Scholastica wanted to say that the only person she’d ever heard of with a less optimistic view of human nature was Savonarola—but it wouldn’t have been politic, and she wouldn’t have been able to get the words out anyway. She was staring down at the visitor’s slip. She had read it. Then she had read it again. Then she had wondered if she was going crazy. “Good God,” she said. “Barry Field.”
“I’m surprised he has the gall to show himself in this parish,” Linda Healy said.
“He lives in this parish,” Scholastica said absently. “In that little apartment building down the block from Peg Morrissey Monaghan.”
“I told him you had much too much to do to see him today,” Linda Healy said, “but he just wouldn’t listen. He insisted I come in here and bother you.”
Scholastica went to her desk, sat down, and laid the visitor’s slip out on the desktop, where she could go on reading it. She had no idea what it was she was going to go on reading. All the idiot thing said was, Mr. Barry Field. 9:45. Scholastica suddenly had a vision of herself, aged fifteen and curled up in the backseat of Barry’s brother Ben’s 1962 Mercury, explaining in euphemisms worthy of the great Mr. Bowdler himself just why she wasn’t going to let Barry take off her bra. In the front seat, Ben and his girlfriend, Janie MacIver, were going at it like extras in a blue-movie orgy scene. The Mercury was parked in a clump of bushes at the top of Borodin Hill.
There was that, and there was the matter of Barry’s name. He wasn’t Barry at all, but Barrymore, after his mother’s favorite actor. Scholastica couldn’t remember if it had been Lionel or John.
Linda Healy had come to stand closer to the desk. She cleared her throat and twitched her nose. Heaven only knew what the twitch was for.
“Now that he’s clearly seen I’ve been in here to speak to you,” she said, “I’ll go right out there and make him go away. Why he thought he could just barge into your office and—”
“Show him in,” Scholastica said.
“What?”
“Show him in,” Scholastica repeated. “Right now.”
“You’re due in church in,” Linda checked her watch, “thirteen minutes.”
“I’ll be at the church. Right now I want you to show him in.”
Linda Healy was not a woman who contradicted priests, or nuns, or anyone else officially connected to her Church—at least not out loud. She had too many other ways of making her disapproval clear.
This time, she went rigid, and hooded her eyes, and drew her lips into a smile that made her look as if she had the face of a thresher shark. Then she said, “Of course, Sister, I’ll show him right in.”
Scholastica watched her back until she was safely out the door. Then she took the visitor’s slip from the top of her desk and tore it into strips.
SEVEN
[1]
BY NINE O’CLOCK, GREGOR Demarkian had begun to wonder if Barry Field sold videotapes of his television programs, or reran the morning ones later in the day. Watching a videotape or a rerun was the only way he was ever going to know for sure what Andy Walsh had said on the air this morning. Watching television with an excited Declan Boyd was an experience Gregor would not want to repeat. Declan jumped, Declan paced, Declan shouted—at himself, Gregor, the television, and the furniture. What he had to say was perfectly clear. The Cardinal went absolutely livid at any mention of what had happened twenty years ago in Black Rock Park. Dec didn’t know why, but there it was. When the Cardinal got livid, he lashed out. Under the circumstances, he would want to lash out at Andy Walsh—but Andy had a habit of vanishing when the lashings out came and of staying vanished until the storms of the Cardinal’s temper were spent. By the time Andy showed up for his inevitable dressing down, the Cardinal would be angry, but subdued, and too tired to do any real damage. In the meantime, he would have hit at the first thing in his path. Declan Boyd knew who that would be. It would be who it always was. Himself.
“Andy always does this to me,” Declan Boyd had said. “Always. The time he consecrated the bran muffins at the CYO Mass, he went to Stowe, Vermont, for a week.”
“Mmm,” Gregor said. He would have said something else if he could have thought of something to say, but it didn’t really matter that he couldn’t. Declan Boyd wasn’t listening to him.
“I am not going to get beaten to a pulp over this,” he was saying. “I am not. Not this time.”
“But Father Walsh can’t disappear this time,” Gregor said. “He has to say Mass in, what, an hour?”