Gregor bit his lip. Standing at the doorway, Garry Mansfield and Lou Emiliani bit theirs, too. Gregor took a deep breath.
“So,” he said, “Father Healy was standing at the side door talking to somebody. Do you have any idea what he was doing before then?”
“I do,” Scholastica said. “I was there. He was in the church, leading a Chaplet of the Divine Mercy.”
“A what?” Gregor asked.
“A Chaplet of the Divine Mercy,” Sister Angela Marie said, putting a tray with coffee things down on the small round coffee table at Gregor’s side. “It’s a devotion, with a set of repetitive prayers, to the Divine Mercy. It’s been televised endlessly on EWTN over the last few years—”
“Eternal World Television Network,” Sister Scholastica said. “Mother Angelica and those people. It’s very popular in this part of the country.”
“Yes. So there were requests for us to do the Chaplet here, and Father liked devotions of that kind, so he led them. Once a week, every week, at this time.”
“How long does it take to pray a Chaplet of the Divine Mercy?” Gregor asked.
Sister Peter Rose wiped her eyes. “About half an hour, if you get really fancy with it and chant. Father loved to chant.”
“He did that,” Sister Scholastica said. “He had a beautiful voice for plainchant.”
Gregor thought about it. “Tell me something about this devotion. Does it require anything else besides praying and plainchant—”
“It’s not praying and plainchant,” Sister Angela Marie said, “you pray in plainchant.”
“All right. You pray in plainchant. But does it require anything else, like Communion , or any other thing that might require Father Healy or anybody else to eat anything?”
“Oh,” Sister Peter Rose said. “Oh, no, it’s nothing like that. And the only thing you’d ever have to eat in a Catholic church would be the Body and Blood, anyway. But it was just prayers, like the rosary. You didn’t receive Communion .”
Gregor turned to Scholastica. “You said you were there. There was nothing to eat while the Chaplet was going on?”
“Of course not,” Scholastica said.
“Were you watching him at all times? Could you say for certain that he didn’t eat anything or drink anything while the devotion was going on?”
“Of course not,” Scholastica said. “I wasn’t looking at him at all. I was looking at my beads, or I had my eyes closed, which is what I was supposed to be doing. But I can almost guarantee that he didn’t eat or drink anything during the Chaplet, anyway.”
“Why?” Gregor asked.
“It’s because of the format,” Sister Thomasetta said, coming in from the foyer. “It’s a proclamation and response format. One person said the first half of a sentence, then the congregation said the next half. Over and over like that. In sentence fragments.”
“What Sister is trying to say,” Scholastica said, “is that Father Healy wouldn’t have had time to eat much of anything. To swallow something small like an aspirin, maybe, but other than that he would have been caught up short the next time he was supposed to speak, and we would probably have noticed the break.”
“Probably but not definitely,” Gregor said.
Scholastica fluttered her hands in the air. “It’s hard to say definitely about anything. But I didn’t notice any hesitations. The devotion is very hypnotic, in a way. Nothing broke the rhythm that I noticed during the whole half hour.”
Gregor looked at Garry Mansfield and Lou Emiliani. Lou Emiliani shrugged. It was weak, but if they could trust it, they would know that Father Healy had to have been poisoned after the Chaplet devotion. Half an hour was far longer than it would take for arsenic to start to make him sick.
Gregor turned to Sister Scholastica again. “What happened after the Chaplet? Did he stand around talking? Was there a coffee hour?”
“No, nothing like that,” Scholastica said. “We do that sort of thing sometimes, when we have devotions or meetings in the evenings, and after the early Mass on weekday mornings, so that people can have some coffee before they go to work—”
“Because they’ve been fasting,” Sister Angela Marie said. “For Communion .”
“Right,” Scholastica said. “So we’ve got that. But with something in the middle of the day like this, no, we don’t do any coffee or refreshments. It’s mostly older people who come. I think they go off to a diner a couple of blocks away and have something on their own.”