“Do you know how long they talked?”
“Nope.”
“And you’re sure it was Father Healy you saw.”
There was a bottle of beer on the edge of the kitchen sink. Mrs. Kelly got hold of it and drank whatever was in it, which didn’t seem to be much. Then she made a face and dropped the bottle in the sink. It cracked.
“I don’t know who it was I saw,” she said, with exaggerated patience, “because I can’t tell one fucking sanctimonious saint from another. Got that? It was a priest, with a black priest suit on and one of those collars. Tall. Christ, what difference does it make? They were always coming out here, the people from that church of hers. They were some kind of fucking support group. Christian community. You should have heard that fucking sanctimonious saint talk about Christian community.”
“Do we mean Father Healy now, or Bernadette?”
“Bernadette. I don’t talk to priests. They meddle too much. I don’t talk to nuns too much, either. There were nuns over there all the time.”
“But not the last time you saw her.”
Mrs. Kelly got another beer bottle out of the six-pack box on the floor and opened it with a can opener. Gregor found himself wondering why she bought bottles instead of cans. “The last time I saw her,” she said with deliberate slowness, “the priest was gone and she was going into her own damned trailer, which was always as clean as a hospital. Maybe nobody killed her at all. Maybe she killed herself from all the cleaning stuff she had in that place. It’s poison, most of it. It’s worse than cyanide.”
“Maybe,” Gregor said.
“She wasn’t sick the last time I saw her,” Mrs. Kelly said. “She was walking just fine, like there was never anything wrong with her. I always thought she put it all on, with the diabetes and all that. I always thought she was going to stage a miraculous cure one day and say she saw the Virgin Mary. You know what I’m talking about?’
“Maybe,” Gregor said, but he only said it because he was afraid that if he said no she would try to explain. He looked at Garry and Lou and nodded. The trailer door was still open, and cold air was still pouring in. Lou had gathered up the cockroaches and killed them.
“Right,” Garry said, suddenly perky. “Well, Mrs. Kelly, thank you for your time. With any luck, we won’t have to bother you again.”
They were out of there so fast, Gregor found himself facing Mrs. Kelly on his own in no time at all.
It was not a comfortable moment.
SIX
1
When the “exorcism” was over, Sister Scholastica went back to St. Anselm’s convent and sat in the single small chair in her own room, with the chair pulled up to the window so that she could look out. It was not what she should have been doing. At the very least, she should have been at her own desk in her own office, so that anyone who needed her could consult her about—things. She didn’t have much she could have told them. She didn’t know why she and the Sisters had participated in that charade, set up by the Cardinal Archbishop. At base, she supposed, it was mostly anger, because she was so sick and tired of Roy Phipps and his posturing and the way it all intruded on her life. Still, there were a thousand things she ought to be doing, about the school, about the parish, about the Sisters she had been sent to take care of. Mary McAllister’s request papers were sitting on her green felt desk blotter, waiting for her to put them into shape and send them to upstate New York. Reverend Mother General would be waiting for them. Sister Scholastica couldn’t make herself do anything but look out the window and wonder what Roy Phipps was doing now. She had expected him to have some kind of reaction that would be both public and dramatic. Instead, the street was so quiet, it might as well have been deserted.
In this order, Sisters did not have clocks in their rooms, unless they were serving as bell ringer, which Sister Scholastica never did. They did have watches, but Scholastica hadn’t turned on the light when she came in, and in the deepening dusk she found it impossible to look at hers. Outside, the streetlights had begun to glow, faintly, against the failing light. She always thought of February as the deepest part of winter. She forgot that it was really a time when the light had begun to return to the early evenings. She wished she could see beyond the courtyard to the street itself. If Roy Phipps wasn’t doing something to mark the exorcism, maybe the people of St. Anselm’s were, or the men of St. Stephen’s. She wished she knew, for certain, how she felt about the entire question of homosexuality. It wasn’t enough to know what the Church said and to believe that the Church was bound to be right—that the Church was right, really, when it came to questions of faith and morals. Right and wrong were not the issue here. She wanted to know what she felt, and every time she tried to get to the bottom of that, she stumbled over a pit of confusion. She didn’t know how she felt. She didn’t know what she thought. She only knew that she wished she could stop obsessing about it, and both St. Stephen’s and Roy Phipps stood in the way of that.