by Jane Haddam
Come to think of it, Gregor wanted to read the file on Black Rock Park, too. He had come to share John Smith’s evaluation of Andy Walsh’s murder, and the Cardinal’s. Whyever it had been done, it had had nothing directly to do with the slaughtered animals in Black Rock Park. Indirectly was another matter, though. Black Rock Park was like a large chandelier hanging from the ceiling in a very narrow hall. Its presence was inescapable and oppressive, intrusive, demanding. If it had had nothing to do with any of this, it shouldn’t have been. The worst thing about Black Rock Park was that you couldn’t get away from it, no matter what you did.
He looked up, stretched his arms and legs, and was glad to see Smith coming back into the squad room, carrying a big greasy paper bag filled to the brim with white cardboard cartons. Just what I need, Gregor thought, lots of food and a shot at more information. Then he realized that John Smith was running.
Smith ran right up to the desk, connecting with nobody else in the room at all, and dumped the bag of cartons in his chair. He was out of breath and flushed, as if he’d run up the four flights to homicide instead of taking the elevator.
“Come on,” he said, “let’s get moving. I ran into Janice from Advisory down on the second floor.”
“Who’s Janice from Advisory?”
“The woman who tells you you have to be someplace. Which we do. Come on, will you please, for God’s sake? There’s been another one.”
Gregor asked, although he already knew the answer. “Another what?”
Smith grabbed his jacket off the back of his chair. “Another murder. At St. Agnes’s. We’ve got to move. We’ve got to get there before Maveronski hears about it.”
PART THREE
Good Friday to Holy Saturday
This is the passover of the Lord: if we honor the memory of his death and resurrection by hearing his word and celebrating his mysteries, then we may be confident that we shall share his victory over death.
—from the Easter Vigil, Service of Light
ONE
[1]
AT FIRST, GREGOR THOUGHT there had been a mistake. There was no murder at St. Agnes’s. There was some kind of medical emergency, a crisis, a question of life and death as yet undecided. Only that could account for the fact that the ambulances parked at the curb outside the main gate still had their lights spinning and their sirens screaming, and that there were six hospital vehicles and only one police car. Whatever had happened here, it was too complicated for the paramedics. They were milling around in the middle of the courtyard, surreptitiously smoking cigarettes and stamping their feet against the ground. There was still a lot of snow and it had gotten onto the cuffs of their pants, over their boots, so that their feet looked frosted, like misshapen cakes. Beyond them, the door to the convent was open. Women were going in and out, with that brisk walk that is the sole province of emergency room nurses.
Back at Colchester Homicide, Gregor had assumed without thinking that the murder had taken place in St. Agnes’s Church. Now, as Smith threaded his unmarked Ford in and out of the vans and the ambulances, he saw there was no activity around the church at all. The front and side doors were both closed. The windows were empty of light. Smith shot between the black-and-white and a Porsche with doctors’ plates and pulled to a stop in front of the church steps. It was the only available space at the curb, and there wasn’t much of it. Smith had to park with his tail jutting out across Ellery Street.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “What’s going on around here?”
“Whoever it is isn’t dead yet,” Gregor told him.
Smith snorted, cut the engine, and jerked open his door. “If it was nicotine, whoever it is is definitely dead. Has to be.”
Gregor knew this was not strictly true. There were antidotes to nicotine poisoning. The difficulty was that they had to be applied very quickly, almost before the victim began to feel the poison’s effects. In a case of murder, that was the next thing to impossible. The murderer would have had to be there, watching his victim drink his death, and then changed his mind. And he would have had to have known the antidote himself.
Himself, herself, Gregor thought. He shouldn’t let himself get tangled in linguistic presumptions. They had a very nasty way of making you fail.
He got out of the car himself and followed Smith through the gate into the courtyard. Nobody tried to stop him, because there was nobody around who had the authority. The patrolmen who belonged to the beached black-and-white were nowhere in sight. Gregor passed the paramedics and brushed by a nurse going in the opposite direction, toward the ambulances. Then he walked up to the convent’s front door and looked inside.
