Precious Blood(89)

“Oh, dear Lord,” she said. “I can’t take this. I can’t take this. I really can’t.”

Gregor looked quizzically at John Smith, and Smith shrugged. “It’s that woman, the pregnant one, Peggy Somebody.”

“Peg Morrissey.” Scholastica looked up. “Peg Monaghan, I mean. I never remember. I—she was in the living room and I—I came out from the back and I was going to the door and there she was—there she was—doubled over like that and then—then I—there are the babies and I—”

“Mrs. Monaghan was pregnant with twins,” Smith said. “The bi—the doctor in there is trying to save them. Mrs. Monaghan is dead.”

Gregor nodded. This, of course, explained everything: the ambulances, the state of emergency, even Smith’s incipient hysteria. The idea of it brought Gregor almost to the edge of hysteria himself. He moved into the foyer and shut the door behind him. Just as he did, a nurse came out of a door at the back of the hall, moved quickly to the foyer and through, and brushed by him on her way out the door. She had been crying, and doing nothing to stop it. Tears had left wormy rivers in the thick pancake of her makeup. Her mouth was grim.

Scholastica had looked up at the nurse as she passed. Now she turned her head to Gregor and said, in a voice so calm it was chilling, “It’s not going to work, you know. I knew it from the beginning. They took too long to get here.”

“They don’t seem to have given up hope,” Gregor said gently.

“I don’t think they work on hope,” Scholastica said. “That doctor especially. I think she just does what she does, and goes on doing it, until something makes her stop.”

“The deaths of the children would make her stop.”

“I know. But what will it matter, even if they manage to be born? Peg was eight and a half months pregnant, but they’ll have poison in their systems. And they’ll have nine brothers and sisters and a father who works two jobs and no mother.”

It sounded like a scenario from East Lynne. Gregor had to remind himself that bathos did not equal unreality. However melodramatic, what was happening here was very, very real.

“I think that’s the kind of speculation you should leave until later,” he told Scholastica, “until you know what’s happened. Thinking about it now won’t do anyone any good. You’ll only make yourself distraught.”

“I am distraught,” Scholastica said. Smith snorted again, but she didn’t notice him. She was looking at the front door, on which hung a crucifix made of walnut and gold. It was not a large crucifix, or a detailed one. The face of Christ on it had neither personality nor particularity. Unlike some, it didn’t look alive. Scholastica seemed to be communing with it anyway.

After a while, she shook her head, shook her shoulders, and stood up. She was still ignoring John Smith. She behaved, in fact, as if he wasn’t in the room.

“You know,” she said to Gregor, “I have something for you. Tom Dolan brought them over around noon.”

“Books,” Gregor agreed cautiously. “The Cardinal promised to lend them to me.”

“Tom tried to leave them at Rosary House, but Sister wasn’t there. He didn’t think you’d mind if he left them with me.”

Of course, Gregor thought, I wouldn’t mind. Nobody would. It was flattering that Dolan himself had taken time from his impossible schedule to deliver the books personally. Even if he had had no choice in that—the way the Chancery was understaffed, he might not have—he had had the choice to wait until after the Stations of the Cross, when things would calm down a little. But what was Scholastica getting at? In this time and in this place, why did she care about the books?

She had moved away from the chair and the wall, toward the hall. If the nurse who had gone out came back, or a different one tried to get out, she would collide with Scholastica. The nurses weren’t wasting attention on trivialities at the moment. Scholastica was oblivious to the possibility that she might be blocking an emergency pathway. She was looking at the framed icon on the wall next to the archway to the hall. It was a Madonna and Child.

“The books,” she said, “are in the dining room. It’s the only room on this floor that hasn’t been commandeered by somebody. The doctor is in the kitchen. The police are in the living room, because that’s where Peg was when she—died.”

“And?” Gregor said.

“And I think you should come to the dining room and get those books.” Scholastica turned to face Smith. She hadn’t forgotten his existence at all. She’d been willing him into nonexistence. “Just you. Not—him,” she said.