Great Day for the Deadly

by Jane Haddam

  Glinda was drinking down a cup of coffee as if it were a glass of orange juice and she had just run the Boston marathon. She had very bad habits like that with coffee and Sam intended to do something about them. Gregor Demarkian was leaning with one crooked arm against Glinda’s filing cabinet, staring at The Library Lady with a very odd look on his face. Sam had heard that a lot of people dismissed him as stodgy or stupid or not very sophisticated. Sam was not about to make the same mistake. Sam had spent too much of his life with media people. Publicly funded media people were the worst. Then there was Mrs. Barbara Keel, also known as The Library Lady and one of the banes of Sam’s existence. He kept tripping over her, and she never made any sense. Now she was huddled in a chair, looking lumpy and inert. From the look on Demarkian’s face, she had just told him something either important or intrinsically fascinating. From the look on her own, it was impossible to guess what.

  Sam decided he was having stage fright and he had to do something about it. He had laughed too hard and boomed too loud at the mention of Bennis Hannaford’s name. Now he looked sideways at Glinda. She looked all right, but he had no way of knowing what Demarkian had been doing to her while he had been away, running down to the store for a minute to get her a pack of cough drops. He would have felt much better if they had advanced on Demarkian on their own initiative, but he couldn’t see what they could have done beyond what they had done. They’d called the St. Mary’s Inn and asked Edith if Demarkian was around. Edith being Edith, she would know.

  Of course, they had also spent half an hour in the parking lot in the backseat of his Jeep Wagoneer, necking like a pair of sixteen-year-olds, but there was only so much Sam Harrigan intended to feel guilty about not giving up in the pursuit of scientific solutions to local murders. He grabbed one of Glinda’s small metal chairs, dragged it across the carpet to Gregor, and sat down on it backwards, with his chin resting on the vinyl-covered curve of its back.

  “Well,” he said.

  “Well,” Demarkian answered pleasantly.

  This was not what Sam was looking for. He cleared his throat. “Well,” he said again, “has Glinda already told you about her talk with Don Bollander? We were going to come right over and tell you about it this afternoon, but when we called the inn, you were gone.”

  “You could have been anyplace you wanted to be,” Mrs. Barbara Keel said blandly. “They were too busy making whoopie in the backseat of a car.”

  “Barbara,” Glinda said.

  “You ought to be glad you aren’t in high school any more and old Father Corrigan is dead,” Mrs. Keel said. “Oh, the lectures he used to give when he caught the teenagers in their cars, in this day and age it’s hard to believe.”

  “You make me sound a hundred and four,” Glinda protested.

  “Oh, no I don’t,” Mrs. Keel said. “I make you sound hardly old enough to know better.”

  Gregor Demarkian bit his lip.

  It was time to put a stop to this. Sam snaked out an arm to grab Glinda by the wrist and cleared his throat again.

  “So,” he said, sure he had started off that way in his unsuccessful attempt just a moment ago. “Did she tell you what Don Bollander told you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.”

  “It was very interesting information,” Gregor said. “And, of course, he was telling the truth. He wouldn’t have been killed if he hadn’t been telling the truth.”

  Glinda jumped, shuddering under his hand. Sam held on tight. “But I thought we just agreed,” she said. “He couldn’t have been telling the truth. There wasn’t enough time.”

  “He was mistaken on a couple of points,” Demarkian said, “but he was telling the truth as he knew it. I wish it wasn’t Saturday. I’d like to go over and take a look at that bank.” He considered it. “Not that it would make any difference, of course.”

  Glinda took Sam’s hand off her wrist and moved in closer to him, so that she could whisper. “I read about this in People magazine,” she said. “They say he just suddenly knows everything and it just strikes him mute.”

  “It probably just strikes him mute in front of People magazine,” Sam told her. “I’m struck mute in front of those people at least once a year.”

  “I don’t know everything,” Gregor said suddenly. “I just know the structure of it.”

