by Jane Haddam
Scholastica had wrapped her arms around her waist and hunched her shoulders forward. She was still staring at him intently, as if she expected him to give her the answer to a question she hadn’t asked.
“Brigit Ann Reilly,” she said, with a trace of coming explosion in her voice, “was not that common type, the girl too immature to be in the convent. She was immature enough, mind you, but that wasn’t what was wrong with her, as far as a religious order was concerned. As far as I was concerned. She was a perfectly ordinary girl from a perfectly ordinary family in New Hampshire. I’m not trying to imply that there was something odd about her background, because I don’t believe there was. I think she would have made a perfectly marvelous wife and mother in the ditzy I Married Joan mold, or a competent private secretary to someone whose schedule wasn’t too complicated. She wasn’t very bright and she wasn’t very stupid. She wasn’t very imaginative and she wasn’t very bad. She was just utterly and incurably undisciplined.”
“Undisciplined?” Gregor demanded.
Scholastica turned away from him and went to the left. She was walking quickly now, with an abrupt and decisive step Gregor remembered from nuns he had run across in his childhood. She pushed open yet another set of swinging wooden doors, held yet another one open for him to pass through, and then continued on their way, oblivious of anything but her own words and her own forward motion.
There seemed to be one more set of doors to pass through. Gregor assumed there was only one more, because he couldn’t imagine Scholastica slamming the palms of her hands into doors like that time after time without getting hurt. He caught the swing of the door himself as he came through, just in case she had forgotten what she was doing besides talking.
“Brigit Ann Reilly,” she was saying, “was the kind of girl who had enthusiasms. She was ready to canonize the postman one week, because of the beautiful things he had said to her when she’d met him on the doorstep while he was delivering the mail. She saw secrets everywhere. Undistinguished people whom she liked had secret lives, according to her. Secret religious lives. She was addicted to felling in calf love—nonsexual calf love, I want to make myself clear—with a different person every week and then”—Scholastica threw up her hands—“I don’t know how to explain this to you, really. I don’t know—Oh, Mr. Demarkian, the whole thing is such a mess, I don’t know where to start talking about it, never mind explaining it.”
“I do,” Gregor said. “Brigit Ann Reilly was a girl who liked secrets. Other people’s secrets.”
“But not blackmail secrets,” Scholastica said. “She didn’t like to know discreditable things about people. I’d have known how to deal with that. I’d have thrown her right out of here as soon as it became clear. What Brigit liked was thinking that someone she was infatuated with had the stigmata and wasn’t telling anyone.”
“And was that happening, Sister? Did someone she knew have the stigmata on the day Brigit Ann Reilly died?”
They had come to a dead stop again, this time in front of broad door with a window cut into its top half. There was a brass crucifix hanging just under the window. Gregor looked at the walls around him and saw a few unobtrusive homages to St. Pat’s. There was more balance here than Gregor had seen in any other part of the convent—but he didn’t know that balance was the business convents were into. Scholastica went to the door with the crucifix on it, opened it up and looked inside. Then she pushed the door all the way open and wedged a rubber doorstop underneath it with her foot. The office beyond it was empty, and obviously the sanctuary of the order’s Reverend Mother General. There was a full-size poster-photographed copy of the portrait in the foyer on the far wall, surrounded by photographs of two dozen or so other women in the same pose: an order genealogy of Reverend Mothers General.
“Reverend Mother General must be off somewhere with Mr. Donovan,” Scholastica said. “She’s got him up here, you know, just to talk to you. You can sit down in the meantime, if you want. She won’t mind having you in here.”
“You were telling me about the stigmata,” Gregor prompted gently.
Scholastica flushed. “I didn’t necessarily mean the stigmata in particular. Although I’ve got to admit, that was exactly the kind of thing Brigit went in for. She said in Recreation once that if she got to have just one wish granted it would be to have a vision of the Virgin, and if it hadn’t been the first week I’d have thrown her out for that. That kind of thing is a form of hysteria. What I’m trying to say is, all that last week before she died, she’d been—strange in a way I recognized.”
“Strange the way she was strange when she formed one of these infatuations,” Gregor translated.
“Exactly,” Scholastica said. “Only it was different, this time, because I don’t think she was fixed on anyone I know. She certainly wasn’t fixed on anyone in the convent. I would have found out who it was if she had been.”
“Was she fixed on someone she met on her walks to the library? Is that what you mean?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Demarkian. I didn’t know what to think about it all even before Brigit died. I will say I hope she wasn’t fixed on Glinda Daniels because Glinda—”
“Glinda what?”
“I’m going to leave you in Reverend Mother’s office now,” Scholastica said. “She’ll be along in a minute. Just make yourself comfortable.”
“Sister—”
But Sister had backed up, out of the door, and then proceeded to do something Gregor had never known anyone but a nun to be able to do: She had truly and undeniably disappeared. Gregor looked up and down the corridor and saw no one, only open doors that revealed small empty classrooms. He looked into Reverend Mother General’s office and wondered how she managed to keep it so very neat. His own desk at home was a holocaust, and Tibor’s was worse than that. The only pieces out of place in this room were the letters and the single small package at the edge of Reverend Mother’s desk, and Gregor found himself resenting the Sister who had put them there, carelessly, without regard to the fastidiousness that marked the rest of this space.
