A Great Day for the Deadly(58)

“Yes,” he said.

It was then that the first of the growing sounds from the other side of the window wall penetrated to them. It was a measure of their distraction that that sound was a piercing shriek.

“See?” Shelley was screeching. “See? I told you so! I told you something was going on!”





[2]


Sister Mary Scholastica had been present at the scene of a murder before. She knew how long it took for the police to get organized, for the evidence to be collected, for the discussions to take place that would provide the foundation for the investigation to come after. Most of all, she knew how boring it was for the bystanders, innocent or otherwise. There was nothing any of them could do but sit and wait—and it wasn’t like a hospital wait, either. Nobody was hovering in the background, promising to provide them with information as soon as it was available. Nobody thought they had any right to any information at all. They were supposed to keep their mouths shut and their bodies out of the way, until they were called. Then they were supposed to answer questions, not ask them.

That nobody else at the Motherhouse understood these simple rules of procedure was obvious from the way they were behaving. Reverend Mother General had put Scholastica in charge of “keeping order for this unusual day” because she’d had experience—Reverend Mother General herself was going to be busy on the phone to the Chancery, making arrangements for one thing and another with the Archdiocese—but the result of it was that the Sisters were taking their frustrations out on Scholastica instead of on the police. They wanted to know what was going on and were angry with Scholastica because she wouldn’t tell them. They wanted to understand how Don Bollander’s death connected to Brigit Ann Reilly’s and were angry with Scholastica when she didn’t know. Maybe angry was too strong a word. Nuns trained under the old dispensation—and most of the nuns at the Motherhouse had been trained under the old dispensation—had their emotions well under control. Not one of them would have dreamed of shouting or making a scene. They were just all putting out little electric charges of tension into the air. Scholastica felt it as a sharp stinging on her skin, a sure sign that she was under too much stress. She used to feel the same thing when she’d had to take math tests in high school, and all day every day during her postulant year.

Directly after lunch, Scholastica had put her postulants to work folding form letters and stuffing them into envelopes. The form letters were requests for help in establishing a case for the canonization of Margaret Finney, and were going out to the Motherhouse’s entire mailing list, a group of nearly 15,000 people. Major benefactors and small donors, women who had once been members of the order, women who had come for formation but left before taking vows, women who had written with interest but decided not to come or been turned down, former students, former lay teachers, former employees, women who had come on retreat or for the special seminars the order held twice a year on women and theology—it was incredible how many different categories of people were connected to a Mother-house, or how much work it took to contact them all at once. Scholastica thought she’d given her girls enough to do to last them for the rest of the day, and when she looked in on them at three fifteen she saw she had been right. She had put them in the big sewing room. In the old days, when the Sisters had worn a distinctive long habit that had to be made by hand and there had been 3,000 Sisters who needed two habits each, this room had served the Sister Seamstress and her assistants. Now, with the dress of their modified habit bought from a supply house and only their veils made on the premises, it was mostly empty. Scholastica found it cheered her up enormously to see the room full and busy again. She counted heads and came up with one missing. She searched faces and saw that Neila Connelly was not in the room. Then she made herself calm down. She couldn’t panic like this every time she couldn’t lay eyes at will on one of her postulants. She’d go crazy. They had to visit the bathroom in peace periodically.

She went back into the corridor and walked west toward her office and Alice Marie’s. Alice Marie’s door was open and she was sitting at her desk. Scholastica stuck her head in, looked at the phone and winced.

“Has it been bad?” she asked. “I heard you when I came through a few minutes ago. You were using that tone of voice you have that sounds like you’re trying to explain nuclear physics to a five-year-old.”

“I was talking to Thoma Andreotti’s mother.” Alice Marie sighed. “I can tell you when the news hit the network television stations,” she said. “At the one fifteen news break. How do they get on to these things so last?”