Precious Blood(93)

“Yes.”

“Curiouser and curiouser,” Gregor said, as mildly as he could. “None of this behavior sounds much like any of you. It doesn’t even sound like what I’ve heard you were like at the time.”

“Well, we’d had a little help. Tom had brought some beer. His father started drinking so early in the morning, he was always passed out by early afternoon. And he could never remember how much he’d had in the house. Tom would wait until he conked and then steal half of whatever was in the refrigerator. So we’d been drinking. Barry had paid for some marijuana—Andy got it, because Andy was the only one of us who knew how to get drugs, but Barry had more money so he paid for it. And then, God help us, there was the LSD.”

“Ah,” Gregor said. “Finally.”

“Yes, finally. Andy got that, too. He got a lot of it. It was just little dots of moisture on these little cardboard squares, and we didn’t know anything about it. It didn’t look like much. We each ate two.”

“You could have killed yourselves.”

“Well, we didn’t. We just went nuts. Andy had come to the park from altar practice—they were all altar boys. The Cardinal insisted on it; he was trying to get the three of them into the seminary even then. Andy had practice for a Baptismal Mass and when he got to the park he still had his missal on him. He wanted to read the Mass backward, in Latin—”

“A traditional Black Mass,” Gregor said. “But there’s more to a Black Mass than that, you know. Just reading the words backward wouldn’t have done it.”

Scholastica shook her head. “Done what? Called up the Devil. If he can be called up, we did it that day. We ate those pieces of cardboard and then we read the Mass backward and then Cheryl started giggling and said she wanted to—to, you know. She stripped down to her skin and danced around the rock. She kept saying, ‘keep the baby company, keep the baby company—’”

“Wait,” Gregor said.

“I won’t wait. She was pregnant. I’m sure of it. She kept saying ‘keep the baby company’ and dancing and then she leapt onto the rock and grabbed Andy by the wrist and pulled him up to her. It was like watching a porno movie. It was terrible. Peg threw up and Judy started screaming and I grabbed both of them and got us out of there.”

“And?”

“There was no and.” Scholastica’s eyes were wet again. She sat down in front of the ashtray and rubbed at them with the palms of her hands. “We never really got together after that until—I don’t know when until. John O’Bannion was named Cardinal Archbishop and he brought Tom out here. I guess we’ve never really got back together with Tom. We see him in the course of business, but that’s about it. Andy got himself assigned to St. Agnes’s, mostly by politicking like crazy. I got assigned here because my order had nobody else to send at the time. Judy and Peg never left the parish. The four of us saw each other fairly often. It got—easier, after a while, to be friends again more or less and let the other thing slide.”

“What about Barry Field?”

“Barry? Barry’s been busy being a professional anti-Catholic. I hadn’t talked to him in years until after Andy was murdered.”

“What about Cheryl Cass?” Gregor said.

Scholastica was crying again, freely. She put the heels of her hands against her eyes and shook her head. “Cheryl Cass disappeared. I never saw her after Black Rock Park except this past Ash Wednesday, when she showed up at the convent door wanting to talk. She wanted to talk about Black Rock Park. She said it had been the second happiest day of her life.”

“Sister—”

“No,” Scholastica said. “I—”

“I’ve got the go ahead,” John Smith said. Gregor and Scholastica looked up, and found him standing in the doorway to the hall, triumphant and amused. His body was so big, he looked like a large picture badly stuffed into a small frame. “The bitch is done. One baby dead and one alive and on its way to the hospital. We are being graciously permitted to return to our murder investigation.”

If he noticed Scholastica’s tears, or Gregor’s violent irritation, he gave no sign of it.





TWO


[1]


JUDY EAGAN HAD NEVER believed in putting off the inevitable. When she tried it, she got anxious and distracted, and couldn’t get anything else done. The inevitable, now that Peg Morrissey Monaghan was dead, was a trip out to Peg’s house to talk to Joe and see about the children. She had known that since just after four o’clock, when Tom Dolan had come up to her in the wide marble vestibule of the Cathedral after Stations of the Cross and told her she had a phone call in the Cathedral office. The phone call had been from Kath, Sister Mary Scholastica, telling her that Peg was dead. When they had finished talking, Judy had hung up and sat at the desk, staring at the phone, feeling guilty. When she’d first seen Tom coming for her, she’d been tempted to run away. She’d thought he’d noticed she was leaving without Confession and wanted to lecture her about it. She had no idea why he’d want to lecture her about anything. He’d barely given her a moment’s thought since he came back to Colchester. He hadn’t even spoken to her until after Cheryl Cass was dead. She went on staring at the phone and told herself it was silly. If she had run away from Tom, if she had never received Kath’s call, Peg would still be dead.