[2]
Gregor was used to the tidal emotions of a murder investigation. Nobody involved in one was able to remain psychologically consistent for two minutes at a time, especially in the first hour after the death or the discovery of the death. What bothered him about Scholastica was that she seemed particularly volatile and, therefore, particularly fragile. He didn’t think staring at that Madonna and Child had been a good idea. He followed her down the hall into the one room in the convent he knew, the dining room where he had eaten breakfast his first morning in Colchester. With its table unset and stripped of its tablecloth, it looked barren.
There was a coffee maker sitting on the sideboard, with a full pot keeping warm on the plate. Scholastica went to it, got two cups and two saucers out of a recessed cupboard above the counter, and poured one cup full.
“Do you want some coffee?” she asked him. “You’ll have to take it black. The cream and the sugar were put away in the kitchen after lunch, and I couldn’t—”
“I don’t think you should,” Gregor said quickly. “I don’t think you should drink that coffee, either. If this death is connected to the other deaths, Mrs. Monaghan will have been poisoned. We don’t know yet what that poison was in.”
“It wasn’t in the coffee.” Scholastica smiled bitterly. “Peg didn’t have any of it, you see. She was supposed to come in and see me, but she never got here. I was in this room until just a few seconds before I found her, just sitting at the table and—thinking.”
“The coffee—”
“Was here all the time I was.”
“What if the murderer slipped in through the back door while you were calling the police or the medical people? What if he or she decided there’d been enough poisoning going on so that it would be nice, for once, for the police to be able to figure out what the poison was in.”
“The poison Andy took was in the chalice. Everybody knows that.”
“It’s only been proved by elimination. If the Cardinal gets what he wants, it will never be proved any other way.”
Scholastica looked into the coffee, shook her head, and put it aside. Then she reached back into the overhead cupboard and took out a pack of cigarettes. “Funny, I’ve just lost all taste for coffee. Judy left these here. It’s tacky to smoke in habit, but I think I’ll do it anyway.”
She took one of the saucers to use as an ashtray, put it on the table, and sat down. Gregor sat down, too, across from her. He waited while she lit up and blew a stream of smoke in the air.
“What do you know,” she asked him, “about that incident in Black Rock Park?”
It was never a good idea to let a witness know you were surprised. It either shut them up or made them want to lie to you. But he was surprised. The last thing he’d expected was more of Black Rock Park.
“It depends on what you mean by ‘know,’” he told her, speaking as slowly as he could make himself. “I’ve heard the police version, of course. Abandoned dogs and cats, with their throats slit. A lot of animal blood and trash. A lavaliere from the junior prom at Cathedral Girls’ High. The impression I got was that the police had some way of knowing that that particular lavaliere was a souvenir of that particular prom.”
“They should have. It was stamped with the school crest, the date, and the words Springtime in Venice Ball. That was the theme of our junior prom. Springtime in Venice.”
“By ‘our’ you mean yours, Judy Egan’s, and Peg Monaghan’s.”
“And Cheryl Cass’s, too. Of course, Cheryl didn’t go. Nobody would have taken her, and she wouldn’t have had the money for tickets or a dress. Even Tom wouldn’t have taken her, and he was—better about Cheryl than the rest of us were.”
“What was ‘better’?”
Scholastica sighed. “Sometimes I wonder how I ever got admitted to this order. It couldn’t have been because of my holiness. I didn’t have any. I don’t have any now. We were terrible to Cheryl, all six of us. Right from the beginning. From the very beginning. All the way back to grade school.” Scholastica stood up, turned around, and reached behind into the cupboard again. She came out with what looked like a large square of cardboard. “Here,” she said, dropping it in front of Gregor. “That’s what I was doing this afternoon, instead of what I was supposed to be doing. I was looking at that.”
“That” was a black-and-white picture of uniform-clad schoolchildren sitting on a set of rickety bleachers. Gregor looked at the caption. The names meant nothing to him. “What is it?” he asked Scholastica.