“Madalyn Murray O’Hair.”
“That’s the one. I’ve got a lot of coffee. Come on back.”
Donna went off down the hall, waving the pages of the fax in the air as if they were a fan. Bennis took off her clogs and followed. All the floors in Donna’s town house were either hardwood or marble. Walking on them in clogs made you sound as if you were setting off heavy artillery. It was incredible how much better she felt, now that she was here. Edith Lawton would not have her op-ed published in the Inquirer. She might have it published in the Star, but that would be later, and she could deal with it when it came up. It was terrible, the way she lacked perspective, when she was left on her own. She pushed her clogs up against the wall under the coat rack and went down to the back, where the kitchen was.
Donna was bringing tins of cookies down from the top of the refrigerator.
“Do you want some of these?” she asked. “Lida and Hannah are having some kind of Bake-Off. Or something. Are you still upset?”
“A little.”
“She’s an idiot, Bennis. That’s all. And she doesn’t even write very well. Sit down and have something to eat. Gregor has got himself involved in another murder. Think about that.”
“What murder?”
Donna went over to the television set that sat in a corner of the breakfast nook and turned it on. “I don’t know exactly, I wasn’t paying any attention, but it will be on if we watch long enough. You really shouldn’t worry about it, Bennis, you know you shouldn’t. She’s just a—gnat. You’ve dealt with gnats before. You always win.”
The television was turned to ABC, which seemed to be showing some tabloid talk show about girls who had decided to get pregnant at twelve so that they’d have somebody to love. Bennis reached into the closest of the cookie tins and found a heap of loukoumia.
Donna was right, of course, Bennis thought. Edith Lawton was a gnat, and there was no reason for her to spend her time worrying about her. In the course of her long career, Bennis had run into a dozen such gnats, every one of them desperate “to be a writer,” every one of them as self-destructive as hell. If they got a break, they sabotaged it. Once they sabotaged it, they went looking for someone to blame for their failure, and Bennis was always not only handy, but an easy target, the one person they could not help but bitterly resent. Or something. Donna had thrown the pages of the fax on the table. Bennis picked them up and looked through them. The tissue-thin paper had begun to crinkle. The printing had begun to smear.
It was easy to say that it had happened before and it would happen again and she should not worry about it, but she was herself, and she worried about everything. Mostly she worried that someday she would not be able to stand it anymore. She would break, and in breaking she would become somebody else, the very bitch people like Edith Lawton wanted her to be, something cold, like a block of ice. Sometimes she felt as if she were freezing to death even now.
She wondered what Gregor would make of that.
She got up and went to the television and started flipping through the channels with the remote. She hoped that Gregor really was involved in a murder again. It would be a relief, to fret about a murder that did not belong to her.
Donna got down a tin of baklava and put that on the table, too.
“Try CNN,” she said. “Even if they don’t have the news of the murder, they’ll have the latest about Hillary Clinton. Why does that woman make me so insane?”
Bennis switched to CNN, and sat down to eat baklava by the fistful.
2
Father Robert Healy wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do next. He had been warned that, once the press conference had happened, he was unlikely to be left alone. Even if nobody knew that he was the chief suspect in these two killings, that he had bought the poison himself and laid it out in traps in the church basement, they would know that the deaths had happened here, and they would come to see. People had been telling him for years that he was out of touch. For the first time in his life, he had begun to agree with them. It hadn’t seemed possible to him that people would behave in the way the Cardinal Archbishop had warned him they would behave. Why would people—not policemen, but just people, not even Catholics—who had nothing to do with these deaths, who had never known any of the victims and did not know him, come to this church just to … look? Look at what? It was a beautiful church, of course, exquisite in its way. It had been built by people who had been trying very hard to measure up to the sort of display that had been committed across the street. They had done very well for their time and place. The ceilings in the main body of the church were high and arched in that way that made them seem to rise to the very majesty of heaven. The paintings and the statuary were not the usual Catholic kitsch, but brought from Europe and made by artists who had taken themselves and their work seriously. The pews were hand-carved and polished. Father Healy was proud of this church as his first real parish, proud of its people as well as its art, but he still couldn’t understand why a lot of gawkers would want to come from the other side of town, just to stare at it. He especially didn’t understand why they would want to come to stare at him, but they did.