A Great Day for the Deadly(21)

“Iggy Loy?”

“St. Ignatius Loyola Church. It’s right down the hill on Delaney but not too far down. It was high enough up to escape any water damage, and we knew it would be. And I know the library is just on the other end of Delaney Street and I know it’s not far—”

“This is the library where she was supposed to be going.”

“There’s only the one,” Scholastica said. “Brigit went every day. We’re all supposed to have one or two little practical chores to do around the house, and that was hers. I thought it was a good idea, but—”

“But Brigit was a flake?”

“I wouldn’t say flake, exactly.” Scholastica looked uncomfortable. “Mr. Demarkian, part of me wants to say that Brigit was nothing particularly special. There were always girls like Brigit in postulant classes, immature girls, borderline cases. Before I became Postulant Mistress, I didn’t realize how hard it would be to decide whether to keep them or not. The actual decision is supposed to rest with Alice Marie—Sister Alice Marie is Mistress of Novices—in consultation with Reverend Mother, but in practice it comes down to me. And I just have a hard time making up my mind.”

They had come to the end of the corridor they had turned the corner into. They were now presented with turns to the right and to the left. The place felt like a maze, turning in on itself, folding up like an accordion. It made Gregor dizzy.

In front of him, Sister Mary Scholastica had come to a stop, turning neither one way nor the other. Now she swung around and faced him for the first time since she had let him through the door. Her face was pale and taut, but there was still no real expression in it. Gregor cast his mind back to last year in Colchester and tried to get some take on this. Had Scholastica been so stoic and expressionless then? Had she been so tense? What was wrong with her? Gregor had come prepared to deal with human emotions. He always did, because he knew too well that if he didn’t they would get in the way. That was one of the things the Bureau had taught him, on kidnapping detail especially. Taught or not, he really didn’t have a talent for this sort of thing. He was always being thrown by the unexpected.

Scholastica had wrapped her arms around her waist and hunched her shoulders forward. She was still staring at him intently, as if she expected him to give her the answer to a question she hadn’t asked.

“Brigit Ann Reilly,” she said, with a trace of coming explosion in her voice, “was not that common type, the girl too immature to be in the convent. She was immature enough, mind you, but that wasn’t what was wrong with her, as far as a religious order was concerned. As far as I was concerned. She was a perfectly ordinary girl from a perfectly ordinary family in New Hampshire. I’m not trying to imply that there was something odd about her background, because I don’t believe there was. I think she would have made a perfectly marvelous wife and mother in the ditzy I Married Joan mold, or a competent private secretary to someone whose schedule wasn’t too complicated. She wasn’t very bright and she wasn’t very stupid. She wasn’t very imaginative and she wasn’t very bad. She was just utterly and incurably undisciplined.”

“Undisciplined?” Gregor demanded.

Scholastica turned away from him and went to the left. She was walking quickly now, with an abrupt and decisive step Gregor remembered from nuns he had run across in his childhood. She pushed open yet another set of swinging wooden doors, held yet another one open for him to pass through, and then continued on their way, oblivious of anything but her own words and her own forward motion.

There seemed to be one more set of doors to pass through. Gregor assumed there was only one more, because he couldn’t imagine Scholastica slamming the palms of her hands into doors like that time after time without getting hurt. He caught the swing of the door himself as he came through, just in case she had forgotten what she was doing besides talking.

“Brigit Ann Reilly,” she was saying, “was the kind of girl who had enthusiasms. She was ready to canonize the postman one week, because of the beautiful things he had said to her when she’d met him on the doorstep while he was delivering the mail. She saw secrets everywhere. Undistinguished people whom she liked had secret lives, according to her. Secret religious lives. She was addicted to felling in calf love—nonsexual calf love, I want to make myself clear—with a different person every week and then”—Scholastica threw up her hands—“I don’t know how to explain this to you, really. I don’t know—Oh, Mr. Demarkian, the whole thing is such a mess, I don’t know where to start talking about it, never mind explaining it.”