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A Great Day for the Deadly(62)



“He isn’t the only one. The snakes, by the way, had been depoisoned or whatever you do to them to make them harmless without taking out their fangs. So. According to the Cardinal, Mr. Harrigan keeps snakes. And according to Sister Scholastica, a woman named Miriam Bailey who owns the local bank also owns a very young husband, and one of the toys she’s bought him is a menagerie. Sister Scholastica has never seen it, but I think I can reasonably suppose that some of the animals it might contain might be snakes. I’m putting that badly, but you see what I mean.”

“I see what you mean. How old is this Miriam Bailey to make you sound so much like a Puritan when you mention her husband? How old is her husband? What are they like?”

When are you going to get your mind off sex? Gregor wondered. He said, “Miriam Bailey is in her sixties, I think. Her husband is twenty-five. At least three people have told me that. I don’t know what either one of them is like. I haven’t met them.”

“You haven’t met them?”

“I haven’t met anybody.” Gregor sighed. “I got here. I went up to the Motherhouse—before even checking into this hotel, mind you; the Cardinal’s driver did that for me—and there was another body on my doorstep. I feel like I’m doing one of those mystery jigsaw puzzles where they don’t give you a picture of what the puzzle is supposed to end up looking like.”

“Well, if I were you, I’d put this Miriam Bailey at the top of your suspect list, even if you haven’t met her.” Bennis laughed. “Old woman. Young man. Small local bank. It sounds like exactly the kind of thing that gives Federal regulators attacks of apoplexy.”

“I agree. Unfortunately, I do not as yet know of any reason for that to lead to the death of Brigit Ann Reilly. The second victim was an employee of the bank—”

“Was he?”

“Oh, yes. In fact, someone—I think it was Pete Donovan, the local cop—told me he was Ms. Bailey’s personal assistant. I’ve thought about it, Bennis, I truly have. If Miriam Bailey wanted to kill her own assistant, she had a hundred ways to do it that didn’t involve sticking him in a laundry sink in the local convent—a difficult and risky thing to do, by the way.”

“She might have been trying to direct attention away from herself.”

“Sure,” Gregor said, “but since she runs this bank, we have to assume that she is reasonably intelligent, and if she is reasonably intelligent, she has to realize that the attention would be right back on her in about three minutes, which it was. And that still leaves Brigit Ann Reilly, and the flood.”

“What flood?”

Gregor sighed. “Go back to work, Bennis. You know more about trolls than you do about life. There was a flood up here the day Brigit Ann Reilly was killed, not a huge one, but substantial. There was enough warning for the town to get organized for evacuations and emergency services. If we assume Brigit Ann Reilly was alive either when or shortly before she was found—”

“Wait a minute,” Bennis said. “What did she die from?”

“Coniine,” Gregor told her, “hemlock. She was a small girl, according to my reports, and she wouldn’t have eaten much that morning, so say it took about half an hour to start feeling sick, two hours to pass out and two and a half hours to die, that would mean she would have had to have been fed hemlock somewhere between ten and ten thirty, by which time everyone already knew the flood was coming—”

“Maybe our murderer thought the flood would cover it,” Bennis said. “Maybe he thought the body would be found and everybody would think she’d been drowned.”

“Maybe,” Gregor said, “but I don’t think so. I think Brigit Ann Reilly was killed that day because she had to be killed that day and no later. Don’t ask me why. That’s what it feels like.”

“Mmm,” Bennis said. There was the sound of a match popping into flame, and Gregor realized she was lighting a cigarette. He thought about giving her another lecture about how bad that was for her health and bit his tongue instead. Every time he lectured, she told him, “That argument only works on people who think the most important thing in life is health.”

Gregor heard her take a drag and then blow out a stream of air. She always did that through pursed lips, as if she were trying to whistle. Sometimes she did whistle. It was odd, because she could never whistle when she wanted to.

“Well,” she said, “you’re right about one thing. I do know more about trolls than anything else, at least at the moment. I ought to go back to knowing about trolls, too. This manuscript is already overdue. I miss you.”