  Sam watched in fascination as Demarkian pushed himself off the filing cabinet, found his coat lying across Glinda’s desk and shrugged it on. He seemed to be moving in a trance, his head shaking back and forth in rhythmic little arcs. He put Sam in mind of the old women in the village he had been born in back in Scotland, clucking their tongues and muttering “what a shame.” Demarkian got his gloves out of his coat pocket and put them on. Then he got his scarf untangled from his collar and began to wind it around his neck.

  “I should have made the time to buy a hat,” he said absently.

  Sam cleared his throat for the third time. “There’s something else,” he said. “Something that happened while I was waiting around at my place until it was time to come get Glinda. Josh Malley came to see me. Do you know who Josh Malley is?”

  For some reason, this stopped Demarkian in his tracks. “Yes,” he said. “I know who Josh Malley is. What did he come to see you about?”

  “Snakes,” Sam said triumphantly.

  “I forgot about the snakes,” Glinda said. “It really was very odd. Josh had never been out to visit Sam before. Josh has snakes.”

  “Black snakes,” Sam Harrigan said. “Harmless. Keeps them out there with a lot of other miserable animals in cages. What anyone sees in zoos is beyond me. Anyway, that woman bought him a goddamned collection. Had a lion out there until the town complained.

  “He still has an ocelot,” Glinda said. “And the town only complained because you did.”

  “I had the right idea, too,” Sam said. “Josh came out today to ask me if I’d tampered with his snake cages. Can you imagine that? His snake cages.”

  “They were your snakes, weren’t they?” Demarkian asked him. “The ones that were found on Brigit Ann Reilly’s body?”

  “That’s right,” Sam said, “but I didn’t keep them in cages. I had a nice warm burrow for them and they were hibernating before the thaw hit. Then the thaw did hit and they woke up and got out. It wouldn’t have been too hard for them to get out. I don’t know how they ended up here.”

  “Fate,” Glinda said.

  Sam squirmed. Demarkian was no longer in a hurry to get out the door, but his attention was wandering again. He was rubbing the side of his face and muttering to himself.

  “What Josh was all worked up about,” Sam said, “was that one of his black snakes was missing. They were sleeping away like all good snakes in the winter and then when he went there this morning one of them was gone. I don’t know why he thought I might have it. Maybe he believes all herpetologists collect snakes.”

  “You do collect snakes,” Glinda said, “Josh probably thought you wanted to eat one.”

  “You don’t eat black snakes,” Sam said. “They taste terrible. If you want to eat a snake—”

  “I don’t,” Glinda told him.

  “Good thing, too,” Sam said. “I only eat the damned things on television. Did I tell you I have a beautiful pair of T-bone steaks sitting in the freezer at my house, all ready to be thawed out in the microwave?”

  “Yes,” Glinda said, “you did.”

  “Did you say you’d come home and let me cook you dinner?”

  “Well,” Glinda said, with a determined gleam in her eye, “I said I’d come home and let you do something for me.”

  “Dear sweet Jesus Christ,” Sam said. “You’re making me blush. You’re even making Demarkian blush.”

  But Demarkian wasn’t blushing. He was looking at the two of them as if they were extraordinarily bright two-year-olds he was too fond of to spank. Sam wanted to bury his own head in the sand.

  “Two more questions,” Demarkian said. “In the first pla
ce, Mr. Harrigan, do you think Josh Malley was telling you the truth? Had one of his snakes gone missing? Or was that just an excuse he had for coming up to your place?”

  “Oh, one of his snakes was missing, all right,” Sam said. “Josh is no mental giant. He barely qualifies as a mental midget. He’s no actor, either. He just kept repeating it. He used to have six and now he has five.”

  “Fine,” Demarkian said, “that’s perfect. Now. Miss Daniels. Brigit Ann Reilly came to the library every weekday and Saturday just after ten o’clock, correct?”

  “Correct,” Glinda said. Sam was all ready to jump to her rescue, but she didn’t seem to need rescuing.

  “Wonderful,” Demarkian said again. “Now, a number of the people I’ve talked to have said that in that last week before she died, Brigit Ann Reilly had developed an odd sort of crush on someone—”

  “And you want to know if I know who it was?” Glinda said. She shook her head. “It had been going on longer than a week, though. Brigit was always doing that kind of thing. Falling in love with people’s souls. Or what she wanted to think were people’s souls. My personal opinion is that most people’s souls are sewers. At any rate, all I can tell you for sure is that whoever it was was connected to the work she did at St. Andrew’s.”

