sure because Sam wasn’t talking. And in the beginning we didn’t know at all, of course. We just thought Brigit had drowned.”

“Was that likely?” Gregor asked.

“After Pete called, no,” Scholastica said. “He did tell Reverend Mother about the snakes. I mean before that, when she was missing and we didn’t know where she was. The rain really was terrible, and there was flooding down at St. Andrew’s. We were helping out by packing up canned goods and getting our gym ready to take anybody Iggy Loy couldn’t handle—”