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A Great Day for the Deadly(82)

By:Jane Haddam


“Excuse me,” Gregor asked him.

They were still sitting in the driveway of Miriam Bailey’s Huntington Avenue house. The great arc of the drive was still clogged with police cars and fire engines. The drive behind Pete’s car was blessedly still clear, but not by much. The state police had sent for a mobile crime unit and it was pulled up half onto the drive’s center lawn. Pete Donovan gunned his engine, slammed his gears into reverse and hit the gas pedal—much harder, this time, than he had back on the road when he had been bringing Gregor in. The car kicked. The car skidded. The car steadied itself on the gravel of the drive and shot off onto the street. Moments later they were barreling into the center of town again, running red lights and causing havoc. Gregor closed his eyes and asked himself what he could have been thinking of, wishing for a chance to take part in a high-speed car chase. He didn’t know what they were chasing but they were certainly going at high speed. He didn’t like it a bit. Pete Donovan seemed to like it just fine, and after a while he did what Gregor had expected him to do at the beginning: he turned on his siren. Gregor had never been in a police car with the siren going before. The Federal Bureau of Investigation didn’t have police cars with sirens, and the local police who sometimes called them in on serial murder and kidnapping cases didn’t invite them to go tearing over the countryside in black-and-whites with the whoopy whistle blasting. Gregor had had no idea that the damn things were so loud.

“Can’t you turn that thing off?” he asked Pete Donovan.

“Soon as we get out of town,” Donovan said. “Don’t want to cause a traffic accident.”

“Why not? You’ve already caused three heart attacks.”

“I want you to tell me the whole story from the beginning,” Donovan said. “Then I’m going to read you chapter and verse about what I’m going to do to you if you’re wrong.”

“I can’t tell you anything with that noise going on over my head.”

“That’s Delaney Street coming up,” Donovan said.

That was, indeed, Delaney Street coming up. They jumped the red light and bolted into it, turned right up the hill toward the Motherhouse, and turned off to the right again onto a gentle fork. Commercial buildings began to shade into two-story hybrids and then into small houses with small yards, but the St. Patrick’s Day decorations didn’t shade into anything. Gregor saw all the same leprechauns, pots of gold, and shamrocks he had on Delaney and at the St. Mary’s Inn. Out here, some of the houses even had their lawns and porches decorated in a way that was more usual for Christmas. There were green and white lights and big fat leprechauns sitting on pots of gold and lit up from inside. Pete Donovan saw Gregor staring at it all and said, “They import ’em from the city. You can get anything from New York City.”

“Right,” Gregor said.

“Tell me a story,” Donovan said.

Gregor pointed to the roof.

Donovan leaned over to the dashboard and shut the siren off.





[2]


“So,” Gregor said a couple of minutes later, while they were winding their way through small and narrow roads that inevitably slowed them down. They weren’t as slowed as Gregor would have liked to be, but it wasn’t much use talking to Donovan about his driving. He wouldn’t listen. “So,” Gregor said again, “if you’re going to go back to the day the first of the murders happened—”

“I like that day,” Donovan said.

“Yes. Well. If you’re going to start there, you’ve got this. Brigit Ann Reilly was a girl who may or may not have had a vocation as a nun, but who very definitely had an avocation as a conspirator. She also had a strong sentimental streak. She was the kind of girl who liked stories about lost puppies saved from drowning and who imagined herself in the starring role in all the most affecting stories of the ancient saints. She had also been very sheltered, so that she knew very little of people who were not like herself. When the Sisters sent her down to work at St. Andrew’s, she had her eyes opened—but not just to poverty, the way the Sisters wanted her to be. St. Andrew’s is Maryville’s favorite local charity—”

“Of course it is,” Donovan said. “It’s easy to help those people. They work their butts off—”

“That’s hardly the point,” Gregor told him. “The point is, Brigit didn’t meet only poor people at St. Andrew’s. She met rich and exotic ones, too. She met Miriam Bailey, for instance, because Miriam and the bank funded a lot of programs and Miriam liked to keep an eye on them. She met Ann-Harriet Severan and Don Bollander, because Miriam Bailey insisted on her employees’ involvement in charitable work. She met Father Michael Doherty, the ultimate sentimental hero, a man who had left a rich family to live with the poor. If Father Doherty hadn’t been so conscientious, Brigit Ann Reilly might never have died. Her first inclination, I think, was to develop a roaring crush on him.”