He looked through the scant text for some sign of an answer, but found none. The story was continued on the next page, so he turned and found nothing there, either. When the case was solved, People would run a five- or ten-page extravaganza and explain the whole thing, but at this point in the investigation they were only interested in titillating. Gregor looked over the pictures on this third page and found a couple he recognized: John Cardinal O’Bannion, and a young woman in a not very modified nun’s habit identified as “Sister Mary Scholastica, Mistress of Postulants and Brigit Ann Reilly’s religious superior in the Sisters of Divine Grace.” Gregor had known her as Sister Scholastica Burke. At the time, she had been principal of St. Agnes’s Parish School in Colchester, New York, and Gregor had been in Colchester looking into a little matter for the Cardinal Archbishop. Gregor ran his finger down the column of type and came up with a paragraph that read,
According to Sister Scholastica, Brigit was a model postulant. “Postulants often have trouble with religious obedience, but Brigit never seemed to,” Sister Scholastica said. “She was always very conscientious about everything she did. I don’t know what she could have been doing in that storeroom so late in the day.”
Gregor slapped the magazine shut, rolled it up, and stuffed it in his pocket. That was the kind of thing people always said in the wake of a violent death. From what he had known of Sister Scholastica, he would have expected better. He wondered if Bennis was at home right this moment, reading this copy of People and coming to the same conclusions. He didn’t suppose she was. The last he’d seen of Bennis, she’d been six weeks into her new novel, holed up in her apartment the way doughboys in World War I had holed up in foxholes, every piece of furniture covered with Post-It notes about rogue trolls, enchanted castles, singing unicorns, and damsels more distressing than distressed. She hadn’t been out in the air since the middle of January, and she swore she wasn’t coming out until she had a draft. Since Bennis’s drafts generally ran seven or eight hundred pages of elite type, Gregor expected Ararat to be shipping in restaurant meals for some time to come.
Still, what Bennis was doing to him—and he couldn’t help thinking of it like that; as something she was doing to him—was better than what the rest of them had done. That was why he was feeling so abandoned, illogical though it might be. The rest of them had virtually disappeared. Father Tibor had gone back to Independence College to teach another course. Lida Arkmajian and Hannah Krekorian had taken Donna Moradanyan and her infant son to Lida’s house in Boca Raton. Even old George Tekamanian was in the Bahamas, floating around on a cruise ship with his grandson Martin, his grandson Martin’s wife, and his three great-grandchildren.
The truth of it was simple: In the year and a half since Gregor had been back on Cavanaugh Street, he had learned to rely on these people as completely as he had ever relied on Elizabeth. When they stepped out of his life even temporarily, he felt as if he’d had the foundation knocked out from under him. It was something he was going to have to do something about someday. He just didn’t want someday to be today. Or ever.
He went over to one of the sinks and washed his hands, just to feel that he had done something practical in the men’s room, instead of just hiding from Dave Herder’s prattle. Then he made his way back into the lobby. There were three restaurants on this level—or accessible from this level—as far as Gregor knew, but the only one Dave and Schatzy would be in was at the back, on the other side of the building from the wall of glass doors. Gregor passed the baggage check and the check-in desk and was making his way along the wall opposite the guest services desk when he heard his name called out.
“Mr. Demarkian?” the high feminine voice said. “Mr. Demarkian, please? If you have a minute?”
Gregor looked over to the guest services desk and saw a small woman—tiny, really—jumping up and down behind the counter. While he watched, she pushed herself up against the counter with her hands and called again.
“Mr. Demarkian?”
“I’m coming.” He walked across the hall until he came to her, and smiled. She had let herself down from her perch and was looking a little sweaty and flustered.
“Oh, Mr. Demarkian,” she said, “you don’t know what we’ve been through. We didn’t know where you were, you see.”
“Of course you didn’t,” Gregor said. “Why should you?”
“That’s what I said,” the woman told him in a confidential voice, “but you just can’t get away with saying that kind of thing when you’re talking to the Archdiocese of New York. Oh, I’m sorry. That’s what this is about. We have a message for you from the Archdiocese of New York.”