True Believers(122)

“Except that St. Anselm’s has the school. But that’s not a coincidence either,” Dan Burdock said, “and you must have known that. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to live in a world where everybody wanted to be an Episcopalian.”

“I think I lived through that era,” Gregor said. “But then, I’m a lot younger than you are. I’d better go downstairs and make sure my friend isn’t freezing in his car in the parking lot. I told him to come in if he didn’t see me, but I don’t really know what he’ll do. Thank you for your time.”

“You’re more than welcome. Is there going to be an official interrogation one of these days? With the cops present, and all that sort of thing?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ve been getting ready for it for days,” Dan Burdock said. “No, longer than that. I’ve been getting ready for it since I first knew Scott hadn’t died a natural death. Does that make any sense to you?”

“Yes. Some.”

“Let me come down with you and see you out.”

Gregor nodded slightly, and Dan Burdock led the way to his own office door. Outside the office windows, the day was already grey and dark, and it wasn’t yet noon. It was lucky they hadn’t had snow.

Gregor realized, at the last minute, that he’d left the Valentine’s Day box on the floor next to the chair he had been sitting in, and went back to get it.





SEVEN





1


There were funeral arrangements to be made for Sister Harriet Garrity. It wouldn’t be a quick funeral, or even necessarily a local one, but Sister Scholastica felt as if life would make a bit more sense if she could get the details straightened out, and so that was what she was trying to do. The first requirement had been to notify Harriet’s order, which was called the Daughters of the Immaculate Conception—a name, Scholastica thought, that had probably made Harriet’s teeth grate. It was strange to think of the things they had all taken for granted in 1962: the First Fridays and First Saturdays devotions; the brown scapulars and Miraculous Medals; the intentions made in the hopes of gaining indulgences for the suffering souls in Purgatory. Scholastica still remembered the kinds of indulgences there were—partial and plenary. A plenary indulgence got the soul out of Purgatory immediately. A partial indulgence got some of the years of suffering taken off that soul’s sentence, and the years were long. There were partial indulgences that took off hundreds of years, and yet, since they were only partial, there must still be years left. Once, when she was eleven, Scholastica had found herself kneeling in the middle of the cathedral in Rochester, thinking that there would never be an end to it. No matter what the nuns said, Purgatory was forever, and if you got stuck there you would suffer only a little less than if you got stuck in hell, and you would never get out. For a moment, the room had seemed to dissolve, and she had thought herself surrounded by souls in agony, crying out to God for the cool relief of water. Then she had snapped back into the present, and there had been Judy Sullivan, sitting in the pew right in front of her, wearing a blue angora sweater over her parochial-school uniform skirt. The colors clashed, but Scholastica had wanted that sweater even so.

The nun from Sister Harriet’s order had been more gracious than Scholastica had expected her to be. Maybe, being used to Harriet, Scholastica had expected an argument, just as a matter of principle.

“We’ll send somebody up, of course,” Sister Hilary Etchen had said. “Although I must admit I don’t know who it will be. We only have four of us now in the motherhouse, and two of us are over seventy. You don’t have that problem, do you, at Divine Grace?”

“We’re short on vocations,” Scholastica had said. “Everybody is.”

“Yes, everybody is. But last year you had eight. And the average age of your Sisters is under fifty. Sometimes I think we should have kept the habit, just for its drawing power. Do you take girls right out of high school?”

“Sometimes. A lot of the time now we prefer to take them out of college.”

“And they come?”

“Well,” Scholastica had said, “some of them do, although not as many as used to when they all came as soon as they left parochial school. But it’s mostly from the Catholic colleges, anyway, and from the conservative ones at that. We don’t get a lot of candidates from the public universities.”

“No,” Sister Hilary had said, “I don’t suppose you do. It makes me wonder, sometimes, if I had my head screwed on right, when I voted in favor of the changes we made in this order. I used to think that people would want to be part of us more if we were authentic, if we didn’t traffic in ceremony and formality. But it seems the opposite is the case.”