Part Three
One
[1]
IF EDITH HAD BEEN a different kind of woman, Gregor Demarkian would have gone back to his room by crossing in front of the reception desk and taking the elevator. If he had, he would have been handed the messages waiting for him in his box. One of those messages was from Sister Mary Scholastica. It asked him to come to the convent and gave him a sketch of what the schedule was like there. In spite of the relatively relaxed atmosphere at the Motherhouse in these days following Vatican II, there was a religious schedule there and it did have to be followed. The other messages were mostly from people whose names he wouldn’t have recognized. Since the Cardinal’s press conference—why the Cardinal always had to hold a press conference, no matter what, was beyond Gregor’s power to understand—the full force of Maryville’s fantasies of conspiracy and violence had been turned in his direction. The St. Mary’s Inn was the only decent place to stay in town. If you wanted something else and weren’t interested in drunks or squalor, you had to go out to the Ramada Inn on the other side of the highway. It had taken no time at all for Maryville’s most determined conspiracy theorists to find out where Gregor was staying.
Because Edith was the kind of woman she was and because Gregor couldn’t stand the idea of being screeched at one more time, however, he took the back stairs both going back up and coming back down, avoiding reception altogether. One of the things the Bureau had taught him was to find secondary exits immediately. He had noticed the fire door at the back of the hall on his room floor when he had first been brought upstairs by Edith and the fire door at the end of the hall leading to the downstairs men’s room when he’d been saying good-bye to Father Doherty. Fire doors almost always meant stairs. Gregor was always surprised with what had stayed with him. “Always find a secondary exit” was a rule for a field agent, and he hadn’t been a field agent for ten years before his retirement. “Always organize your complaints on paper” was a rule for administrators, and he had forgotten how to carry out that one on the day he handed in his resignation.
After he left Father Doherty, he ran up to his room, grabbed the heavy brown leather jacket Lida Arkmajian had given him for his birthday, and ran down again. Then he left the St. Mary’s Inn and started heading even farther down the slope of Delaney Street. Eventually he wanted to head up and back to the Motherhouse, but not yet. All he needed to do up there was to check his suppositions. Right now he wanted to go to the library, where he might actually find out something new.
It wasn’t a very long walk. In fact, in Gregor’s estimation, the entire stretch from the Motherhouse gate to the library’s main doors was barely twelve full city blocks. It was a short enough distance to travel, and it made the “sightings” a little more forgivable. There was something eerie about a girl disappearing along a walk as short as that and showing up dead. It wasn’t a deserted walk, either. Gregor tried to think of Brigit walking—staggering, really—anywhere on Delaney Street after she had been poisoned, close to the end. He couldn’t do it. Even in the flood, somebody would have been around to see her. Delaney Street was lined with public buildings and small stores with apartments above them. Glinda Daniels had just been closing up the library when she found the body. Surely somebody would have been around on the street in the half hour or so before that, when Brigit must have been on her way to the storeroom, by one means or another. No, either Brigit Ann Reilly walked to her place of dying on a road other than this one, or she was brought there in a vehicle and dumped. Gregor was a little shocked to realize that the problem he was considering now was essentially the same one he had been considering earlier this afternoon, when he had been talking to Pete Donovan about the death of Don Bollander. In each case, he had a body dumped someplace where, on reflection, it couldn’t be. With Bollander, that had been all too obvious. With Brigit Ann Reilly, it hadn’t even been considered, because there had been too much else to think about. The snakes, the flood—Gregor was nearly at the library doors now and he shuddered. Where was the storeroom door? If it was anywhere in sight of these doors he was headed for now, getting Brigit Ann Reilly through it, conscious or unconscious, would have been damn near impossible. If it was around the back—he would have to go around the back.
He stepped up to the main doors and let them slide open in front of him, gliding smoothly in their tracks. He watched with his mind half on something else as the smoked glass gave way to a typical small-town scene, with children sitting in a ring around a reader in the children’s section and two teenagers fumbling with the card catalog and a middle-aged woman with a stack of romance novels checking out at the desk. The Norman Rockwell picture was entrancing, and for a moment it obscured what else was going on in the Maryville Public Library. Gregor Demarkian was not one of those people who believed that Norman Rockwell had painted a false-faced, cotton candy, never-existing world. He had known dozens of Norman Rockwell families and Norman Rockwell towns in his career. This just didn’t happen to be one of either.