True Believers(77)

“Sister Scholastica says that she’s not really a nun. She’s a religious Sister, because nuns take solemn vows and the Sisters of Divine Grace only take simple vows. Do you get all that?”

“Yes,” Father Healy said, “but it doesn’t matter. What about you? Are you all right? You were praying up a storm when I came in. Is there something wrong at school, or at home, that I could help you with?”

“Not exactly. It’s just—did you ever feel that something was missing? I mean, that something was just not there, so that even though your life was just perfect, it just wasn’t enough?”

Father Healy blinked. “Well, yes,” he said. “Of course I did.”

“You did?”

“Do you get this feeling a lot, or did it just sort of show up this morning and hit you on the head?”

“I don’t know. It’s been going on for a couple of months, I guess. Maybe from the beginning of the year. And I’m getting to be impossible to live with, really. I’m not satisfied with school. I’m not satisfied with the homeless shelter. I’m not satisfied with my boyfriend, and that’s really unfair, because he really does try and he’s good to me. And half the time I’d rather stay home, except when I do I’m all dissatisfied with that, too. Even my mother says I’m irritable all the time, and all I do is talk to her on the phone.”

“Ah,” Father Healy said. “Well.”

“I’d better let you go, or they’ll figure out you’re here and just inundate you. Sister Scholastica told Sister Peter Rose that they might have to protect you from being harassed while you’re celebrating Mass. It bothers me that people are so awful all the time.”

“It bothers me, too,” Father Healy said. “Do you know which way Sister Harriet went?”

“So that you can go in the other direction?” Mary McAllister laughed. “I think she went over to her office. At least that’s the way she was headed. Maybe you’d better go over to the convent and talk to Sister Peter Rose. Sister Harriet never wants to go over there.”

“True,” Father Healy said.

“See you later,” Mary McAllister said.

Father Healy looked out over the church again, and found his eyes fixed on Edith Lawton. He hadn’t known that copies of Free Thinking were being given out in his own church foyer, but he had seen the magazine, or newspaper. It was hard to know what to call it, since it was in the shape of a large newspaper like the New York Times, but on better paper than newsprint. And Mary McAllister was right. It got everything wrong. It got everything so wrong, it was hard not to think that the editors felt it was too much of an effort to look things up in the dictionary.

He looked at Edith Lawton again—not impressive, not at all. She lacked even the casual sophistication of the Philadelphia suburbs, and her face was as round as a chipmunk’s—and then he turned away and went back out of the church. He considered it a grace that no one had noticed him, and gave thanks for it. He would consider it an even greater grace if he managed to get back to his own bedroom without running into anybody he would rather not see. If things were like this when all anybody knew was that Bernadette Kelly had died of arsenic poisoning and Scott Boardman had died of arsenic poisoning, too, what would it be like when the details of this case became too clear for anybody to misunderstand?

He looked at Edith Lawton again and decided he was treating her like a rare animal in a zoo: the village atheist, in captivity. He went out the side door he had come in and felt better for being in the cold air. He thought of himself laying down the rat poison in the boiler room in the church basement and felt a little sick to his stomach.

It was odd how the smallest thing you did, the most innocent thing, could look so damning when it was cast in the wrong kind of light.





3


There was a clock in the window of the newsstand across the street from the small restaurant where Sister Scholastica had had an early dinner, and it startled her, when she saw it, that it was only six o‘clock. Like most nuns in traditional orders, she was used to having dinner early, just as she was used to having breakfast early. When you woke up at four and went to bed at nine, you did almost everything early. The one great exception, for the Sisters of Divine Grace, was lunch. Lunch had to be provided at the times most convenient for the students at St. Anselm’s school. Because of that, Scholastica sometimes found herself dizzy with hunger at eleven o’clock, because it had been so long since she’d eaten and because she had never been able to choke down more than a piece of toast when she first woke up. Of course, they prayed the Office and went to Mass before they actually sat down to breakfast, but that didn’t seem to matter. Scholastica’s internal clock did not adjust. Early morning was early morning. She didn’t want to eat in the early morning.