Precious Blood(97)

Scholastica closed her eyes. Caution had become false sincerity, and about what? Abortion? He’d always been perfectly sincere about abortion. She’d heard him speak, and she knew. What was he hiding?

She reached into the pocket of her habit, found Judy’s pack of cigarettes, realized it was empty. It was probably a good thing. She only got five dollars a week for her own personal use. She couldn’t afford to be a nicotine junkie. And smoking did look tacky when you were in habit.

Nicotine.

She heard a thudding, pounding knock on the front door and then Peter Rose, answering it. The deep voice that echoed through the foyer and down the hall belonged to Father Declan Boyd.

“Barry,” she said, “I’ve got to go. It’s Father Boyd at the door. He wants something.”

“You mean you want to get off the phone.”

“I’ve got to go, Barry.”

“I’ve heard Andy Walsh was threatening to make Boyd find other quarters. Didn’t like sharing the rectory with him.”

“I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” Scholastica said.

Barry started to say, “I’m sorry,” and she put the receiver down in the middle of it. Barry has always been like this, she thought. Truth and falsehood, generosity and malice, all jumbled up together, popping out at you when you least expected it.

She got up, went out into the hall, walked down to the foyer. Peter Rose was there with Father Boyd, listening politely while Dec rambled his way through one of his incoherent monologues.

Dec saw her before she got within three yards of him. His face lit up. He’d spied fresh meat and better reactions, within reach.

“Sister,” he shouted, “guess what. Guess what’s going on at the church?”

“I don’t know, Father,” Scholastica said, “what is going on at the church?”

“That Demarkian man is there,” Declan Boyd said, “with that police lieutenant and everybody else, the uniformed man and the priest guarding the chalice, everybody. He got permission from the Cardinal and he’s looking at the chalice.”

“What do you mean, looking?”

“He’s got white cotton gloves on like a lady and he’s picking the chalice up and swishing it around and looking inside it and pointing. He’s done it three or four times and he was doing it again right before I came over here. And when he points the police lieutenant looks and nods his head. You know what I think? I think he’s figured out how the poison got in the chalice.”

For Declan Boyd, it could have been the scene before the climactic close of an episode of Murder, She Wrote. For Scholastica, it was something else. The bottom had just dropped out of her stomach.





[3]


I am finally, Tom Dolan thought, having a nervous breakdown. I have gone through all the stages, panic and paralysis, exhilaration and exhaustion, euphoria and despair. I am standing in the middle of a hospital corridor, surrounded by nurses, talking to myself. I may be talking to myself out loud, but I can’t be sure. My senses have become inoperative.

Tom Dolan sighed. He wished it were true. He could have used a nervous breakdown, right at this moment. It would have been a handy explanation for what he had just done. Or not done, to be precise. He would have liked his senses to be inoperative, too, instead of what they were, which was on red alert. Joe Monaghan had just come out of little Peggy Monaghan’s room. He was naming his surviving infant daughter Margaret Mary after his wife. The Cardinal was behind him, in the toned-down robes he had worn to perform an emergency baptism on Good Friday night. It was the baptism Tom Dolan had not done. He had stood there with the vials of Holy Water and Holy Chrism in his hands, and at the last minute he had not been able to go on with it. The baby had been lying in a clear plastic hospital bassinet, stuck through with tubes and looking miserable. He looked at her and thought of Peg, stiffening the way Andy had, falling the way Andy had, dying on the convent’s living room carpet just in time for Kath to find her. His ethics teacher in the seminary had told him that there was no such thing as a painless death. The souls of the dying are always in agony even if their bodies are dulled by drugs or coma. He couldn’t remember it all. It filled up his head, but it didn’t make any sense to him. There was so much pain and so much confusion and so little time to pray.

The Cardinal and Joe Monaghan had stopped to talk. Now they shook hands, nodded to each other, and went off in opposite directions. Joe was headed for the elevators, and home. There would be nothing he could do here tonight, and he had nine more children who needed taking care of. The Cardinal was headed for the pediatrics lounge, which was where Tom was supposed to be. The corridor Tom was standing in was on the way to it. Tom couldn’t remember why he hadn’t taken the last few steps and done what the Cardinal had told him to do.