Gregor did just what he’d said he was going to do. He sat where he was and tried to think. He didn’t really believe that there was something peculiarly evil about the effects of religion. People were people, and human nature was human nature. Most of the religious people he knew were perfectly sane, and Bennis was right. There were fanatics of all kinds out there. Lots of them didn’t even believe in God.
He closed his eyes and imagined the scene in Scholastica’s office the night before, with Sister Harriet Garrity just being taken down from the chair behind Scholastica’s desk, and the little half-hardened mound of vomit next to her on the floor. There was no sign anywhere of anything she might have eaten or drunk, no plate, no cup, no glass. Gregor was still convinced that she had died in that room. If she had, then she almost surely must have ingested the arsenic in that room. The only other possibility was that she’d taken it in one of the other offices on that same floor and been able to walk the few steps to Scholastica’s office before the poison really hit. But that didn’t make a lot of sense, either. The door was locked. Somebody must have come in with her, or watched her die and come in after her, and that would have to be the person who killed her. Gregor couldn’t think of a reason why anybody else would want to lock that office door.
He got up and slid down to the end of the pew nearest the center aisle. The church was dark. The windows were stained glass in deep reds and purples, letting very little light in even on the brightest days. The only lights that were glowing were the small ones on the sidewalls that always reminded him of Christmas bulbs. What did Sister Harriet Garrity have in common with Scott Boardman? What would Bernadette Kelly have in common with Scott Boardman? Gregor could think of a million things that Sister Harriet and Bernadette Kelly had in common with each other. The key would have to be in the other connection.
He was already out of the church and on the sidewalk when it suddenly struck him: why the name Edith Lawton was so familiar and where he had seen it before.
There was an Edith Lawton on the list of subjects for questioning that the homicide detectives had drawn up the night before, before they allowed anybody in the church to go home.
THREE
1
Edith Lawton knew she was in trouble, but through the long night since the riot and the discovery of Harriet Garrity’s body, she hadn’t been able to think straight. She hadn’t been able to sleep, either, which was worse. There were people who could get along on almost no sleep, but Edith wasn’t one of them. If she got less than eight full hours, she felt fuzzy all day. If she got less than five, she was walking into walls. This morning, she was sure she had had less than three, but all she could really remember was lying alone in her bed with the lights off, listening to Will moving around in the living room. In the old days, she would have told him what was wrong and asked him to straighten it out for her—or, really, to rearrange the facts so that they would begin to make sense. Now, of course, she couldn’t say a thing. She didn’t even want him to know that she had been questioned by the police, or that she would be questioned again. She had no idea how long she would be able to keep that from him. The police would probably come here, one of these days. Either that, or they would find Will where he worked, and ask him about her then. He would tell them all about Ian. Then the police would talk to Ian. Eventually, the news would hit the papers or the television stations or both. If she became a serious suspect, her face would be everywhere. Then what would she do? There was a cold place at the pit of her stomach that said this was not the kind of publicity she could afford, if she expected to make something of her life someday—and then she felt ludicrous, because by the time you were fifty you should already have made something of your life. Still, she could see it, everything that could go wrong from here on out. Once you got a reputation, you could never get rid of it. And if it all came out—Ian, for instance, and all her attempts to get published in places that didn’t want her, and the fact that Will was going to file for divorce—
It was cold in her bedroom. The pipes needed to be bled. The boiler was acting up. Something. She kept thinking that these murders were like winning the lottery. She didn’t expect to be arrested, but she might be exposed, and that would be … shameful. The sort of thing that happened to trailer trash. The sort of thing that didn’t happen to people who were real writers who got their pictures in Vanity Fair. She had written a beautiful essay once on the stupidity of the lottery, but the fact was that she was afraid to win it. She didn’t want to be one of those people with their pictures in the Inquirer and the Star, holding oversize checks, never to be taken seriously again. There had to be a reason why so many of the people who won the lottery were convenience-store clerks when they won it, and never did much else with themselves ever afterward.