What he had expected to see, he didn’t know. A lot of people, maybe, milling about and looking important. Instead, there were only John Smith and Sister Scholastica, staring at each other across an empty foyer.
“Jesus Christ,” Smith was saying, “who does that woman think she is? There’s been a death here, for God’s sake.”
“There’s been one death here,” Scholastica said. “Shut up and get out of here. Just shut up and get out of here.”
“I’m not getting out of anywhere, for God’s sake. There’s been another murder here.”
It could go on like this for hours, Gregor knew. Scholastica was hysterical and Smith was close. He wondered what had happened in the brief time Smith had been out of his sight. He wondered at the atmosphere of emergency in the foyer, as thick as smoke, as intoxicating as a drug. It had even started to get to him.
Smith and Scholastica were still facing each other, still oblivious to him watching them from the doorway. In a minute or two, they were going to start shouting again. Gregor cleared his throat.
It took longer than it should have. They were so wrapped up in each other, and they were so reluctant to let it go. In some way, their argument had served as an anesthetic for both of them. While they were engaged in it, they were temporarily protected from the full impact of what had happened here.
Eventually, they both broke. Gregor was standing only a few feet from them. They knew he was there. They turned away from each other and looked at him. Then Sister Scholastica sat down in the foyer’s only chair, put her face in her hands, and started to cry.
“Oh, dear Lord,” she said. “I can’t take this. I can’t take this. I really can’t.”
Gregor looked quizzically at John Smith, and Smith shrugged. “It’s that woman, the pregnant one, Peggy Somebody.”
“Peg Morrissey.” Scholastica looked up. “Peg Monaghan, I mean. I never remember. I—she was in the living room and I—I came out from the back and I was going to the door and there she was—there she was—doubled over like that and then—then I—there are the babies and I—”
“Mrs. Monaghan was pregnant with twins,” Smith said. “The bi—the doctor in there is trying to save them. Mrs. Monaghan is dead.”
Gregor nodded. This, of course, explained everything: the ambulances, the state of emergency, even Smith’s incipient hysteria. The idea of it brought Gregor almost to the edge of hysteria himself. He moved into the foyer and shut the door behind him. Just as he did, a nurse came out of a door at the back of the hall, moved quickly to the foyer and through, and brushed by him on her way out the door. She had been crying, and doing nothing to stop it. Tears had left wormy rivers in the thick pancake of her makeup. Her mouth was grim.
Scholastica had looked up at the nurse as she passed. Now she turned her head to Gregor and said, in a voice so calm it was chilling, “It’s not going to work, you know. I knew it from the beginning. They took too long to get here.”
“They don’t seem to have given up hope,” Gregor said gently.
“I don’t think they work on hope,” Scholastica said. “That doctor especially. I think she just does what she does, and goes on doing it, until something makes her stop.”
“The deaths of the children would make her stop.”
“I know. But what will it matter, even if they manage to be born? Peg wa
s eight and a half months pregnant, but they’ll have poison in their systems. And they’ll have nine brothers and sisters and a father who works two jobs and no mother.”
It sounded like a scenario from East Lynne. Gregor had to remind himself that bathos did not equal unreality. However melodramatic, what was happening here was very, very real.
“I think that’s the kind of speculation you should leave until later,” he told Scholastica, “until you know what’s happened. Thinking about it now won’t do anyone any good. You’ll only make yourself distraught.”
“I am distraught,” Scholastica said. Smith snorted again, but she didn’t notice him. She was looking at the front door, on which hung a crucifix made of walnut and gold. It was not a large crucifix, or a detailed one. The face of Christ on it had neither personality nor particularity. Unlike some, it didn’t look alive. Scholastica seemed to be communing with it anyway.
