Precious Blood(82)

Somebody was going to have to come here and drag her away from this. She didn’t know if she was going to be able to make herself move otherwise. She was sitting at her place at the table in the convent’s dining room, looking at a pair of fists she had written out on a pair of sheets of lined notebook paper. The genesis of one of these lists, marked Confirmation, was off to the side of the notebook paper. It was a faded black-and-white group picture that had been taken at her own Confirmation, with each of the children identified in a caption at the bottom by their Confirmation rather than their regular names. The genesis of the other fist, marked Goat, was her own memory, which she didn’t think was very good. It had been too long, and it wasn’t something she had paid much attention to even when she was supposed to. She picked this list up, crumpled it in her hand, and tossed it across the table.

She had retrieved the Confirmation picture from the convent basement, where it had been filed with all the other Confirmation pictures ever taken at St. Agnes’s in a big metal file cabinet that stood next to the boiler. Then she had brought it up here and made her list. She had had to, after Barry had shown her his tape, because Barry was right. There had been something besides Black Rock Park going on with Andy Walsh on the day he died.

The table was cluttered with miscellaneous junk and the junk was beginning to bother her. She pushed aside the books Tom Dolan had brought for Gregor Demarkian and the extra bottle of wine Judy had dropped off for “nunly medicinal use” and Barry’s tape, left so she could view it again at leisure, and bent over her list. She noticed she had started it with herself, and smiled.

Me, it began—there was egotism for you—and Martha for Martha and Mary. Then:

Judy: Therese for the Little Flower

Barry: Francis for St. Francis of Assisi

Tom: Joseph for the foster father of Jesus

Peg: Clare for St. Clare of Assisi

Andy: Thomas for St. Thomas the Apostle

She considered the list one more time and added:

Cheryl: Bridget for St. Bridget of Sweden.

Scholastica put her pen down and closed her eyes. It was so like Cheryl to have taken a name like that, a pretty name, the land of name girls always seemed to have when they were the pampered daughters of indulgent fathers. Cheryl hadn’t been the pampered daughter of anyone, and there hadn’t been much indulgence in her life.

Thinking about that life and that death, Scholastica thought, was enough to make you despair.

On an impulse, she got up and got the wine Judy had brought, then moved to the sideboard to look for a corkscrew. It was for “nunly medicinal purposes,” wasn’t that what Judy had said? Scholastica had a nunly medicinal use for the stuff right now. In another hour, she’d go into the long Good Friday-Holy Saturday fast, and she wouldn’t be allowed to drink at all.

The corkscrew was where it belonged. She opened the wine and looked at the glasses on the shelf above her head. There were small ones and goblets, both made of crystal. If you’re going to cheat, Scholastica told herself, you at least ought to cheat big.

She took down one of the goblets and filled it so full it started to spill.





SEVEN


[1]


ONE OF THE FIRST things Gregor Demarkian had been taught when he was in training with the FBI was never offer unsolicited advice to local police departments. It was a good rule. Gregor had seen the wisdom of it immediately. What was more, unlike many of his colleagues, he had never broken it once in his twenty years as an agent. Maybe it was the combination of his childhood and his educational career. He had grown up in an urban ethnic ghetto, one of those places where the immigrant and the poor were expected to hide themselves while performing the kind of work the outside world seemed to think they wanted, like running small and not very profitable restaurants. At the same time, he had gone through the Philadelphia public school system during an age when achievement, not problem management, was the focus of faculty attention. From the day his first-grade teacher discovered he had learned to read before she’d started teaching him to the day his high-school principal had announced at the senior honors assembly that he had been awarded a scholarship to Penn, he had been subject to the terrifying litany of upward mobility: be good, be better, be better than better, be best, work hard, work harder, work hardest, and never, never rest. Now, he knew, people called that discrimination. Why should the poor and disenfranchised have to be better than the rich and privileged to get the same things? Why should the first black man, or the first Hispanic, or the first woman have to work twice as hard to be a vice president as the pretty boy from Groton at the next desk? There was logic to arguments like those, Gregor knew. He had explored them. On an emotional and experiential level, though, he had never been able to accept them. The obstacle course he had run had turned out to be good for him. It had made responsibility, concentration, and persistence habitual to him. The people who had not run it always seemed to him to lack something, especially as agents—some essential intensity that made the difference between a competent detective and a brilliant one. Too many of the Groton pretty boys lack heart-and-soul involvement in anything. They kept their distance, and, in keeping it, missed things. Gregor thought of them sometimes as men too lazy to wear the glasses they needed to see the eye chart.