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A Great Day for the Deadly(77)

By:Jane Haddam


“It’s Miriam Bailey,” he said, when Gregor had taken the phone from Reverend Mother General. “Dead as a doornail and—never mind, and. You can see for yourself. I’m coming to get you.”

“Shouldn’t you stay at the scene?” Gregor asked him.

“I’ve got half the local state police barracks at the scene, and they’re not going to do any more good than I would. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

“Five minutes,” Gregor repeated dutifully.

“I’ve got Josh Malley here and when I get the other one, I’m going to strangle her with my bare hands. Just for the aggravation.”

Pete Donovan slammed the phone in Gregor’s ear and Gregor handed the receiver back to Reverend Mother General.

“I’ve got to go,” he said.





[2]


Five minutes later, Gregor was standing on the stone steps outside the front door to the Motherhouse with Scholastica beside him, feeling the wind under the collar of his coat. Pete Donovan turned in at the gate with a squeal of tires, rolled up to the steps and popped the passenger door open with the motor still running. How he managed it, Gregor never knew.

“Get in,” he said.

Gregor said something reasonably polite to Sister Scholastica and got in. He slammed the passenger door after him and looked expectantly at Donovan. Donovan was in no mood to satisfy expectations. He gunned the motor, popped it into gear and slammed his foot on the gas pedal. Unfortunately, he slowed to make the turn that led to the gate. Otherwise, Gregor thought, his performance would have been perfect.

Gregor waited until they were out on the main streets of Maryville before he started talking. Then he went about it in as careful and uncontentious a manner as possible.

“So,” he said in a neutral voice, “where are we going?”

“Huntington Avenue,” Pete told him, running a red light at Delaney and Sands. “Miriam has a house up there. I should say the Baileys have a house. Miriam’s grandfather built it.”

“Miriam’s grandfather who founded the bank?”

“That may have been her great-grandfather,” Pete said. “I can never remember those things.”

“It comes down to the same thing,” Gregor said dismissively. “The family. Always the family. How did you find Miss Bailey dead?”

“We didn’t.” They were now at Delaney and Londonderry. A right turn would have taken them to Diamond Place and Clare Avenue and Beckner, an area of town which Gregor had never seen but of which he had heard in detail. They turned left instead, up another hill, but a more gentle one than the slope of Delaney Street itself.

“Josh Malley found Miriam,” Pete Donovan said, “or at least that’s what he’s telling us at the moment. He’s the one who called.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. I took the call myself. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. He must have called me just before he called the fire department.”

“The fire department?”

“The house has had a nice little job of arson done on it,” Pete Donovan said. “Kerosene splashed all over the floor of the conservatory and lit. It caught the conservatory windows just as we got there, but it had been going a good long time before that.”

“Hmm,” Gregor said. “What about the body?”

“The body is the kicker,” Donovan told him. “The conservatory leads to a greenhouse kind of thing. It’s where Josh keeps that menagerie of his. The only way you can get to it is through the conservatory. The body is on a second-level ledge in the greenhouse.”

“Can’t you come at it from outside?”

“According to the fire department, no. The trees are too thick and too close. Also too old. By the time you hacked through them the house would have burned to the ground. If she was alive in there—” Donovan shrugged.

“You’re sure she’s not?” Gregor asked him.

“Positive. I can use a pair of binoculars as well as anyone else. You can see the body, Gregor, you just can’t touch it.”

“Hmm,” Gregor said again.

Pete turned the car off Londonderry Street and onto something called Farrow. Farrow wound around the base of a small hill and turned into something called Fox. From Fox, Gregor could finally see it: first a glow on the horizon, then the pulsing red of fire about to go out of control. The car spun off Fox onto Huntington and he was faced with what could only be the very best part of town. It was a street of graceful brick two-stories on graceful wide lawns, a uniformity broken only by the great stone pile with the fire engines and police cars parked in front of it: Miriam Bailey’s Huntington Avenue house. The neighbors on either side of it and across the street were out on their front steps, watching the action. Pete Donovan skidded by them with a shudder of disgust.