True Believers(105)

“I don’t,” Peter Rose said. “But it doesn’t make any sense, does it? Why would she just stand there, not even moving. And besides—”

“Besides?” Gregor cocked his head.

“She was in there fifteen minutes later,” Peter Rose said. “She must have been. Nobody came in from that end, because I would have heard the hinge. And nobody came in and down the hall from the other end, because they would have had to pass me. But Mary McAllister came in at just about quarter of, and she wanted to put some things on Scholastica’s desk, and when she went down to the office, the door was locked.”

“I never lock my door,” Scholastica said. “None of us do, except sometimes by accident, because there’s no point to it.”

“There are duplicate keys all over the place,” Peter Rose said. “And don’t say it’s possible that Scholastica locked the door herself by accident, because it was open when I came back that morning and it was open not five minutes before the first time I saw Harriet in the hall. I saw it coming back from the bathroom.”

“But you’re sure it was locked from the inside?” Gregor said.

Scholastica shook her head. “Inside, outside, it doesn’t matter. The keys work regardless.”

“Why didn’t somebody use the key to get in so that—”

“Mary McAllister,” Lou Emiliani said.

“Mary McAllister,” Gregor repeated. “Why didn’t somebody use a duplicate key to get in when Mary McAllister wanted to leave the things on Scholastica’s desk? What things, by the way?”

“Some papers about the food drive. Mary works with a homeless shelter downtown, and she does food distribution here. Our parochial-school kids collect canned goods and nonperishables. Sometimes, there’s a special call—for peanut butter, for kidney beans, for cranberry sauce. Things that are especially needed or that somebody wants. Mary had the special-needs schedules for next month.”

“And she took them away with her?” Gregor asked.

“She just went down to the main office and put them in Scholastica’s box,” Peter Rose said. “She didn’t want to take the time for Thomasetta to go find the key and open up. Except, you know, that she was bothered by it. The locked room. She was, and I wasn’t. And she didn’t really have any reason to think there was something wrong. I should have known right then that Harriet must have been inside. It just didn’t occur to me.”

Gregor stood up and began to pace, but very slowly. It was hard to move, because the room was small and too full of furniture. “So what you’re saying,” he said finally, “is that Sister Harriet Garrity went into Sister Scholastica’s office at ten-thirty yesterday morning and locked the door behind her. Why?”

“I don’t know,” Peter Rose said.

“Probably to get a look at my computer,” Scholastica said. “It’s got a password on it, but we all use the same ones. Benedicamus Domini. There are a couple of others. It wouldn’t have taken her much to go through them.”

“What would be on your computer that Sister Harriet Garrity would want?” Gregor asked.

Scholastica and Peter Rose looked at each other. Scholastica took a deep breath. “Well,” she said, “nothing, really, but Sister might have hoped there was. We’ve been having a lot of, well, friction, since I got here in January.”

“Friction about what?”

“About the First Holy Communion   Mass, for one thing,” Scholastica said. “I’m all for the traditional event, with girls in white dresses and veils. She was all for something more ‘relevant,’ except that wouldn’t have been the word she would have used. More ‘feminist,’ maybe. Anyway, we had a fight about it, and I won that round. She might have been looking for embarrassing information to use the next time we had a run-in.”

“And there was no such information?”

“Good grief, Gregor, I’ve been here less than two months.” Scholastica laughed. “Not that there isn’t enough embarrassing information in my past, but Harriet wasn’t going to find out about it in my office. She might have discovered that I’ve been less than strict about the academic requirements in the case of one or two of the kids, but that isn’t anything Father Healy didn’t know about. Besides, she was the one who was always saying that grades were a tool of white-male hegemonic oppression.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “What happened after ten-forty-five? Did Sister Rose see her come out of the office?”