Precious Blood(33)

“When I entered this order, I was a mouse. I was worse than a mouse, really. I was one of those people who panic every time somebody gets mad at them.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“Everybody does, but it’s true.”

“All right. The convent changed your life. What does that have to do with Cheryl Cass?”

“Nothing. I’m just saying that I’m sorry if I seem to be rude, or aggressive, but I want to know and I don’t know any other way to find out.”

“What do you want to know?”

“About Cheryl Cass,” Sister Scholastica repeated. She sounded exasperated. “It’s so hard to get any information out of anybody that makes any sense. Not that the Chancery ever makes any sense. It’s a bureaucracy. It can’t. But ever since Peg Monaghan identified that picture—”

“Who’s Peg Monaghan?”

“She’s who identified Cheryl Cass,” Scholastica said. “Did the Cardinal tell you about this?”

Now that Gregor thought of it, all the Cardinal had told him was that somebody with connections to Father Andy Walsh and a lot of other people in St. Agnes Parish had turned up dead of nicotine poisoning. “The impression I got,” he said, “was that this Cheryl Cass had turned up somewhere in the vicinity—”

“In the vicinity of the Cathedral, maybe, but not in the vicinity of St. Agnes’s.”

“Isn’t the Cathedral close?”

“It’s only a few blocks away. But Cheryl was found in an alley on the other side of it. And that wouldn’t have made any difference, you know. People have been found dead there before. Junkies, mostly, I guess. The Tribune only ran her picture on a back page just in case. And the local news ran it twice, at six and eleven, as a favor to the police. It was because of the wedding ring.”

“What wedding ring?”

“Cheryl’s. She was wearing it when she died. And it was expensive, I think. She had it on when I saw her, and it looked heavy.”

“I see,” Gregor said. “The police probably thought if she was wearing an expensive ring—”

“She might have family who cared. That’s the way I read it, too. Anyway, the Tribune ran Cheryl’s picture and Peg Monaghan—she used to be Peg Morrissey, back in high school—saw it. She called the police and told them who it was. That was when all—heck broke loose. And nothing’s made any sense since.”

Gregor studied her face, curious. “I talked to your police department,” he told her, “and they seemed to think they’d made as much sense of it as they needed to make.”

“Did you talk to John Smith?”

“No. I talked to a number of people. One of them had a Polish name—”

“Maveronski,” Scholastica said. “He’s useless. He just doesn’t want to go to the trouble of investigating anything. Benedict Marie had him in the sixth grade, and she says he was always that way.”

“Yes. Well. At the moment, Sister, willful suicide is the official verdict on this case, and there’s a certain amount to be said for it—”

“Andy Walsh thinks the Cardinal got you up here just to cause him trouble,” Scholastica said. “I think he’s wrong. I think the Cardinal got you up here because he’s not any more happy with that verdict than I am. There might be a certain amount to be said for it, Mr. Demarkian, but there’s a lot to be said against it.”

There was no sugar on the table and no cream. Gregor had checked when he first came in. Now he checked again, to give himself a chance to look away and think. Sister Scholastica was simply voicing the same concern he himself had voiced to Father Tibor. If he hadn’t had that concern, he wouldn’t have come up here. He had only one creditable reason for spending the American Easter weekend in this arctic snow zone, and that was that the reports he had received on the death of Cheryl Cass were fishy.

What he wanted to know was why he was so bothered by the fact that Sister Scholastica agreed with him. Come to think of it, he was bothered by Sister Scholastica herself. He hadn’t been, either last night or when he first saw her this morning, but the more he talked to her the more she stirred in him a faint feeling of unease. There was something—off—about her whole performance. On the one hand, she was just as forthright as she appeared to be. Gregor had pegged her in an instant as one of those people who could only lie by omission. A direct falsehood would cause too much strain on her character. On the other hand—

He turned away from the nonexistent cream and sugar to find her staring at him. “I’m sorry,” he told her. “I was woolgathering.”