It was the one thing in the world he knew he shouldn’t think about. The trench had been discovered just as Elizabeth entered her last year of life, a long agonizing year whose only real event—in his mind—had been her dying. He’d had every right to withdraw from the case, and every right to expect the man he’d handed it over to to solve it. The fact that that man had not could not be Gregor Demarkian’s fault.
He just couldn’t seem to stop himself from thinking it was.
He put his coat on and wrapped his scarf around his neck. Brooding over that incredible mess was worse than futile. He was retired now. The Bureau wouldn’t have let him get back into it for anything less than a direct order from the President of the United States. Gregor had never been on intimate terms with this particular President of the United States.
The best way not to think about the past was to get involved in the present. It was too bad John Cardinal O’Bannion seemed to have done everything possible to ensure there was nothing for Gregor to get himself involved in. Or at least, nothing until tomorrow. Gregor supposed the Cardinal would come back to earth as soon as the crunch of Holy Thursday was over. In the meantime…
Gregor looked across the courtyard to St. Agnes’s Roman Catholic Church. In the meantime, he thought, since everybody else is going to church, so will I.
[2]
For a while, he hesitated between using the back door of the church—which was close—or going around to the front. He decided on the back because it was so cold. It was, in fact, much colder than it had been when he left the convent for the rectory. A solid sheet of clouds was blanketing the sky, shutting out the sun. The wind was much stronger than it had been. Besides, he could see people going in and out of that back door, including Sister Benedict Marie. If there was no way to get from it to the main body of the church without causing a scandal, she would redirect him.
He slipped and slid along the asphalt walk—capped with ice as all the walks had been the night before—and got to the door just as the woman in the red coat was coming out of it. Beyond it, he could see a half-flight of steps leading down and the goat.
The red-coated woman looked him over and said, very bluntly, “Who are you?”
“Gregor Demarkian,” he answered her, as pleasantly as he could. Then he remembered something. “You’re Judy Eagan. The president of the Parish Council.”
Judy Eagan was taken aback. “That’s right. I am. How did you know?”
“Father Boyd described you to me.”
“Oh,” Judy Eagan said. “Father Boyd.” She looked back at the door she was still holding open in one gloveless hand and frowned. “Are you going in there?”
“If it’s all right,” Gregor said.
“Oh, it’s all right,” Judy Eagan told him, “as long as you’re careful of the goat. The damn thing bites.”
“Goats usually do.”
“Well, it’s very nice that you know that, but this is the first goat I’ve ever met. It ate one of my gloves. And now I’ve got to get the wine.”
“The wine?”
“For Communion ,” Judy Eagan said impatiently. “It wasn’t delivered when it was supposed to be. I had to go pick it up. I’ve got it in the trunk of my car and if I don’t get it there won’t be any.”
“The church ran out of wine?”
“I think Andy drinks the stuff with dinner. If you’re going to go in, you ought to go. I’m in a rush.”
She let go of the door and trotted off, not so much as wobbling on the ice. In heels that high, it was a good trick.
Gregor opened the door again for himself and went down the interior stairs to meet the goat. It was, he saw, a prime billy goat, old enough to have grown a substantial set of horns but young enough to have a temper. It was tethered by a very short rope to the newel post of another half-flight of stairs that rose to the left.
The half-flight that led to the right was much more interesting. The door at the top of that had been propped back, and through it Gregor could see a little constellation of people rushing back and forth through what appeared to be an anteroom leading to a short hall. One of those people was Declan Boyd. Another was the very pregnant woman he had seen with Judy Eagan from the window of his room this morning. None of them was Andy Walsh.
Gregor had just decided to go up the steps in that direction—although he had a feeling it was the wrong direction—when Judy Eagan came running back in. She was carrying four bottles of wine under her left arm and a fifth in her free hand, and she looked more frazzled than she had before.