A Great Day for the Deadly(35)
On the bench, Neila Connelly was squirming and shifting. “I went to the infirmary to get an aspirin,” she told them. “I’ve been feeling terrible all day, hot and tired. Not bad enough to skip work but—bad. So I thought I’d get an aspirin and it would make me feel better.”
“Is that where you think you found this—where you think you found Don?” Pete Donovan asked.
Neila Connelly made a sharp impatient gesture in the air, so much like one of Father Tibor’s that Gregor was startled. Maybe it was a form of all-purpose ethnic sign language. Maybe Neila had picked it up from her cousins in Ireland or the oldest woman on her street.
“I don’t think I found Don Bollander,” she was saying, “and I don’t think I found a body, either. I know it was Don Bollander because I saw his face, and I know it was a body because I—I touched it.”
“In the infirmary?” Pete Donovan insisted.
Neila shook her head. “I didn’t do anything in the infirmary, really. Sister Hilga was already gone. I really am feeling bad today. Out of synch. The bell for chapel must have rung and I didn’t notice it. When I got to the infirmary it was empty and Sister Hilga was gone and we’re not allowed to take medication without permission, not even an aspirin. So I decided to come downstairs.”
“To go to chapel,” Gregor said, trying to get this strange sequence worked out. “If you were late for chapel than it stands to reason that once you realized it you must have gone to chapel.”
“That’s right.” Staring up at him, Neila’s eyes were large and round and green, beautiful eyes in a face that had nothing else beautiful in it. “They make a royal fuss around here when you’re late for things, especially prayers, because prayers are supposed to be the point. And I’m never late, so when I saw nobody at the infirmary desk and then I looked out into the hall and there was nobody on the corridor—I suppose I should have noticed that before but I just—”
“You were feeling bad,” Pete Donovan said.
“Exactly. Anyway, I started downstairs. Sister Scholastica is always telling us not to cross the courtyard without our capes in this weather, but the courtyard is a shortcut and I was in a hurry. You’re not supposed to be in a hurry, either, not ever. And now I’m sitting out here and I’m not even cold. I don’t know what’s going on.”
“Tell me where this infirmary is,” Gregor said. He was hoping that in getting Neila to talk about the geography of the Motherhouse, he might also get her to talk about the location of the body. He couldn’t understand why Pete Donovan wasn’t more anxious to establish that fact. What worried Gregor was what he thought should be obvious to everybody, Neila Connelly included. Neila was not a doctor, a nurse, or a paramedic. In spite of her protestations, if there was a body, that body was not necessarily dead.
Neila had left her bench and advanced into the courtyard. She pointed upward and said, “Those windows there, next to the long thin ones that go to the staircase. That’s the infirmary.”
“And the staircase is just beside it,” Gregor said.
“The doors are side by side, except that the staircase door is a fire door that swings, instead of the kind with a knob in it. There’s another one, another fire door, at the bottom. It’s right across from that one I came out of. It goes to the front lawn.”
“All right,” Gregor said, “so you came through that door. Was it open?”
“It’s never open. We’re not even allowed to prop it open. It’s supposed to serve as a firebreak.”
“Fine. So. You went through it and down the stairs—”
“And when I was halfway down, when I got to the turn and the landing, I saw the door to the utility room standing open. There’s a room on the first floor right at the bottom of those stairs with a big industrial sink in it and mops and pails and things for cleaning. Anyway, that’s not left open, either. Sister Alice Marie says if you leave that door open, the kittens get in there and eat the cleaning fluids and kill themselves. And there are always kittens around here. There are like five cats and they’re always getting pregnant.”
Pete Donovan cleared his throat. “Neila,” he said, “if you could just—not that I’m trying to hurry you or anything—”
Neila shot him an exasperated look. “You think I’m lying,” she said. “You think I’m like Bernadette and Amanda and whoever else went tromping down to your office this week, getting the vapors and making up stories that didn’t have anything to do with anything.”