by Jane Haddam
Neila blanched and looked away, at the snow-covered stones that paved the courtyard, at the bench she was sitting on.
“I’m very cold,” she said tearfully. “Suddenly I’m very cold. I want to go inside.”
“Of course, you can go inside,” Pete Donovan told her.
“I don’t want you,” Neila said. “I want somebody I can trust. I want somebody who isn’t making fun of me.”
“Christ on a crutch,” Pete Donovan said.
Gregor kneeled down against the bench next to where Neila was sitting and took her chin gently in his hand. The fainting episode had been shock, phase one, the immediate response. This was shock, phase two, the delayed one. He knew the signs all too well, the sudden pallor, the opaqueness of the eyes. The girl needed either the traditional sweet brandy or something more to the point, like a large glass of orange juice or a chocolate malt.
“Listen to me,” Gregor said. “I’m going to go look now at your utility room—you did say it was just inside that door you came out of?”
“Yes,” Neila said. “Yes, it is.”
“Fine. What I want you to do is to go and find Reverend Mother General. Go and find her right away. You can take Mr. Donovan with you.”
“I don’t want Mr. Donovan with me.”
“You should have someone. You really aren’t feeling well. It’s obvious. I don’t want you to get lost and faint again.”
“I won’t faint,” Neila Connelly said. “I never faint.”
“Mr. Donovan will make sure you don’t faint,” Gregor said. Then he stood up and turned to Pete Donovan, hovering over him like Thor in a temper.
“You can’t just go barging around the convent on your own,” Donovan said. “And you don’t understand—”
“I understand how to get to this utility room, unless she’s left out a book of map information. Go take her to Reverend Mother General.”
“But for Christ’s sake—”
Gregor didn’t even pretend to be listening any more. He turned his back to Donovan and Neila Connelly and went striding toward the door Neila had come out of, a twin of the door they had so recently come out of themselves when they ran into her. It’s not so complicated, Gregor thought. It just seems that way when you’re inside and being led around from one corridor to another. It’s basically just a square. If there really was a body—a corpse and not a sick man; a corpse and not a fantasy—he would have to get Reverend Mother General to give him a floor plan.
He plunged through the outer door into inner darkness, paused to catch his breath, caught the light and stopped breathing. The light was coming through an open door in the opposite wall, streaming into the corridor in a sharp-edged shaft. That didn’t surprise him. The door was where Neila had said the utility room door would be. The light could have been the one she said she’d turned on. She hadn’t said anything about turning it off.
The surprising thing was the person, standing at the edge of the door with her arms folded across her chest and a look of incredulity on her face.
Sister Mary Scholastica.
[2]
“His name was Don Bollander and he was Miriam Bailey’s assistant at the bank,” Sister Scholastica said later, when Gregor had her sitting down on the floor outside the utility room. It was less than five minutes since he had found her, but it felt as if it had been forever. He had made her sit down just in case. She had been in mild shock when he first saw her. He didn’t want to take any chances. Still, she was no Neila Connelly. She was older, better trained, and more experienced. She had seen a man die in front of her eyes last year in Colchester, New York. Even without all that she would have held up better. She simply had more backbone than Neila Connelly ever would.
Gregor was leaning over the sink, trying to find out everything he could without touching anything. The sink was not really a sink at all but a laundry tub, which explained how a body had gotten into it. Listening to Neila Connelly out in the courtyard, Gregor had imagined a stuffing and folding operation it would have taken a trash compactor to complete. He didn’t have to worry that their blithering conversation in the cold had cost this man his life, either. Gregor had thought at the time that Neila’s description sounded like rigor mortis. It would take a doctor and a good forensic laboratory to be sure, but Gregor’s guess was that Don Bollander had been dead for at least half a day.
“I don’t suppose there’s any chance it isn’t murder,” Scholastica said. “Not with him stuffed into the laundry sink that way.”
“It’s hard to tell much of anything with him this way,” Gregor said. “Would there have been any reason for him to have been in this room?”
