Precious Blood(81)

All of a sudden, light dawned. “Dear Mother of God,” Judy said, “you think it was one of us.”

“I don’t think it was anybody. I saw—”

“I don’t care what you saw. It couldn’t have been one of us. We were all in the pews in full sight of—” She stopped.

“You see.” Boyd was triumphant. “You weren’t.”

“We were at the time you’re talking about,” Judy said, “right after the murder. It wasn’t until later—”

“This wasn’t later. This was right after, practically, before that Demarkian person started snooping around. I’ve been so upset about it, I haven’t been able to eat. I didn’t know what to do.”

“What made up your mind?”

Boyd went smug. “I did what I was supposed to do. I called the Chancery and asked for advice.”

“On Good Friday?” Judy was stunned. “Dec, for sweet Jesus’s sake, the Cardinal must be ready to kill you.”

“I didn’t talk to the Cardinal directly. I know enough not to bother the man. But I had to have advice and I got it. She has to go to the police. That’s the only thing that will do.”

“Fine,” Judy said. “I hope she does. Whoever she is. I’m going to work.”

“Miss Eagan—”

“It’s Ms. Eagan, thank you very much, and I’m late. Get out of my way.”

She had to physically push him out of the way to get him to let her pass. She didn’t want to do it—in spite of feminism and assertiveness training and self-actualization and all the rest of it, she was still at heart a nice Catholic girl; it went against her earliest training to manhandle a priest—but she did it, because if she hadn’t, she’d never have gotten to her car. For the same reason, she shut her mind to the words he called after her as she ran to Ellery Street.

“You could convince her,” he yelled after her, “you could tell her and she’d listen to you.”

Judy didn’t know who “she” was, but she didn’t want to know. She climbed in behind the wheel and made sure all the doors were locked and started the engine. She wanted to be on the road before Dec got the bright idea of sitting on her hood. Or something. She reached into her purse and got out her cigarettes and lit up.

Her heart was pounding and her head hurt. Dec, the little bastard, had frightened her badly. She was having a hard time breathing and she wanted to cry—and the worst of it was, she didn’t know why. What did it matter if “she” had been in the anteroom? There had been nothing in the anteroom. Nothing at all. And the books on the bookshelf there were less than nothing: Bibles, a concordance, an expanded glossary of Mass themes, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints.

She looked up and saw that her cigarette had grown a long column of ash. She tapped the ash into the dashboard ashtray and felt the air coming out of the heater to be sure it was warm. Then she shifted into gear and eased the car along the otherwise carless curb. She had never been good at parallel parking or at extracting herself from parallel parking.

The light at the corner of Ellery and Carter was red. She pulled to a stop in front of it and thought: Damn Declan Boyd. Damn him damn him damn him damn him damn him.

That said it all.





[3]


The Sisters of Divine Grace, like every other traditional order of nuns in the United States, had made its compromises with the “spirit” of Vatican II. Both its habits and its periods of silence had been shortened. A great many of its rules had been relaxed, and some of them had been done away with altogether. Sisters could now see their families whenever they wanted to and go on vacations and read secular books. The nuns of St. Agnes’s convent had become particularly fond of the novels of Stephen King. They sometimes sat around the fire at the beginning of the long cold nights of winter and scared each other silly reading aloud about vampires and haunted cars. That made the restrictions that were still in force hard to take, like the one that said Sisters should neither discuss nor “dwell on” their secular pasts. At quarter to two on Good Friday afternoon, Sister Mary Scholastica decided that that particular restriction had become impossible to take.

It was less than an hour before she was supposed to lead the procession of schoolchildren that would go from St. Agnes’s school to the Cathedral for Stations of the Cross. She had had a long day in which she had accomplished only half of what she should have. The desk in her office was still covered with the paperwork for First Holy Communion   receptions and the equally hard to organize seating for the Confirmation Mass. On any other day, she would have gulped a sandwich at her desk and worked without a break until Peter Rose or Benedict Marie physically dragged her away.