Gregor nodded politely to the young nun hurrying out, and sat down on the couch across from the chairs where Sister Scholastica and Sister Peter Rose sat.
“Well,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” Sister Peter Rose said. Then she buried her face in the oversize handkerchief she was holding and started to cry again.
“I keep telling her not to worry about it,” Sister Scholastica said, “considering the way I behaved yesterday. Then I get to thinking about the handkerchiefs.”
“The what?” Gregor said.
“The handkerchiefs.” Sister Scholastica reached out and touched the one Sister Peter Rose was holding. “It’s been a regulation in the order at least since I entered. We carry men’s plain white linen handkerchiefs. I don’t think I realized, before this week, just how large they were.”
“Ah,” Gregor said.
Sister Peter Rose put down the handkerchief and blinked.
“You know,” Gregor said, “you’re wrong. You’d make an excellent Mother Superior.”
“Mother General,” Scholastica corrected him.
Sister Peter Rose looked startled. “Oh, yes,” she said. “What a wonderful idea. Not right away of course, because I wouldn’t want Mother General to be ill, but in the long run—”
“Let’s try to remember I haven’t even been elected a provincial yet,” Scholastica said. “Are you ready to talk to Mr. Demarkian, Sister?”
“Oh,” Peter Rose said. “Yes. I’m sorry. I know I’m acting like a child.”
“You’re doing fine,” Gregor told her. “You’re not supposed to take finding a dead body in stride. Even people who are paid to do it don’t take it in stride. The question, at the moment, is why you went up to Father Healy’s room. That’s what you did, isn’t it? You went up to the second floor of the rectory and into his room.”
“That’s right,” Sister Rose said. “I’d never been there before.”
“So it wasn’t something you usually did.”
“Oh, no,” Sister Peter Rose said. “I wouldn’t think of it under ordinary circumstances. We’ve got very strict rules about that sort of thing. The whole archdiocese does. Well, most archdioceses would frown on a nun going to a priest’s bedroom for almost any reason, except, you know, if he were dying and she was needed to nurse him, which would be an entirely different thing, of course, because—”
“Sister,” Scholastica said.
“Oh,” Sister Peter Rose said. “Sorry.”
“That’s fine,” Gregor said. “Don’t worry about it. So it wasn’t your habit to go up to Father Healy’s room, and ordinarily you would never have thought of it. That’s as I’d thought. But you did go up to his room. So you must have had a reason.”
“Oh, yes,” Sister Peter Rose said. “It was because of the pounding.”
“The pounding?” Gregor asked.
“I could hear it all the way down in the rectory living room,” Sister Peter Rose said. “It was like he was trying to throw furniture. Things seemed to be smashing into the floor, except it was the ceiling over my head. So I went out into the hall and called up the stairs. And he didn’t answer me. That’s when I started to be worried.”
“When he didn’t answer you,” Gregor repeated.
Sister Peter Rose rubbed her hands together. “I thought I’d catch him before he had a chance to go upstairs, you see. I mean, when I come in from outside I always spend a couple of minutes in the parlor or I go to the kitchen before I go upstairs. So I thought he would be on the first floor. But then I couldn’t find him, and the pounding started, and he wouldn’t answer me—”
“Wait,” Gregor said. “When did you think you could catch him?”
“Oh.” Sister Peter Rose took a deep breath. “Well, you see, I was at the school, and I’d had a conference with this parent, and that was over. And I looked out the window of my classroom and Father was standing in that little arched side doorway that goes into the Mary Chapel. You know the one I mean.”
“Yes.” It was the one Gregor had been going in and out of on a regular basis since he first started coming to St. Anselm’s.
“Well, he was standing there, talking to someone—”
“Who?” Gregor asked.
Sister Peter Rose shook her head. “I don’t know. I couldn’t see. But it wasn’t an angry talk, or anything. It didn’t look confrontational. Father was just sort of bopping along and talking full tilt. I mean. You know what he was. He was such a naif really.”