After a while, she shook her head, shook her shoulders, and stood up. She was still ignoring John Smith. She behaved, in fact, as if he wasn’t in the room.
“You know,” she said to Gregor, “I have something for you. Tom Dolan brought them over around noon.”
“Books,” Gregor agreed cautiously. “The Cardinal promised to lend them to me.”
“Tom tried to leave them at Rosary House, but Sister wasn’t there. He didn’t think you’d mind if he left them with me.”
Of course, Gregor thought, I wouldn’t mind. Nobody would. It was flattering that Dolan himself had taken time from his impossible schedule to deliver the books personally. Even if he had had no choice in that—the way the Chancery was understaffed, he might not have—he had had the choice to wait until after the Stations of the Cross, when things would calm down a little. But what was Scholastica getting at? In this time and in this place, why did she care about the books?
She had moved away from the chair and the wall, toward the hall. If the nurse who had gone out came back, or a different one tried to get out, she would collide with Scholastica. The nurses weren’t wasting attention on trivialities at the moment. Scholastica was oblivious to the possibility that she might be blocking an emergency pathway. She was looking at the framed icon on the wall next to the archway to the hall. It was a Madonna and Child.
“The books,” she said, “are in the dining room. It’s the only room on this floor that hasn’t been commandeered by somebody. The doctor is in the kitchen. The police are in the living room, because that’s where Peg was when she—died.”
“And?” Gregor said.
“And I think you should come to the dining room and get those books.” Scholastica turned to face Smith. She hadn’t forgotten his existence at all. She’d been willing him into nonexistence. “Just you. Not—him,” she said.
[2]
Gregor was used to the tidal emotions of a murder investigation. Nobody involved in one was able to remain psychologically consistent for two minutes at a time, especially in the first hour after the death or the discovery of the death. What bothered him about Scholastica was that she seemed particularly volatile and, therefore, particularly fragile. He didn’t think staring at that Madonna and Child had been a good idea. He followed her down the hall into the one room in the convent he knew, the dining room where he had eaten breakfast his first morning in Colchester. With its table unset and stripped of its tablecloth, it looked barren.
There was a coffee maker sitting on the sideboard, with a full pot keeping warm on the plate. Scholastica went to it, got two cups and two saucers out of a recessed cupboard above the counter, and poured one cup full.
“Do you want some coffee?” she asked him. “You’ll have to take it black. The cream and the sugar were put away in the kitchen after lunch, and I couldn’t—”
“I don’t think you should,” Gregor said quickly. “I don’t think you should drink that coffee, either. If this death is connected to the other deaths, Mrs. Monaghan will have been poisoned. We don’t know yet what that poison was in.”
“It wasn’t in the coffee.” Scholastica smiled bitterly. “Peg didn’t have any of it, you see. She was supposed to come in and see me, but she never got here. I was in this room until just a few seconds before I found her, just sitting at the table and—thinking.”
“The coffee—”
“Was here all the time I was.”
“What if the murderer slipped in through the back door while you were calling the police or the medical people? What if he or she decided there’d been enough poisoning going on so that it would be nice, for once, for the police to be able to figure out what the poison was in.”
“The poison Andy took was in the chalice. Everybody knows that.”
“It’s only been proved by elimination. If the Cardinal gets what he wants, it will never be proved any other way.”
Scholastica looked into the coffee, shook her head, and put it aside. Then she reached back into the overhead cupboard and took out a pack of cigarettes. “Funny, I’ve just lost all taste for coffee. Judy left these here. It’s tacky to smoke in habit, but I think I’ll do it anyway.”
She took one of the saucers to use as an ashtray, put it on the table, and sat down. Gregor sat down, too, across from her. He waited while she lit up and blew a stream of smoke in the air.
“What do you know,” she asked him, “about that incident in Black Rock Park?”
It was never a good idea to let a witness know you were surprised. It either shut them up or made them want to lie to you. But he was surprised. The last thing he’d expected was more of Black Rock Park.
