A Great Day for the Deadly(38)

He backed away from it all and stuck his head into the hall. “You were telling me about Don Bollander,” he said to Scholastica. “You should keep talking. Do you have a notebook?”

Scholastica shoved her hands into one of her pockets and came up with a palm-size notebook and a ballpoint pen. “It’s part of the uniform. Do you want me to write something down?”

“A reminder to the medical examiner. I want to know the location and the temporal origin of any bruises found anywhere on the body, no matter how small.”

“Temporal origin?”

“Whether they were made before or after death.”

“Oh.”

“Tell me about Don Bollander.”

“Well,” Scholastica said. “Well. You know who Miriam Bailey is. We talked about that before. Do you know about Ann-Harriet Severan?”

“No”

“Ann-Harriet works at the bank. As some kind of minor officer. She’s very pretty and very volatile, one of those people who go off their nuts at the first sign of trouble, which is interesting because she’s always in trouble, because Ann-Harriet is having an affair with Josh—you remember Josh?”

“I remember.”

“Miriam must know,” Scholastica said. “The two of them are very clumsy about it all. Anyway, that’s the kind of assistant Don Bollander was. He dealt with whatever had to be dealt with, and if that meant keeping Ann-Harriet in line, then he did it. And that wouldn’t have been easy, either, because Ann-Harriet is a consummate—well, it’s tacky to use a word like this in habit, but there really is only one word and that’s—”

“Bitch.”

“Exactly. The postulants don’t like Miriam Bailey much, but they really detest Ann-Harriet Severan. She’s always saying things, making fun of them, if you know what I mean. But anyway, Don. Don got a little promotion just about the time Miriam decided to come back to town as a rich old lady with a very young husband.”

“So what did Don Bollander have to do with that?”

Scholastica smiled. “I said he was her assistant. What he really was was her flack catcher. He was totally useless as a banker. In all the time since I’ve been connected to Maryville, since I’ve entered the convent, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of him doing any banking work at all.”

“What did he do?”

“He ran interference. He took care of things that would waste her time. Miriam has a very definite idea of what is and what isn’t a waste of her time. She thinks she has to do community work, as she puts it. Otherwise the bank doesn’t look good. She funds the literacy program at St. Andrew’s and she makes an appearance there every year. Don does—did the grub work. He looked after the paper. He sent the checks she signed. He ordered books when the program needed books and refreshments when the program was going to have a party. Then Margaret Finney was beatified, and Miriam wanted to start a lay committee for—I don’t remember what she called it. She wanted to support the canonization effort. It’s impossible to explain to people like Miriam that things just aren’t the way they used to be. Canonization isn’t that kind of adversarial process it was before Vatican II—”

“Back up,” Gregor said. He had been listening for sounds in the courtyard or the hall. It seemed to him to be a monstrous amount of time since he had left Pete Donovan and Neila Connelly at the bench, instructing them to get Reverend Mother General and bring her back to him. It shouldn’t be taking this long to find the Motherhouse’s most important and visible nun. He ran his hands through his hair in irritation.

“I wish I knew what was keeping them,” he said. “This is insane. We ought to have forensic people up here.”

Sister Scholastica shrugged. “The bell had rung for chapel. It’s just midmorning prayer—what I suppose used to be called Terce, since they suppressed Prime—anyway, it’s a minor hour, but it’s still an hour. If Pete and Neila caught them at just the wrong moment, they might not have been able to get Reverend Mother General’s attention.”

“They should have stood up in the middle of the room and shouted and howled until they did.”

“You were going to ask me something else?” Scholastica said.

Gregor turned his mind back to the problem at hand. “You said something about the literacy program at St. Andrew’s. Don Bollander did the grub work for the literacy program at St. Andrew’s.”

“That’s right.”

“Didn’t I read in the Cardinal’s report somewhere that Brigit Ann Reilly worked in the literacy program at St. Andrew’s?”