“Good heavens no. I don’t know if you realize it or not, but you’re in a restricted area of the Motherhouse. There aren’t supposed to be any seculars in this part.”
“Is that religious?” Gregor asked. “Have I just done something on the order of desecrating an altar—”
“No, no. Of course not. It would have been a more serious transgression before Vatican Two, but sometimes I think everything was a more serious transgression before Vatican Two. No, my point is, he wouldn’t have been anywhere near here unless he’d had a good reason, and I can’t think of a reason he might have had.”
“He could have been meeting somebody.”
“He would have met her in one of the reception rooms. If you mean he could have been having a clandestine meeting, it would have been safer to hold it off Motherhouse grounds. He had the perfect setup. I did tell you he was Don Bollander from the bank.”
“You did. You just didn’t tell me what that meant.”
Gregor was leaning far over the laundry sink now, the only position from which he could stare Don Bollander straight in the face. He had told Scholastica that it was hard to tell anything about this death under these circumstances, but that wasn’t quite true. Coniine killed by paralyzing the lungs. There was a blue tinge to the face, faint but unmistakable. Of course, it might have been one of a number of other vegetable alkaloids. Their effects were often quite similar. Because there was already one person dead from coniine, though, Gregor thought he was justified in guessing death by coniine here. In his experience, amateur murderers picked a method they found comfortable and stuck to it.
He backed away from the body and looked around the room. There was a shelf about the sink filled with laundry detergents and white plastic bottles of cleaning materials. There were more white plastic bottles on the floor, lined up against the window. Gregor didn’t think Don Bollander could have been brought in through the window. He’d examined every inch of visible skin and he hadn’t come up with a single bruise. It was possible that all the bruising had occurred under Bollander’s clothes, but it wasn’t likely. It was also possible that Bollander had been alive and ambulatory when he arrived at the utility room, but that wasn’t likely, either. Alive wasn’t impossible. Coniine was a tricky poison. Symptoms almost always started within half an hour. Death was more erratic. Depending on a number of factors—how much coniine the victim had eaten; how much other food the victim had eaten immediately before that; state of health; state of mind; height, weight, and age—death could arrive anywhere from half an hour to five hours later. What made coniine particularly nasty was that death was inevitable a long time before that. Coniine was one of those poisons whose antidote had to be delivered next to immediately after the poison was ingested. It was the kind of poison that grew roots.
He backed away from it all and stuck his head into the hall. “You were telling me about Don Bollander,” he said to Scholastica. “You should keep talking. Do you have a notebook?”
Scholastica shoved her hands into one of her pockets and came up with a palm-size notebook and a ballpoint pen. “It’s part of the uniform. Do you want me to write something down?”
“A reminder to the medical examiner. I want to know the location and the temporal origin of any bruises found anywhere on the body, no matter how small.”
“Temporal o
rigin?”
“Whether they were made before or after death.”
“Oh.”
“Tell me about Don Bollander.”
“Well,” Scholastica said. “Well. You know who Miriam Bailey is. We talked about that before. Do you know about Ann-Harriet Severan?”
“No”
“Ann-Harriet works at the bank. As some kind of minor officer. She’s very pretty and very volatile, one of those people who go off their nuts at the first sign of trouble, which is interesting because she’s always in trouble, because Ann-Harriet is having an affair with Josh—you remember Josh?”
“I remember.”
“Miriam must know,” Scholastica said. “The two of them are very clumsy about it all. Anyway, that’s the kind of assistant Don Bollander was. He dealt with whatever had to be dealt with, and if that meant keeping Ann-Harriet in line, then he did it. And that wouldn’t have been easy, either, because Ann-Harriet is a consummate—well, it’s tacky to use a word like this in habit, but there really is only one word and that’s—”
“Bitch.”