“It depends on what you mean by ‘know,’” he told her, speaking as slowly as he could make himself. “I’ve heard the police version, of course. Abandoned dogs and cats, with their throats slit. A lot of animal blood and trash. A lavaliere from the junior prom at Cathedral Girls’ High. The impression I got was that the police had some way of knowing that that particular lavaliere was a souvenir of that particular prom.”
“They should have. It was stamped with the school crest, the date, and the words Springtime in Venice Ball. That was the theme of our junior prom. Springtime in Venice.”
“By ‘our’ you mean yours, Judy Egan’s, and Peg Monaghan’s.”
“And Cheryl Cass’s, too. Of course, Cheryl didn’t go. Nobody would have taken her, and she wouldn’t have had the money for tickets or a dress. Even Tom wouldn’t have taken her, and he was—better about Cheryl than the rest of us were.”
“What was ‘better’?”
Scholastica sighed. “Sometimes I wonder how I ever got admitted to this order. It couldn’t have been because of my holiness. I didn’t have any. I don’t have any now. We were terrible to Cheryl, all six of us. Right from the beginning. From the very beginning. All the way back to grade school.” Scholastica stood up, turned around, and reached behind into the cupboard again. She came out with what looked like a large square of cardboard. “Here,” she said, dropping it in front of Gregor. “That’s what I was doing this afternoon, instead of what I was supposed to be doing. I was looking at that.”
“That” was a black-and-white picture of uniform-clad schoolchildren sitting on a set of rickety bleachers. Gregor looked at the caption. The names meant nothing to him. “What is it?” he asked Scholastica.
“It’s our Confirmation class picture. The names at the bottom are our Confirmation names. You take an extra one, you know how it works, a kind of name in religion. I—wait.” She reached into her pocket and came up with a folded sheet of lined notepaper. “Here. I wrote us all down. Real names and Confirmation names. Cheryl is the second from the right in the front row. Her Confirmation name was Bridget.”
Gregor looked from the picture to the notepaper and back again. “Can I keep these?” he asked. “I don’t have to have them forever. Overnight would be long enough.”
“As long as you return the picture, yes,” Scholastica said. “The picture isn’t mine. It belongs to the convent.”
“I’ll take very g
ood care of it.”
“We were twelve when it was taken,” Scholastica said, “just at that age when children turn into teenagers and start to separate the sheep from the goats. We were definitely the sheep, the six of us. Andy and Barry and Tom and Peg and Judy and I.”
“And Cheryl Cass was a goat.”
“If you’re thinking that’s why Andy had the goat in church, go right ahead. I thought of that, too. I somehow don’t think so. But to answer your question, yes. Cheryl was a goat. At that stage she was worse than a goat. She was an untouchable.”
“She was pretty,” Gregor said.
Scholastica smiled again. “You mean she looks pretty after a fashion. I suppose she was. It was the wrong fashion. When I first went into the convent, I used to think about her and think we’d been so cruel to her because she was, well, poor. Worse than poor. We all knew what her mother was like, what both her parents were like. We found the whole thing revolting. But—”
“But?”
“But that couldn’t have been the whole truth,” Scholastica said. “Tom Dolan’s parents were just as bad. Worse, in a way, because his father was very irreligious. He’d go storming up to old Father Deegan screaming and yelling about the Church, right in front of everybody. He’d get bombed out of his skull Sunday morning and make a scene at the twelve o’clock Mass. It used to embarrass Tom no end. But we never held it against him.”
Gregor was willing to bet Tom Dolan hadn’t believed that. If he had been in Tom’s position, he wouldn’t have believed it himself.
“Anyway,” Scholastica was going on, “that was probably why Tom wasn’t as bad about Cheryl as the rest of us. Peg and Judy and I wouldn’t even talk to her. Whenever she happened to be in the same room with us, we looked right through her. The boys would—play tricks, call her names, things like that, when we were younger. As we got older, they started hitting on her for other things.”