It was the kind of thought that was calculated to make him think he was getting old. He sat down in the only chair that looked like it could accommodate him and settled in to wait.
[3]
Fifteen minutes later, Gregor Demarkian was still sitting in his chair and still waiting. He was going over and over the things Scholastica had told him. He had a feeling that the jumbled account actually meant something, both more and less than she had intended to tell him. The things she had stressed did not seem so important, but one or two of the things she had said in passing did. He tried to put it together with his knowledge that Brigit Ann Reilly had died of coniine poisoning—of hemlock, really—and came up with mostly mush.
He was just consoling himself with the idea that what he had was at least promising mush when he heard a step in the hallway. He had gotten up by then and begun to pace. He stopped in the center of the room and looked through the door at the small woman paused in its frame. She was very small indeed, and very old, but in spite of the fact that she wore the same abbreviated habit Scholastica did, she had all the authority of the women in the pictures behind him who were wearing full robes. This, Gregor thought, must be Reverend Mother General. He started toward her with his hand outstretched, and then stopped.
Reverend Mother General wasn’t looking at him, even though he was human and large and taking up a good deal of space in her office. She was looking at her desk, and when Gregor looked too he understood why. The small package that had been lying under the envelopes was no longer where he had first found it, but further along the desk top near the brass base for the pen and pencil set. What was more, it was moving.
Gregor stepped up to the desk, picked the package up, and shook it close to his ear. He could hear the bump and shudder of something trying to get out. He brought the package down and turned to Reverend Mother General.
“Do you mind?” he said. “There’s something alive in
there.”
“Is it safe for you to open it?”
“Relatively safe,” Gregor said. “I suppose if it’s a rabid bat, I’ll be in for a lot of pain with the series injections, but I don’t think it’s that.”
“No,” Reverend Mother General agreed, “I don’t think it’s that, either. The other ones had had their poison glands removed, did you know that?”
“Yes, Reverend Mother. The Cardinal told me.”
“Well, if that’s what this is, let’s just hope it’s got its glands removed, too. Go ahead. Open it.”
Gregor returned his attention to the box. It had been taped shut at both ends and along its seams, and it was small. He had a big hand and it would just fit across it, without jutting out at either end. He found the letter opener on Reverend Mother General’s desk and used that, cutting along a fold that looked weak but wasn’t. It took him a good minute of hacking to get it undone.
“Here we go,” he said, when he got a slit carved in the tape. He started to pull back the flap and felt Reverend Mother General move closer to him. He gave her points for that. Gregor Demarkian had never been a man who liked wimpiness in women. He got the flap all the way back and reached for the tabs inside.
What happened next happened so fast he almost didn’t see it. There was a snake inside the package, but it wasn’t a water moccasin, rendered harmless or otherwise. It was a garden variety black snake, about a foot and a half long. With the box closed it had been coiled. As soon as the tabs came open, it lunged as if to strike—even though black snakes don’t strike. What it did do was to shoot itself out of the box. For a split second, it seemed suspended in air. Then it was on the floor and headed in the direction of the open door. Reverend Mother jumped away from it instinctively. Gregor just watched it go. Then he looked down at the package in his hand and the floor beyond it and saw what he had missed in the excitement of the snake.
It was a piece of paper about twelve inches long and six inches wide. It must have been wrapped up in a tube around the snake inside the box and fallen out when the snake escaped. It was now lying face up on the floor. Gregor recognized the printing—it was the same letter-quality computer typeface of the anonymous letters in John O’Bannion’s file. The graphics were new. They were also very, very graphic. Gregor had no trouble at all recognizing them for what they were, which was not very abstract abstractions of the female genitalia.
NUNS OPEN THEIR LEGS AND PUMP FOR PRIESTS
the printing said, and then:
ALL WHORES DESERVE TO DIE.
Reverend Mother General looked down at the paper, picked up her skirts, and walked over it. Then she sat down behind her desk and said, “I’d better get Alice Marie down here to set the novices looking for that reptile. We can’t have it wandering around the convent no matter how harmless it is.”
Five
[1]
SISTER MARY SCHOLASTICA HAD entered her order well after Vatican II had changed it. Unlike Sister Alice Marie, or Reverend Mother General, she had never worn full habit or begged her soup after Chapter of Faults or recited the Little Office in Latin. To say she was a thoroughly modern nun, however, was not quite accurate. Some of her postulants would be thoroughly modern nuns. No matter how carefully she trained them, they would come out of formation thinking that all this ritual stuff was a little silly and that it might make more sense if Sisters wore lay clothes and were much more open about the way the convent was run. Scholastica was of a generation that believed—and was encouraged to believe—that what went on in a convent was the concern of the Sisters who lived there, and no one else. If there was a crisis of suitably apocalyptic proportions, Reverend Mother General might decide to call the Chancery, or even the Congregation for Clergy and Religious in Rome. Laypeople were simply out of bounds. You didn’t tell laypeople anything, not even what the convent served for lunch. You certainly didn’t ask their help in a matter that should have been between you and your superiors. From the moment that Sister Mary Scholastica had first mentioned her doubts about Brigit Ann Reilly’s vocation to Gregor Demarkian, she had been feeling guilty. From the first moment afterward when she’d had a chance to think, she’d been feeling worse: like a traitor.
