A Great Day for the Deadly(39)
Scholastica nodded. “Yes, she did. We make a point of requiring our postulants and novices to do all three kinds of work: intellectual, charitable, and practical. Brigit’s practical work was going back and forth to the library every day, among other things. Her charitable work was to teach reading to adults at St. Andrew’s.”
“Does that mean Don Bollander and Brigit Ann Reilly knew each other?” Gregor asked.
Scholastica considered this. “In a way,” she said, “I suppose it does. He would have known her by sight, certainly, even if he didn’t know her by name. He spent a fair amount of time on site. I don’t think he would have known her well. In fact, I’m sure he didn’t.”
“Why?”
Scholastica snorted. “Don Bollander was the kind of person who dramatized himself,” she said. “He was the kind of person who liked to be near excitement. If he’d known Brigit Ann Reilly well, he’d have told everyone in town about it after she died, just to have an association with the thrill of it. Instead, he was wandering around town telling everybody how he was engaged in a hush-hush project that would ensure the canonization of Margaret Finney and turn Maryville into the new and improved Lourdes.”
“New and improved Lourdes,” Gregor murmured, and then he straightened up. Now there was noise coming at him, much more noise than he’d thought it possible for nuns to make. First the noise was in the courtyard, a low hum like too many bees near a flower and the stomp of feet on stone. Then the courtyard door opened and Reverend Mother General came in. Behind her, Gregor could see nothing but a sea of black and white head coverings and Pete Donovan’s blond thatch. Beside him, Scholastica stood up.
“Reverend Mother,” Scholastica said.
“Is there a man dead in here?” Reverend Mother demanded. “In the laundry sink?”
There was more commotion at Reverend Mother’s back. Pete Donovan was pushing himself forward, excusing himself to nuns at every turn. He got to the doorway and gave Reverend Mother General a gentle and apologetic nudge to make enough room to get himself inside.
“If there’s a body in here, I want to see the body in here,” he said, and then he pushed Gregor out of the utility room doorway and walked inside. Going in, he was caught in the same cheerful and skeptical mood he had been in talking to Neila outside. No sooner had he got all the way inside than that changed.
“Jesus screaming Christ,” he said, in a voice loud enough to carry to every nun in the vicinity—and making them all wince. “She was telling the truth,” he bellowed. “There really is a dead man in here.”
Gregor already knew there was a dead man in there. That wasn’t what he wanted to think about for the moment.
What he wanted to think about was how strangely similar Scholastica’s descriptions of the characters of Don Bollander and Brigit Ann Reilly had been.
Two
[1]
UNLIKE PETE DONOVAN, MIRIAM Bailey had never been able to say she knew most of the people in town, by sight or any other way. Her father had been much too strict about the distinctions of class to allow her a latitude like that. To be precise, he had been much too strict about the distinctions of class for women. Men were supposed to be able to hold their own in rough company. Miriam’s father had divided the world in a great many ways, always marking those divisions by gender. Later, when Miriam went to college and discovered that no one shared his rules and regulations for proper conduct in women and men, she had wondered if he had invented them just for her. Rules for a wayward daughter, she had told herself at the time, and then almost immediately dismissed the thought. There was nothing wayward at all about her at the age of eighteen, at least on the surface—and her father was no mind reader. If he suspected her of subversion, he was experiencing a form of clinical paranoia. Miriam at eighteen was plain and awkward and shy and badly dressed, in spite of a clothes allowance the size of one of her father’s bank clerks’ salaries. Miriam at eighteen was also polite, courteous, modest, retiring, and deferential to men.
Miriam at sixty-odd was in something of a bind. She might not know everyone in town, but the people she did know were far too numerous. It was just a little after noon. Over the last hour, sitting alone in the house on Huntington Avenue, she had taken at least eleven phone calls on the subject of Don Bollander—or maybe she should think of it as “Don Bollander’s demise.” Whatever it was, she had heard much more of it than she wanted to. Sheila McRae over at Bell Epoque—Bell Epoque was a house; the cuteness of its name was apparently what passed for wit in Sheila’s Smith College graduating class—had wanted to know what Miriam was going to do about it, with Don lying all bloody in the convent well. Deborah Martin had been more sensible. She’d at least known that Don wasn’t found bloody or in the convent well. Her speciality had been sympathy, sticky and sweet. After a while, Miriam had thought she could see Deborah’s voice, sliding down the wire like molasses down a string. The phone rang and rang, rang and rang. Every time Miriam picked it up, she thought it would be the police, but it never was.