A Great Day for the Deadly(75)

I’m making that up, Scholastica told herself, shooing Gregor in ahead of her. Then she put a big smile on her face and said in her perkiest voice, “Well. Here’s Mr. Demarkian. We all know Mr. Demarkian.”

The rest of them looked at her as if she’d gone insane.

Reverend Mother General rose up from behind her desk and motioned Gregor Demarkian to a seat. When he declined, she sat down again and spread her hands. Scholastica breathed a sigh of relief. It was always easier when Reverend Mother General took charge.

“Now,” Reverend Mother General said, “it seems to me we have two issues to consider in this present matter. One is the matter of a postulant not Brigit Ann Reilly having been seen by Father Doherty on Beckner Street on the day of the flood—”

“Also by Don Bollander at the bank about fifteen minutes before Glinda Daniels found Brigit’s body in the library.”

“Is that true?” Scholastica asked.

“Of course, it’s true,” Reverend Mother General snapped. “Why would he say so if it weren’t true? It does make our conclusions even more—conclusive. From what I remember about the police reports, Glinda found the body at approximately one o’clock?”

“That’s right,” Gregor said.

“Well, by quarter to one we’d all been organized in teams to help Father Doherty and the other people who had come up to Iggy Loy to get out of the wet, and if anybody else had been missing, I would have noticed.”

“If it had been a postulant, I would have noticed,” Neila Connelly put in. “We were all very nervous with the weather and Brigit missing. We were all packing boxes in a big room and we kept counting ourselves over and over to make sure.”

“I didn’t think any of you were missing,” Gregor said, “but I had to be sure. You have no idea how many great ideas have foundered on the rocks of not making sure.”

“I think I have,” Reverend Mother said. “I once spent ten years teaching English composition in a high school. Now. The other matter is the witness of Neila Connelly here, and I use the word witness advisedly. I have talked the matter over with her and I believe her. I think it would be a good idea if you believed her, too.”

“I intend to,” Gregor said.

Neila Connelly had gone very pale. Scholastica knelt down next to the girl’s chair and touched her arm. “Neila, if you can’t go on with this I’ll send you straight to the infirmary, no matter what Mr. Demarkian wants to know. Brigit and Mr. Bollander are dead. There’s no reason on earth why you should kill yourself.”

“I’m all right, Sister.” Neila started to cry, a squeezed outcry that dripped tears from the corners of her eyes like the tail end of a tube of toothpaste coming out onto a brush. Neila didn’t notice that the tears were there and let them run down the sides of her face. “The thing is,” she said, “I don’t really know much of anything at all.” She turned to Gregor pleadingly. “I told Sister Scholastica everything I could think of the first three minutes after I started talking. I was supposed to be Brigit’s best friend, but I didn’t get to know much more than anybody else did.”

“But you did know about this—uniform, or whatever it is,” Gregor said gently.

“Oh, yes.” Neila nodded vigorously. “Brigit took it out of the habits room the night before she died. After Compline. We’re supposed to observe Grand Silence after Compline, but Brigit had been getting worse and worse at that over the last few weeks, so she was talking away. And I was scared to death, because during Grand Silence you can hear a butterfly flap its wings in this place, I’m not kidding. So I thought we were going to get caught.”

“Stealing this postulant’s dress?”

“Talking,” Neila said. “And she didn’t just take a dress. She took a veil and stockings and shoes, too.”

Scholastica watched Gregor consider this. “They wouldn’t have been missed?” he asked finally. “A set like that can go out of the convent without anyone noticing?”

“Not forever,” Reverend Mother General told him, “but for a while, yes. We don’t have the staff we used to. We can’t spend time checking for things every day. We do inventory every month on the fifteenth unless the fifteenth is a Sunday. Then we do it on the following Monday. Until then, no one would necessarily know where anything was.”

“Oh,” Scholastica said, “I wouldn’t put it that strongly.”

“I would,” Reverend Mother General said.

“She thought she’d get them back long before they were missed,” Neila told them. “She hid them under her mattress that night and then just before she was supposed to leave for the library she came up here and stuffed them all under her skirts. The way this skirt is made, we’ve got a kind of extra belt under there, a rope thing that goes around the waist to keep the top part in place—I’d have to show you and I don’t think I should.”