When Scholastica left Gregor Demarkian in Reverend Mother General’s office, she went down the north spine of the main Motherhouse wing, around another corner, and out into the courtyard. It was a cold day and she wasn’t wearing a cape, but she didn’t mind it much. She crossed the courtyard and let herself into the building on the other side. Just inside that door there was both a corridor and a staircase. She had intended to go up to the cloister floor, where she had a “room”—a cell, really—with walls made of muslin curtains and a bed with a gray metal frame. She wanted to be alone and out of sight with a desperate intensity she hadn’t experienced since adolescence. That was how she remembered coming to the knowledge of her vocation—not a blinding vision of light in church or the voice of the Blessed Virgin Mary in a dream, but afternoon after afternoon followed by night after night of sitting on her bed at home, thinking it out and not being able to shake the idea. Since then, she had read a lot of words about mysticism. She had even read the words of the mystics themselves, like Teresa of Avila and Catherine of Siena. She knew that people were granted perfect pictures of heaven and hell, sights and sounds the rest of the world wasn’t privy to. She also knew she was not one of these people. If she had any direct experience of God at all, it was with a God of silence.
She changed her mind about going up to the cloister at the last minute. Maybe she was too guilty to want to spend time with God. It would be just her luck to have the only true vision of her life when she was feeling barely worth the trouble of calling by name. Maybe she was just too restless. It could be torture, sitting on your bed in a muslin-walled room when what you really wanted to do with yourself was pace. Scholastica looked up the stairs for only a moment and then pushed through the swinging doors onto the classroom corridor.
Back when Scholastica was a postulant, classes were held on Saturdays at the Motherhouse, both for Sisters in formation and for the professed. Sisters in formation got a sixth day of convent drill: practice in custody of the eyes, rehearsal for chapel rituals, and explications of the theories and theologies behind interior silence and the habit scapular. Professed Sisters studied for continuing education credits if they were certified teachers and for pleasure or penance if they were not. Today, no one at all was studying, at least not on this corridor. The doors to the small classrooms were all open and the rooms and corridor were both filled with girls—girls in black dresses and black babushkas, girls in black dresses and white veils, girls in black dresses and white veils with a band of black at the hem. Postulants, canonical novices, senior novices: Scholastica looked at them all, scrubbing floors and polishing doors and cleaning windows, and sighed. She still liked the old custom better. There was something spiritually satisfying about it that could never be fulfilled with soap and water.
Down at the far end of the corridor, near the door that led to the outside, Sister Alice Marie was sitting on a high stool, reading aloud from the Introduction to the Devout Life by St. Francis de Sales. Whether any of the postulants or novices was actually listening was moot. From what Scholastica could remember, in her own days of being read to she hadn’t listened much.
Scholastica went up to Alice Marie, tugged on her sleeve, and gestured with her head when Alice Marie looked up. Alice Marie nodded and called out for Sister Josepha to come up to read for her. Scholastica watched as impassively as she could as Sister Josepha came up, a pale wisp of a girl for whom even the modified habit looked too heavy. The band of black on the hem of her veil testified to the fact that she was a senior novice, not a canonical one. The sappy look on Alice Marie’s face testified to the fact that Josepha was one of the stars of her class. Scholastica let it ride. If Josepha had been one of her postulants, Scholastica would have been seriously considering the possibility of sending her home.
Alice Marie released the stool to Sister Josepha and motioned Scholastica across the hall, into the only classroom that was empty. It was also the only classroom that was entirely clean. Closing the door behind her, Scholastica noticed that the desks had been buffed to a high hard sheen, as if they were decorative pieces instead of useful ones.
“I’m glad you came,” Alice Marie said. “I was sitting out there, droning along about the practice of the presence of God or whatever it was, wondering how it was coming along. Did you talk to him?”
Scholastica sighed. “Oh, I definitely talked to him. I talked to him too much. You’d think after nearly twenty years of practicing silence, interior and exterior silence, you’d think after all that, I’d be able to keep my mouth shut.”
“It’s only been eighteen years,” Alice Marie said.
“Same difference.” Scholastica had been standing against the door. Now she moved into the room and sat down at one of the desks. It was too small for her, but it was too small for everybody. Scholastica sometimes wondered if these desks had been misplaced from one of the order’s elementary schools.
“I told him all the things we agreed to tell him,” she said after a while. “I told him all about Brigit going out and wandering around. I told him all about getting the call from Pete Donovan.”