Hardscrabble Road(16)

Actually, what Frank had told her at the time was that he wanted to be protected from ever having to be in the same room with Drew unless there was somebody else present; but it didn’t matter. Frank walked out the door, and Marla went flipping through her Rolodex to find the card she’d written Mike Barbarossa’s contact information on. She gave a passing thought to Sherman Markey, and then she just let it go. She couldn’t go on feeling guilty forever, and it wasn’t like she’d killed the man, or forced him to sleep in the streets on a night when it was cold enough to freeze a man’s balls into ice cubes.

She had a schedule to fill, and now that she had a chance in hell of filling it, without Mr. Drew Harrigan, she was feeling better than she had in months.





3


At the Monastery of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Sister Maria Beata of the Incarnation was just finishing up her duty in the kitchen and getting ready to go out to man the front desk. The reading in refectory had been even more of St. John of the Cross, and the reading in schola this afternoon would be the same: the monastery was going through a positive orgy of the works of St. John. Beata thought she could stand it if only somebody besides herself would say the obvious: that the man was a sexual hysteric; that his ecstatic visions were sexual to the point of being embarrassing; that the fact that St. John had been named a doctor of the Church centuries before St. Teresa had been allowed to carry the title was embarrassing for its bad taste as well as its sexism. Nobody else would say the obvious, though, so she would have to. And then she would be in trouble again.

She put the last dish away in the cupboard, wiped her hands on her wide white apron, then untied the apron behind her neck and waist and took it off. She hung it on one of the hooks that had been hammered into the kitchen wall just for aprons—they shared aprons; whoever needed one took whichever one was available; they didn’t have aprons of their own—and went out of the kitchen, across the refectory, and into the hall. The Angelus bell started ringing just as she reached the grille, and she fell into the prayer without thinking much about it.

“Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae,” a voice came from above her head.

“Et concepit de Spiritu Sancto,” she answered, and then she was at the grille and the door with its careful locks, leading to the vestibule.

She let herself out of the cloister and nodded to Sister Immaculata at the desk. The rule was that the front desk had to be manned at all times by an extern sister, in case anyone came to the monastery in need of prayer or assistance. In Beata’s experience, not much of anybody did.

“Good morning, Sister. Did we have any visitors while we were listening to Annunciata drone endlessly on about the Bridegroom at breakfast?”

Immaculata frowned, to let Beata know that she did not approve of this kind of conversation, which criticized the good faith efforts of other sisters, and solemnly vowed sisters at that. Beata ignored her.

Immaculata leaned over and rummaged through the drawer in the desk. “As a matter of fact, we did. An old man, one of the men from the barn, came in to give you this.”

“This” was a bright red watch cap. Beata blinked.

“He said to tell the ‘other nun,’ which I presume is you, that he was wrong about the hat. They must not have stolen the hat after all, because he found it last night under one of the beds in the back of the barn. Do you understand any of that?”

“Of course. It was that man who died here, a couple of weeks ago. Don’t you remember?”

“I remember that a man died.”

“Yes,” Beata said, “well. He had on a hat, a brand-new watch hat, this one. I remember seeing him wearing it, standing in line waiting to get into the barn when I came back from the lawyers’ that day. When he died, this other man came to the door to tell me that he was dead and that some other men had stolen the hat. Except either they didn’t, or they stole it and then lost it, because here it is.”

“I’m not comfortable with this idea of giving over the barn to homeless people,” Immaculata said. “It’s not—they’re not just homeless, these men. They’re troubled. Some of them are mentally ill. Some of them are violent. We don’t have anybody here who knows how to treat them professionally. And that wasn’t the first one who died.”

“Yes, well, Sister, homeless people will die in weather like this. We might as well do what we can to alleviate the situation. I wonder what I ought to do with the hat.”

“Give it to the coroner, I suppose,” Immaculata said. “Or to the police generally. Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen when somebody dies a pauper and his body is taken off wherever they take things like that, by the authorities?”