True Believers(139)

“Did Father Healy stand around in the church after the Chaplet and talk to the people who had come?” Gregor asked.

“He said hello and how are you to a couple of them,” Scholastica said, “but he didn’t get involved in conversations.”

“And then he left.”

“Yes.”

“And you saw him leave,” Gregor said.

“Yes,” Scholastica said. “Well, to be exact, I saw him go out behind the Mary Chapel in the direction of that door. There’s a little buffer space or something back there, the actual door is hard to see from the center of the church. But he went that way and he didn’t come back and there’s no place else to go.”

“Did you go out that way, too?”

“No,” Scholastica said. “I went out the front of the church. I had to go over to St. Stephen’s and tell Chickie George that Mary McAllister wouldn’t be able to pick him up until seven. She’d been held up at school.”

Gregor thought it over again. “What about the other people who had been at the devotion. Did they leave by the Mary Chapel door?”

“Some of them might have,” Scholastica said, “but most of them wouldn’t have. Like I said, we get mostly older people. The Mary Chapel door comes out on a stoop—well, you’ve been on it. A concrete-block stoop. It ices over this time of year. We should take better care of it. But the way it is, most of our older people prefer to go out the front, where we’ve got salt down when it ices and the going is relatively flat.”

“But you can’t say that one of them didn’t go out that door,” Gregor said.

“No,” Scholastica admitted. “But do you really think one of our older people poisoned Father Healy, and Bernadette and Harriet and poor Scott Boardman from across the street? I mean, I know they get cranky sometimes, but—”

“I’m just trying to determine if we can rule out that part of Father Healy’s day,” Gregor said. “So it was most likely one of your older parishioners he was talking to when Sister Peter Rose saw him.”

“Well,” Sister Peter Rose said, “yes, I suppose so. I just didn’t think it was. If you know what I mean. I mean, none of the other people from the Chaplet were around, or coming out that door, or even in the parking lot. So I just assumed, you know, that it was somebody else.”

Gregor let it go. “What happened then?” he asked. “He came back to the rectory?”

“That’s right.” Sister Peter Rose nodded. He came across the parking lot and then across the courtyard, and I called out to him, but he didn’t hear me. So I ran around to the back door—I was at school, you see, I couldn’t go right out the way I could have if I had been here—and just as I got outside, I saw him go into the rectory. So I ran up to the rectory and rang, but nobody answered. Well, I mean, I didn’t wait for him to answer, really. I mean, there’s no need. I rang to let him know somebody was coming in, then I came in.”

“And Father Healy wasn’t in the living room,” Gregor said.

“In the living room or the dining room or the kitchen. I checked all those places. And then I knew, you know, that he’d gone upstairs. So I went to the bottom of the stairs and called up to him.”

“And?”

“And nothing happened,” Sister Peter Rose said. “He didn’t answer back. So I called again. And then next thing I heard was the thumping.”

“Thumping like somebody falling or thumping like somebody pounding?”

“I don’t know,” Sister Peter Rose said. “Thumping like somebody was taking something big and blunt like one of those weight bags boxers use to practice on and slamming it against the floor, over and over again. Like that. It didn’t make any sense really. I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t answering me. And I thought, I don’t know, that he was having a heart attack or maybe this was a home invasion and there were people in the house and then I don’t know what I was thinking, but I ran up the stairs to find out.”

“You could have been killed,” Sister Thomasetta said. “Think what would have happened if it was a home invasion.”

“Well, it wasn’t,” Peter Rose said. “And I got up to the top of the stairs and the door to his bedroom was closed, but I could hear the thumping in there, so I opened it. I know I shouldn’t have opened it. When the Cardinal Archbishop finds out about this, I’m going to be sent right back to the motherhouse. But I did open it, and there he was, on the floor, all sort of contorted—I’m not sure how to describe it—all bent up and creased, sort of, his skin was creased and I just lost my composure. I just—I screamed and screamed and then I could see that he was dead and I didn’t know what to do about it.”