“Exactly. The postulants don’t like Miriam Bailey much, but they really detest Ann-Harriet Severan. She’s always saying things, making fun of them, if you know what I mean. But anyway, Don. Don got a little promotion just about the time Miriam decided to come back to town as a rich old lady with a very young husband.”
“So what did Don Bollander have to do with that?”
Scholastica smiled. “I said he was her assistant. What he really was was her flack catcher. He was totally useless as a banker. In all the time since I’ve been connected to Maryville, since I’ve entered the convent, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of him doing any banking work at all.”
“What did he do?”
“He ran interference. He took care of things that would waste her time. Miriam has a very definite idea of what is and what isn’t a waste of her time. She thinks she has to do community work, as she puts it. Otherwise the bank doesn’t look good. She funds the literacy program at St. Andrew’s and she makes an appearance there every year. Don does—did the grub work. He looked after the paper. He sent the checks she signed. He ordered books when the program needed books and refreshments when the program was going to have a party. Then Margaret Finney was beatified, and Miriam wanted to start a lay committee for—I don’t remember what she called it. She wanted to support the canonization effort. It’s impossible to explain to people like Miriam that things just aren’t the way they used to be. Canonization isn’t that kind of adversarial process it was before Vatican II—”
“Back up,” Gregor said. He had been listening for sounds in the courtyard or the hall. It seemed to him to be a monstrous amount of time since he had left Pete Donovan and Neila Connelly at the bench, instructing them to get Reverend Mother General and bring her back to him. It shouldn’t be taking this long to find the Motherhouse’s most important and visible nun. He ran his hands through his hair in irritation.
“I wish I knew what was keeping them,” he said. “This is insane. We ought to have forensic people up here.”
Sister Scholastica shrugged. “The bell had rung for chapel. It’s just midmorning prayer—what I suppose used to be called Terce, since they suppressed Prime—anyway, it’s a minor hour, but it’s still an hour. If Pete and Neila caught them at just the wrong moment, they might not have been able to get Reverend Mother General’s attention.”
“They should have stood up in the middle of the room and shouted and howled until they did.”
“You were going to ask me something else?” Scholastica said.
Gregor turned his mind back to the problem at hand. “You said something about the literacy program at St. Andrew’s. Don Bollander did the grub work for the literacy program at St. Andrew’s.”
“That’s right.”
“Didn’t I read in the Cardinal’s report somewhere that Brigit Ann Reilly worked in the literacy program at St. Andrew’s?”
Scholastica nodded. “Yes, she did. We make a point of requiring our postulants and novices to do all three kinds of work: intellectual, charitable, and practical. Brigit’s practical work was going back and forth to the library every day, among other things. Her charitable work was to teach reading to adults at St. Andrew’s.”
“Does that mean Don Bollander and Brigit Ann Reilly knew each other?” Gregor asked.
Scholastica considered this. “In a way,” she said, “I suppose it does. He would have known her by sight, certainly, even if he didn’t know her by name. He spent a fair amount of time on site. I don’t think he would have known her well. In fact, I’m sure he didn’t.”
“Why?”
Scholastica snorted. “Don Bollander was the kind of person who dramatized himself,” she said. “He was the kind of person who liked to be near excitement. If he’d known Brigit Ann Reilly well, he’d have told everyone in town about it after she died, just to have an association with the thrill of it. Instead, he was wandering around town telling everybody how he was engaged in a hush-hush project that would ensure the canonization of Margaret Finney and turn Maryville into the new and improved Lourdes.”
“New and improved Lourdes,” Gregor murmured, and then he straightened up. Now there was noise coming at him, much more noise than he’d thought it possible for nuns to make. First the noise was in the courtyard, a low hum like too many bees near a flower and the stomp of feet on stone. Then the courtyard door opened and Reverend Mother General came in. Behind her, Gregor could see nothing but a sea of black and white head coverings and Pete Donovan’s blond thatch. Beside him, Scholastica stood up.
“Reverend Mother,” Scholastica said.
“Is there a man dead in here?” Reverend Mother demanded. “In the laundry sink?”
