“That’s all right,” Gregor said.
“Well. She tied everything to that. It would never have worked if she’d had to go down to chapel that way, because it was noticeable. Not as noticeable as you’d think, though. I had no idea there was so much material in these skirts. Anyway, after she tied the things to herself, she wrapped herself up in a shawl, and the shawls we use cover everything. I mean they’re enormous. If you wrapped one the right way, you could probably cover a ninth-month preg—I’m sorry, Reverend Mother.”
“That’s quite all right, Neila. Of course, in my day there were girls who entered the convent without ever once having heard that word spoken in their lives, but there were others who knew a few you probably don’t. Including myself. Mr. Demarkian, as far as I know, this is all the information Miss Connelly has.”
“It is,” Neila Connelly said. “It’s all I ever knew. Brigit didn’t tell me anything.”
“Did she tell you what she was going to do with the outfit?” Gregor asked.
“Oh, that,” Neila said. “Yes. She told me what she was going to do with that. She was going to give it to a friend of hers, a new and special friend and that friend had a friend who had just begun to realize she might have a vocation—I got the impression that Brigit thought this friend of a friend business was all made up. That whoever had asked her for the dress was the one who was going to wear it around and see if she liked the feel of it.”
“What size was this dress?” Gregor asked.
“Twelve,” Neila said. “The shoes were tens but I wouldn’t put too much into that. Brigit didn’t know the right shoe size. She kept saying that whoever this was had bigger feet than she did and then she got the biggest because you could stuff them, you know, and still wear them, but if the shoes were too small there was nothing you could do with them at all.”
“I wonder who’s size twelve,” Gregor said.
“I am,” Scholastica told him. “So are half the women I know, in the convent and out. Alice Marie. Ann-Harriet Severan and Miriam Bailey both, that’s a joke. Glinda Daniels. We’ve all got big feet, too.”
“Miriam’s feet aren’t big,” Reverend Mother General said. “I don’t think they’re even sevens.”
Scholastica turned to Gregor. She had meant to make some passing comment about the shoes not counting, but she didn’t. The look on his face was very familiar. She remembered it from Colchester, and it frightened her.
“Oh,” she said. “You know?”
“What?” Gregor looked up at her. “No. I don’t know. I almost know. Are you acquainted with a woman named Barbara Keel?”
“Senile,” Reverend Mother General said.
“Well, she may or may not be, but she said something very intelligent to me tonight. I knew there was no such thing as a locked-room mystery.”
“What?” Scholastica said.
The phone on Reverend Mother General’s desk rang and she leaned over to pick it up, barked hello into the receiver, and listened. A few seconds later, she handed the receiver across the desk.
“It’s for you,” she told Gregor Demarkian. “It’s Pete Donovan and he sounds half out of his mind.”
Three
[1]
GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD A driver’s license, but he did not drive. According to Bennis Hannaford—and to everyone else who had ever had the misfortune of spending time with him when he was behind the wheel—he was a world-class menace on four tires, especially to the car. He was bad even with small machines. Blenders and electric pencil-sharpening machines seemed to come apart in his hands. Cars seemed to blow up. Once he had set a brand new 1979 Honda Civic on fire in the parking lot of a Stop & Shop in Brookfield, Connecticut, nobody ever knew how. Fortunately, he wasn’t a man with much of a yen for high-speed car chases—just a little one. Mostly he considered all that sort of thing silly and beneath his dignity. Sometimes, watching Bullit late at night on television, he wondered what it would feel like. If he was ever going to get the chance to know—which he was sure he wasn’t—this call from Pete Donovan would have been it. Reverend Mother had understated the case. Pete Donovan wasn’t half out of his mind. He was all the way out of it and on his way to becoming a form of free-floating electricity. Gregor knew that tone of voice all too well. Here was a man who kept watch over a small town. Small towns were warm places, full of routine and predictability. Now the routine was in ruins and the predictability had been shot to hell. Sanity did not look likely to make a reappearance soon. The world was a mess and getting messier by the minute. No wonder Pete sounded as if he wanted to strangle somebody, preferably God.