Precious Blood(112)

Gregor went up to the desk, held out his hand, and said, “Your Eminence. I was afraid we were going to be early.”

“Everybody was early,” the Cardinal said. “Barry got here at five o’clock. I got so antsy myself, I almost sent a car to the police department.”

“Police headquarters,” Smith corrected automatically.

The Cardinal ignored him. “We’ve all had so much coffee in the last half hour, we’re ready to go off like rockets. Do get on with it.”

Gregor nodded. He was perfectly willing to get on with it, he just wasn’t sure where to start. It had finally hit him what the scene in this room looked like, and that had made him a little self-conscious. Obviously, the rest of them had not been oblivious to the literary references he had forgotten. They expected him to pull a Hercule Poirot, or a Lord Peter Whimsey, or something. Because he hadn’t come intending to do that, he didn’t know how to begin.

Actually, coffee was a good place, but he couldn’t see any. There wasn’t so much as a cup in use anywhere in the room. “Were you drinking coffee here?” he asked the Cardinal. “Where are the coffee things?”

“What does it matter where the coffee things are?” the Cardinal asked, furious. “Sister cleaned up the coffee things. Sister always cleans up immediately. It’s the kind of discipline her order is—”

The Cardinal was going on, but Gregor had turned away from him. He looked at Sister and said, “Could you bring some coffee into the room? You don’t have to pour out and bring a lot of filled cups on a tray. Just the pot and some crockery would be sufficient. Don’t put yourself to any trouble.”

Sister stood very still, looking at him curiously, her sharp old eyes alive with intelligence. Gregor looked around and was gratified to see that the idea that had occurred to her—and, of course, to him—had occurred to nobody else. She nodded gravely to him and glided, silent in voice and body, out of the room.

Gregor turned back to the Cardinal. “I know you’re all anxious,” he said, “but there’s no way to hurry this. It’s a very long story—”

“If you’re talking about Black Rock Park again,” the Cardinal said, “forget it. I told you—”

“I’m not talking about Black Rock Park again,” Gregor said sharply. “I know all about Black Rock Park. So do you. So, I think, does everybody else in this room.” Barry Field started, turned quickly away from the window, and stared. Gregor went on. “This story is a much longer one that that. This goes back, not twenty years, but thirty or thirty-five.”

“Most of us are only thirty-six,” Judy Eagan said, “what could we possibly have done when we were infants?”

“It’s not what you did,” Gregor told her, “it’s what you were. What each and every one of you were. You know, when I talked to all of you, at various times and various places, the impression you always gave was that there was a harmony, a natural affinity of family and background, among the six of you. At least, that’s what you said when you were thinking about it, the way you all explained what was wrong with Cheryl Cass. She was the town tramp, not only because she was personally promiscuous, but because her family background made her an outcast. In a way your own family backgrounds had not made you.”

“I told you that,” Scholastica said, “but it wasn’t—we weren’t—there was nothing unusual—”

“In the way you regarded Cheryl Cass?” Gregor said. “No, there wasn’t anything unusual in that. Children behave that way. What was unusual was the way four of you regarded two of the others, because those two had family backgrounds not much different from Cheryl Cass’s. Tom Dolan’s was poor. His father was abusive. He told me that himself, to let me know that he was grateful to the Church—for saving him, as he put it. Father Dolan has had a remarkable and exemplary climb. Then there was Judy Eagan. Judy Eagan’s parents were poor. The Cardinal told me that Judy had had to borrow a dress from Scholastica for the junior prom at Cathedral Girls’ High—”

“We weren’t poor because we were shiftless,” Judy said sharply. “My father didn’t go busting up the church on Sunday mornings. We were poor because there were so many children—”

“Grade-school children don’t have much use for mitigating circumstances,” Gregor said gently. “You were unable to afford to do the things they were allowed to do without question. That should have been enough. As I said, it’s remarkable that it wasn’t. Judy Eagan and Peg Morrissey and Kath Burke, Andy Walsh and Tom Dolan and Barry Field, were inseparable from at least the time they started school together until the day of Black Rock Park.”