A Great Day for the Deadly(22)

“I do,” Gregor said. “Brigit Ann Reilly was a girl who liked secrets. Other people’s secrets.”

“But not blackmail secrets,” Scholastica said. “She didn’t like to know discreditable things about people. I’d have known how to deal with that. I’d have thrown her right out of here as soon as it became clear. What Brigit liked was thinking that someone she was infatuated with had the stigmata and wasn’t telling anyone.”

“And was that happening, Sister? Did someone she knew have the stigmata on the day Brigit Ann Reilly died?”

They had come to a dead stop again, this time in front of broad door with a window cut into its top half. There was a brass crucifix hanging just under the window. Gregor looked at the walls around him and saw a few unobtrusive homages to St. Pat’s. There was more balance here than Gregor had seen in any other part of the convent—but he didn’t know that balance was the business convents were into. Scholastica went to the door with the crucifix on it, opened it up and looked inside. Then she pushed the door all the way open and wedged a rubber doorstop underneath it with her foot. The office beyond it was empty, and obviously the sanctuary of the order’s Reverend Mother General. There was a full-size poster-photographed copy of the portrait in the foyer on the far wall, surrounded by photographs of two dozen or so other women in the same pose: an order genealogy of Reverend Mothers General.

“Reverend Mother General must be off somewhere with Mr. Donovan,” Scholastica said. “She’s got him up here, you know, just to talk to you. You can sit down in the meantime, if you want. She won’t mind having you in here.”

“You were telling me about the stigmata,” Gregor prompted gently.

Scholastica flushed. “I didn’t necessarily mean the stigmata in particular. Although I’ve got to admit, that was exactly the kind of thing Brigit went in for. She said in Recreation once that if she got to have just one wish granted it would be to have a vision of the Virgin, and if it hadn’t been the first week I’d have thrown her out for that. That kind of thing is a form of hysteria. What I’m trying to say is, all that last week before she died, she’d been—strange in a way I recognized.”

“Strange the way she was strange when she formed one of these infatuations,” Gregor translated.

“Exactly,” Scholastica said. “Only it was different, this time, because I don’t think she was fixed on anyone I know. She certainly wasn’t fixed on anyone in the convent. I would have found out who it was if she had been.”

“Was she fixed on someone she met on her walks to the library? Is that what you mean?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Demarkian. I didn’t know what to think about it all even before Brigit died. I will say I hope she wasn’t fixed on Glinda Daniels because Glinda—”

“Glinda what?”

“I’m going to leave you in Reverend Mother’s office now,” Scholastica said. “She’ll be along in a minute. Just make yourself comfortable.”

“Sister—”

But Sister had backed up, out of the door, and then proceeded to do something Gregor had never known anyone but a nun to be able to do: She had truly and undeniably disappeared. Gregor looked up and down the corridor and saw no one, only open doors that revealed small empty classrooms. He looked into Reverend Mother General’s office and wondered how she managed to keep it so very neat. His own desk at home was a holocaust, and Tibor’s was worse than that. The only pieces out of place in this room were the letters and the single small package at the edge of Reverend Mother’s desk, and Gregor found himself resenting the Sister who had put them there, carelessly, without regard to the fastidiousness that marked the rest of this space.

It was the kind of thought that was calculated to make him think he was getting old. He sat down in the only chair that looked like it could accommodate him and settled in to wait.





[3]


Fifteen minutes later, Gregor Demarkian was still sitting in his chair and still waiting. He was going over and over the things Scholastica had told him. He had a feeling that the jumbled account actually meant something, both more and less than she had intended to tell him. The things she had stressed did not seem so important, but one or two of the things she had said in passing did. He tried to put it together with his knowledge that Brigit Ann Reilly had died of coniine poisoning—of hemlock, really—and came up with mostly mush.

He was just consoling himself with the idea that what he had was at least promising mush when he heard a step in the hallway. He had gotten up by then and begun to pace. He stopped in the center of the room and looked through the door at the small woman paused in its frame. She was very small indeed, and very old, but in spite of the fact that she wore the same abbreviated habit Scholastica did, she had all the authority of the women in the pictures behind him who were wearing full robes. This, Gregor thought, must be Reverend Mother General. He started toward her with his hand outstretched, and then stopped.