True Believers(136)

“Do you think she’s telling the truth? About the body being warm?”

“I think she thinks she is,” Garry Mansfield said. “I guess it’s not impossible. He wasn’t long dead when we got here. But he was on the other side of the bed.”

“On the other side of the bed from what?”

“From the vomit,” Garry Mansfield said simply. “On the side of the bed that you can’t see from the door, he’d done a lot of vomiting. There was an ocean of it. But he seems to have come around to the door side before he collapsed. Trying to get out, I’d guess.”

“So would I. He didn’t leave vomit anywhere else? Only on that side of the bed?”

“I think there might not have been much of anything left in his stomach to come up,” Garry Mansfield said. “If you know what I mean. Sister Peter Rose said the room smelled funny, if that’s any help to you.”

“I think it’s perfectly natural.”

“Yeah, so do I,” Garry Mansfield said. “You don’t think this is something the nuns are doing, do you? I mean, I’m not a religious man myself, but I don’t have anything against it. But you hear all these stories about convents, and the women go nuts in them, and that kind of thing.”

“Ah,” Gregor said. “Well. I think you’ll find that that’s mostly an urban legend.”

“Yeah? Well, I think it’s weird anyway. Shutting a bunch of women up together like that and telling them they can’t, you know, have any. It would make me nuts.”

Gregor was about to say that Sister Scholastica was one of the sanest women he knew, but they had reached the top of the stairs and Lou Emiliani. What Gregor assumed must have been Father Healy’s bedroom was cordoned off from the rest of the empty building, and full of men in lab coats. He stood aside a little as one of the technicians brought a clear plastic bag full of something out the door.

“Shit,” Lou Emiliani said. “I mean, excuse me, Mr. Demarkian, but—shit.”

“I take your point exactly,” Gregor said.

“You know what I want to know?” Lou Emiliani said. “What was this nun doing in the Father’s bedroom to begin with? I mean, what was she doing there? Do they run back and forth to each other’s rooms like a bunch of college students?”

“Did you ask her?” Gregor said.

“She’s the one who’s having hysterics all over everywhere,” Garry Mansfield said.

Gregor went to the door of Father Healy’s room and looked inside. From where he stood, he couldn’t see where the vomit had been. The bed was made and unrumpled. The single chair was a straight-backed wooden one he couldn’t imagine any visitor wanting to sit in. He went back to Mansfield and Emiliani.

“What about food?” he asked. “Was there any food in there?”

“Chocolate chip cookies,” Mansfield said. “But I wouldn’t pin your hopes on that. They were as stale as rocks.”

“But you sent them to be analyzed,” Gregor said.

“Absolutely.” Garry Mansfield sighed.

Gregor went back to the door of the room and looked inside again. It was a plain room, with a crucifix on one wall and a religious painting on another. There was a wooden kneeler in front of the crucifix. It was the sort of thing Gregor knew people had, but didn’t know why. He went back to Mansfield and Emiliani.

“Well,” he said, “why don’t we go talk to Sister Peter Rose.”





2


The convent parlor was smaller than the rectory living room—smaller and plainer, even though it housed eight nuns when the rectory housed only two priests. All of the nuns seemed to be in attendance when Gregor knocked on the door. Sister Thomasetta let them in. Sister Angela Marie ran back and forth with tea and cookies. Sister Scholastica was sitting with Sister Peter Rose, making the kind of shushing noises a mother makes to a child who has had a bad fall, but not really done himself any damage. Well, Gregor thought, it’s true enough that Sister Peter Rose hasn’t done herself any damage—but then, he didn’t believe she’d done damage to anybody else, either. Sane people had motives when they committed murder. Even half-sane people did. Unless he was terribly wrong about Sister Peter Rose, she was as sane as a rock.

Garry Mansfield and Lou Emiliani wiped their shoes carefully on the indoor mat. They’d already wiped them carefully on the outdoor one. Sister Scholastica looked up as Gregor and the two detectives came in and called out,

“Angela Marie? Do you think you could get these three gentlemen some coffee? They’re probably going to need it.”