True Believers(95)

Now it was much later, nearly noon, and Edith didn’t know what to do with herself. The Inquirer had turned down her op-ed. She had sent a copy to the Star and hadn’t heard back yet. She didn’t want to work. She was too tired, and too jittery, to make any sense. She kept going from the papers to the television to the front windows to the papers again, and coming up blank. Earlier in the morning, there had been cleanup crews on the street, hosing down the last of the mess from the riot. Now there was nobody. The only sign that there had been trouble was the fact that one of the windows on one of the town houses nearest St. Stephen’s Church was broken, but it could have been broken by anything. Every once in a while, she pressed her face to the window glass and tried to see farther up or down the street, but she never got anything but the fog of her breath on the pane.

If she hadn’t been known to be an atheist, she wouldn’t be in this much trouble. She knew that was true. The police were all believers. That Gregor Demarkian—who was a friend of Bennis Hannaford’s—had a best friend who was a priest. It would be so convenient for all of them if they could just pin these murders on her. It was too bad for them that she had never bought any arsenic and never been known to talk to any of the victims, except this last one, who was on the street all the time. If she managed to escape the worst sort of publicity, she could see how to make something of this. It would make a good essay for Free Thinking, or for her site on the web: the prejudice visited on unbelievers; the mortal peril of the freethinker in a believer’s society. It might even get some wider play in the freethought press. She had never had the chance to be a martyr before. It gave her an odd sense of exhilaration.

The exhilaration was followed by another wave of nervousness. She couldn’t stay in the house anymore, by herself, talking to no one. She was going to go crazy. What did it mean that she couldn’t think of a single person to call? She got her coat off the newel at the bottom of the stairs, picked up the little change purse with her keys attached that fit into her pocket, and stepped outside. She should have brought a hat and gloves.

There was a little corner store at the end of the block opposite the one with the churches on it. Edith went there first and looked through the papers, even though she subscribed to all the ones in town. She finally bought a York Peppermint Patty and went back out onto the street. Going back up the block, she passed Roy Phipps’s town house “church” and saw that it looked the way it always had. Nothing was broken, and there was no indication that half the church’s members had spent the night in jail. That was material for a column, too—what the Phipps people had done during the riot, how violent they were, how dangerous—but Edith had the depressing feeling that she had said it all before. She wandered past her own house and to the walk in front of St. Anselm’s. She looked across at St. Stephen’s and thought she had done that before, too. She’d written an essay on how enlightened and forwardlooking churches like St. Stephen’s were, and then she’d been taken aback when Dan Burdock had let her know that he thought that Jesus had really risen from the dead.

She went up the steps into St. Anselm’s and looked around. There was a noon Mass coming up, and there was a fair-sized group of people at the front near the altar, saying the rosary together. Edith went back out and around the side. The courtyard was deserted, but a big van was pulling into the parking lot. As she watched, it settled into a space, shuddered a few times, and stopped running. The driver’s side door opened and a very young woman with long red hair hopped out. Edith walked in that direction. The van belonged to some kind of homeless shelter. The young woman was somebody she had seen around.

“What are you doing here?” the young woman said, suddenly, when Edith wasn’t expecting it.

Edith froze. She hadn’t realized she’d gotten so close to the van, or that the young woman had noticed her. “I’m not doing anything,” she said. “I’m just—walking around.”

“This area is supposed to be sealed off,” the young woman said. “Nobody is supposed to be here unless they have business here. The police lines are still up at Sister’s office.”

Edith wrapped her arms around her body. “There wasn’t anything sealing it off. I was in the church, and then I came out and walked around. There weren’t any barriers up. Nobody stopped me.”

“What were you in the church for this time? If we don’t watch out, there’ll be a million gawkers here all day. We won’t be able to get anything done.”