A Great Day for the Deadly(31)

Instead of getting into all that—which he didn’t want to do and which wouldn’t have been polite in any case—Gregor sat down on the chair he had been occupying when Reverend Mother General opened her package and stretched out his legs.

“I wasn’t exactly worrying about it,” he said. “I was just annoyed by it. What happened to Reverend Mother General?”

“She went off with a lot of other nuns to look for a snake. Do I have that right? With this nasty letter she got, there was a snake?”

“A black snake,” Gregor said. “Not very big. Not dangerous at all.”

“I know black snakes.” Donovan rubbed the back of his neck. “Which one was it? The letter she got?”

For a moment, Gregor didn’t know what Donovan was talking about. Then he realized that the policeman couldn’t have any idea which of the letters on the desk belonged to Reverend Mother General. It could have been either or both. Gregor cocked his head and asked,

“Why do you assume it was one or the other? Why not both?”

“Because Reverend Mother General always says exactly what she means and what she said was that she got a nasty piece of mail. If she’d got two, she would have said two.”

Of course, there were other possibilities. Neither of the letters on the desk might be the one received by Reverend Mother General. Gregor could have substituted two others, for purposes of his own. Reverend Mother General could have taken the real letter with her and palmed off a fake on Gregor. A million and one things could have happened, most of them improbable, but all of them possible given the limitations of what Donovan knew. If Donovan had been an agent, Gregor would have given him a lecture about it.

In spite of the fact that Donovan was so young, however, he was neither an agent-in-training nor Gregor’s immediate subordinate in a Bureau operation. Gregor was simply unused to dealing with young law-enforcement officers in any other way. He was going to have to squelch his impulse to instruct. Donovan was being cooperative, probably because the Cardinal had asked him to be. Gregor didn’t want to jeopardize that.

He got out of his chair—he was so restless—and picked up the box the letter and the snake had come in. It had fallen to the floor in the confusion and been kicked—by Reverend Mother General or himself, Gregor didn’t know—slightly under the desk. Gregor turned it over in his hands and said, “The postmark is Maryville. The postmarks on the Cardinal’s letters have been Maryville, too. Did you know the Cardinal was getting these things?”

“No,” Pete Donovan said, “but I wouldn’t be surprised. Things have been—a little weird around here lately.”

Gregor chucked the box onto the desk. “What about Reverend Mother General?” he said. “Has she gotten any more of these things?”

Pete Donovan shrugged. “As far as I know, no. At least, she hasn’t come to me about them. That doesn’t mean she hasn’t gotten them.”

“You sound as if you think she must have.”

“Maybe I do. Like I said, things have been a little weird around here lately. St. Mary Magdalen’s out in Borum Ridge was vandalized about a month ago. Borum Ridge is on the western end of town. Whoever got in there took the crucifix off the wall behind the altar and hacked it into wood chips with an ax. Then they smashed a lot of windows and defecated on the altar. They must have made a racket fit to wake the dead, but Father Testaverdi was away for the week and there wasn’t anyone to hear them.”

Gregor considered this. “That kind of thing is usually kids, isn’t it? Kids pretending to be Satanists or kids getting drunk or stoned and out of control.”

“Sometimes.” Donovan conceded the point grudgingly. “The problem is,” he went on, “this isn’t your big city or your bedroom suburb. We’ve grown a bit. We even have our own version of a low-rent district, complete with Spanish bodegas and knife fights once or twice a month on Friday nights. But even the low-rent district is small.”

“I don’t see what you’re getting at.”

“What I’m getting at is, we all know each other.” Pete Donovan sighed. “Hell, I know every one of the Spanish kids by face and name except for maybe one or two who moved in in the last week or so. I’m not saying I’d recognize everybody who lives in town. It’s a bigger town than that. But it’s not a much bigger town than that. If someone’s desecrating altars and sending nuns—which one did you say it was?”

“This one.” Gregor picked up the letter with the picture on it and handed it over.