There was more commotion at Reverend Mother’s back. Pete Donovan was pushing himself forward, excusing himself to nuns at every turn. He got to the doorway and gave Reverend Mother General a gentle and apologetic nudge to make enough room to get himself inside.
“If there’s a body in here, I want to see the body in here,” he said, and then he pushed Gregor out of the utility room doorway and walked inside. Going in, he was caught in the same cheerful and skeptical mood he had been in talking to Neila outside. No sooner had he got all the way inside than that changed.
“Jesus screaming Christ,” he said, in a voice loud enough to carry to every nun in the vicinity—and making them all wince. “She was telling the truth,” he bellowed. “There really is a dead man in here.”
Gregor already knew there was a dead man in there. That wasn’t what he wanted to think about for the moment.
What he wanted to think about was how strangely similar Scholastica’s descriptions of the characters of Don Bollander and Brigit Ann Reilly had been.
Two
[1]
UNLIKE PETE DONOVAN, MIRIAM Bailey had never been able to say she knew most of the people in town, by sight or any other way. Her father had been much too strict about the distinctions of class to allow her a latitude like that. To be precise, he had been much too strict about the distinctions of class for women. Men were supposed to be able to hold their own in rough company. Miriam’s father had divided the world in a great many ways, always marking those divisions by gender. Later, when Miriam went to college and discovered that no one shared his rules and regulations for proper conduct in women and men, she had wondered if he had invented them just for her. Rules for a wayward daughter, she had told herself at the time, and then almost immediately dismissed the thought. There was nothing wayward at all about her at the age of eighteen, at least on the surface—and her father was no mind reader. If he suspected her of subversion, he was experiencing a form of clinical paranoia. Miriam at eighteen was plain and awkward and shy and badly dressed, in spite of a clothes allowance the size of one of her father’s bank clerks’ salaries. Miriam at eighteen was also polite, courteous, modest, retiring, and deferential to men.
Miriam at sixty-odd
was in something of a bind. She might not know everyone in town, but the people she did know were far too numerous. It was just a little after noon. Over the last hour, sitting alone in the house on Huntington Avenue, she had taken at least eleven phone calls on the subject of Don Bollander—or maybe she should think of it as “Don Bollander’s demise.” Whatever it was, she had heard much more of it than she wanted to. Sheila McRae over at Bell Epoque—Bell Epoque was a house; the cuteness of its name was apparently what passed for wit in Sheila’s Smith College graduating class—had wanted to know what Miriam was going to do about it, with Don lying all bloody in the convent well. Deborah Martin had been more sensible. She’d at least known that Don wasn’t found bloody or in the convent well. Her speciality had been sympathy, sticky and sweet. After a while, Miriam had thought she could see Deborah’s voice, sliding down the wire like molasses down a string. The phone rang and rang, rang and rang. Every time Miriam picked it up, she thought it would be the police, but it never was.
“I’m sure they wouldn’t call me if they needed information about a funeral,” she had said to Katherine Hale, who had set out to be the sensible one. Of course, there was nothing very sensible about nattering away on the subject of Don’s funeral when he’d just been found murdered somewhere in town. If that really was what happened, it might be weeks before the police were ready to release his body to anyone at all. That was just like Katherine Hale. Katherine had been with Miriam at Manhattanville—and if it hadn’t been well before the age of competitive admissions, she wouldn’t have been at Manhattanville at all. Katherine Hale couldn’t think her way out of a paper bag.
It had been just after Katherine called that Miriam had made her decision. She had no doubt that Don was dead—too many people had agreed on that point to make it anything else but true—but she didn’t want to think about it for the moment. She didn’t want to be questioned by the police about it, either. There would come a time when she could avoid neither of these things. That time would arrive very soon, accompanied by unspoken demands on her to produce the appropriate emotion. Miriam hadn’t the faintest idea what that emotion could be. For the moment, she simply wanted to disappear.