Gregor thought of the letters the Cardinal had received and the letter—as well as the snake—that had been delivered to Reverend Mother this morning. He said, “There’s a young girl dead and she was training to join a religious order. There’s a man dead, too, and he was found in that religious order’s utility room. Those two things seem to me to be enough reason to at least consider the possibility that what we have here is some kind of antireligious mania.”
“I suppose they are,” Doherty said. “All I can tell you is, I haven’t seen anything of the kind. To tell you the truth, it’s been quiet on every front I can think of over the last few months. I work down in a parish called St. Andrew’s—”
“I know about St. Andrew’s,” Gregor told him. “Sister Scholastica was explaining it to me. Poor parish, mostly Hispanic immigrant population. Lots of programs, literacy classes, and a clinic.”
“That’s right. Also citizenship classes and, believe it or not, a parish school. Don’t ask me how we keep it running, because I don’t know. Bless those nuns. From time to time we get some know-nothing activity, anti-immigrant, antiforeigner stuff, but not recently. Recently, even the dope sales have been down.”
“Hmm,” Gregor said.
Doherty shifted a little in his chair. The lights in the lounge were so dim, and the windows so carefully tinted, it felt like the middle of the night instead of the middle of the afternoon. Doherty coughed into the side of his fist and said, “Mr. Demarkian, I came here because—no, let me put it another way. I know, because I read my local newspaper and because I spend a good deal of my time talking to Glinda Daniels, who’s been a friend of mine for years, anyway, I know all about the people who have come forward to say they saw Brigit Ann Reilly on the day she died. I know that most of them are fantasizing. I know that, from your perspective, reports of that kind are probably less than worthless, but I really did have to come—”
“You mean you saw Brigit Ann Reilly too?” Gregor wanted to add that if Father Doherty said he’d seen her, Gregor would believe he’d seen her. Father Doherty was a believable man.
Father Doherty was shaking his head. “Not exactly,” he told Gregor. “Hear me out. St. Andrew’s parish is down near the river. All the really bad parts of town are. On the day of the flood, I got worried early. I started packing us up well before noon. I didn’t want to take any chances. We have a lot of old people in our parish. You know how it is. The young men come here and work until they can bring their parents over and then their brothers and sisters and then their aunts and uncles and then their grandparents. The Irish did it and the Armenians did it and I suppose other people than these will do it in the future. You end up with a lot of old people being supported by fewer younger ones and everybody living in a small space, and the old people aren’t like the people here who live to be old. They’re feeble and they’re sick. That makes them hard to move. So, around about eleven thirty or so, when the rain was coming down in torrents, I made a few phone calls and got ready to evacuate. I got a bunch of the boys together and Sister Gabriel—she’s a nurse. She’s between assignments and the Motherhouse loans her out to me for the clinic—anyway, I got us all together, told Barry Fitzsimmons to get ready for us in the auditorium at Iggy Loy, and sent the boys out to search the apartments in the buildings around us and make sure we didn’t forget anyone. Then I had to wait for a phone call, so I stayed in my office, just sort of standing there, and that was when I saw the nun.”
“Nun?”
Michael Doherty took a deep breath. “Postulant. Whatever. I recognized the dress. She came down Beckner Street, straight at me as if she were headed for the church, and she made me very nervous. I mean, what was she doing down there, in that weather? What could she be doing? So I left my office and went out to intercept her. I got to the front door of the church and she was gone, except that I thought I saw a piece of black cloth disappearing through the door of Number Thirty-seven.”
“I see,” Gregor said slowly. “And you think this figure in black may have been Brigit Ann Reilly.”
“No,” Father Doherty said.
“What?” Gregor asked him.
Doherty took a long draft on his beer and slammed the glass onto the table in front of him. “I’m away on most program nights, visiting the prison. There are half a dozen postulants who volunteer in the programs at St. Andrew’s that I’ve never seen. Brigit Ann Reilly was something else again. Brigit Ann Reilly didn’t volunteer in the literacy program last month. She worked on my liturgical committee. She would have been on my liturgical committee this month, too, because she was good at it, except that she developed a violent crush on me and I had to cool it off. I knew Brigit Ann Reilly very well. And let me tell you, Mr. Demarkian, whoever that postulant was, walking down Beckner Street just after eleven thirty on the morning Brigit Ann Reilly died, it wasn’t Brigit Ann Reilly.”