True Believers(140)

“There wasn’t anything for you to do about it,” Scholastica said. “What do you think you were supposed to do about it?”

Actually, Gregor could think of a number of things—call the police; call the ambulance; get help; not panic—but he didn’t mention any of them, because most civilians could not do anything but what they did. Training could teach you to handle the surprise of somebody dying violently before your eyes. Without training, people mostly did what they could do.

Gregor got up and went to the parlor window to look out. A little way across the courtyard, tech men were going in and out of the rectory while a young dispirited-looking priest was standing by.

Gregor retreated from the window. It was dark out there, now. Other than the police and the parochial vicar, the courtyard was empty.

“I suppose,” he said, “we’d better find out what the autopsy says about what the man ate.”





TWO





1


Ian was with her when the sirens started, and he was with her an hour later, when the street was calm again and only the lights at the end of the block gave any indication that there was something wrong at St. Anselm’s. Edith knew it was a mistake. Will almost never came home before the middle of the night anymore, but this might be the time, and to have Ian sitting here naked wouldn’t do. She looked across Ian’s lap at the night table. He had laid out his Rolex watch and his Coach accessories: leather card case, leather credit card case, leather wallet. Everything Ian owned that wasn’t gold was mahogany leather. Edith got up and found a robe to wrap around herself. Then she sat back down on the bed and stretched out her legs.

“It can’t go on forever,” she said finally. “Will knows now. Nothing we do will make any difference to that.”

“It will make a difference if he can prove it.”

“He can say he walked in on us. He did walk in on us. Isn’t that the same as proof in a divorce court?”

“Not if you deny it.”

“I thought I wasn’t allowed to deny it,” Edith said. “Under oath, I mean. I thought you told me, when we started—”

“I know what I told you.’

Until now, the room had been dark. Ian never seemed to like the light on when they were together. Now he switched on the bedside lamp and sat looking up at her, the pale hair on his chest seeming to rise and fall in a stray draft. Edith’s roll of Life Savers were lying on top of the dresser. She got it down and popped the one on top into her mouth, fingering it along the smooth small curve first, as if she wanted to memorize the shape with her fingers.

“Everything we’ve done,” she said carefully. “From the very beginning. Everything we haven’t done. It was so that Will wouldn’t find out”

“But Will did find out, Edith. So that’s over.”

Edith went to the window and looked out. “There’s been another one, down the street. Did you know that. Father Healy. Didn’t you know Father Healy from your office?”

“Vaguely. Mostly, I only knew the Cardinal.”

“You knew that girl. That Bernadette Kelly.”

“Of course I did. She was a receptionist.”

“She could have ruined you.”

Ian got very still. Edith could feel it. “I wouldn’t say that,” he said finally. “She wasn’t a very bright girl. Everybody knew that.”

Edith turned the soft mints over and over in her hands and then put them back on the bureau. It was worse than still in this room. Everything had come to a dead stop. The lights in the church’s courtyard down the block were spilling into the street. Every time somebody walked past there, he looked as if he had been lit up. Edith went from the bureau to the window to the bed and back again.

“She could have ruined you,” she said finally, “and you knew it, and I knew it. She could have stopped you. She told you so. I heard her.”

“She never said anything of the kind. Edie, don’t be a fool. You didn’t hear anything like that. Even if you think you did, you can’t corroborate it.”

“I don’t have to corroborate it. I heard it. And then a week later, less than a week later, she was dead. Out in that trailer park where she lived. They never would have known it wasn’t diabetes if that silly husband of hers hadn’t brought her into church. Nobody would ever have known. But he did.”

By now, the room was beyond dead stop, beyond anything Edith could remember experiencing in her whole life. Ian could have been a block of marble. If he had smoked cigarettes, he would have brought one out to have something to do with his hands. With the light on, there were no shadows in the room. Edith thought that she must look like those women in movies, lit to be hags. The light was wrapped around her, making her look creased.