  “You’re positive?”

  “Oh, yes. She actually said so one day—that someone she’d met at St. Andrew’s had changed her entire perspective on life. Except that she didn’t say perspective. I don’t remember what she did say. Perspective is what she meant.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure. She said her whole idea of what a vocation was and how it happened and when it happened and who it happened to had been turned right around and transformed—and transformed was the word she used. Then she asked me if I didn’t think it would be noble work, helping people who were confused about it realize that they’d been called by God.” Glinda sighed. “Brigit was always saying things like that. What’s worse, Brigit was always believing it.”

  “She gave you no indication at all who it might be?”

  “I asked Glinda the same question,” Sam said. “I had exactly the same idea. We worked on it for hours.”

  “We got nowhere,” Glinda said. She made a futile gesture in the air. “Brigit was always keeping secrets, always hinting around, always so full of—I don’t know. If she hadn’t been so basically sane and viscerally optimistic, she would probably have gone in for conspiracy theories. And she was so reflexively nice about people. Even about Ann-Harriet.”

  “Ann-Harriet.” Sam swore to himself he could see Demarkian’s antennae go up.

  “Ann-Harriet was a perfect little bitch to all the postulants,” Glinda said, “as if the only reason anyone would decide to become a nun was if she were stone ugly and rock stupid and didn’t have any other prospects at all. Ann-Harriet would needle them. She reduced that little Neila Connelly to tears right in this library one day. But Brigit was always saying there had to be a reason, or something. I’m sorry. I didn’t always listen to her.”

  “Redemption,” Gregor Demarkian said. Then he buttoned up the rest of his coat. “I’ve got to go up to the Motherhouse now,” he told them. “If anyone’s looking for me, tell them they can find me there for the next half hour or so.”

  “Of course,” Glinda said.

  “Is that all?” Sam asked him.

  “What else could there be?”

  Demarkian turned on his heel and walked out the office door, with Glinda and Sam staring after him. Sam especially felt disoriented and—yes, and let down. He hardly wanted to admit it, but he had been half looking forward to the third degree. He’d heard so much about it from hard-boiled mystery fiction.

  It was too embarrassing an emotion to admit. Sam turned to Glinda, who was looking thoughtful but hardly raked over the coals, and said, “You are off duty. And we have seen Demarkian. And it is getting dark. Let’s go up the hill and have a deeply meaningful discussion about the nature and purpose of life.”

  “Deeply meaningful discussion my foot,” Mrs. Barbara Keel said. “Well, I just hope you two have your brains in the right place. If you can’t be good, at least be careful.”

  And with that, Mrs. Barbara Keel sailed through the door Gregor Demarkian had left open and on into the library proper, looking for all the world like a proud old ship gliding into the sunset at the end of a long and distinguished career. She couldn’t have looked any more like the Queen Mum if she’d had plastic surgery. Sam stared after her in astonishment. Glinda stared after her in astonishment. Then they each looked at the other and burst out laughing.

  [2]

  It got dark early in Maryville in March—not as early as it got in February, but early enough. On bright days, the Motherhouse turned its lights on at three thirty in the afternoon. On overcast ones, it turned them on at three. By quarter after four it was almost always pitch black out and threatening to get blacker. Sister Mary Scholastica had been born and brought up in the region, so it didn’t bother her, but it often bothered both postulants and novices who came from farther south. Scholastica didn’t know how long it took to get used to it. It was now five o’clock on Saturday night. Standing at the side of the Motherhouse’s open front doors, Scholastica found it easy to imagine she was looking out on midnight. She tried to concentrate on Gregor Demarkian instead. He was coming up from the gate, walking carefully on pavement that was icing over in the increasing cold that came with the absence of the sun. He looked as thoroughly tired as his voice had sounded not ten minutes ago on the phone. Scholastica stepped into the doorway and waved him a greeting.

  “You ought to move faster,” she said. “It keeps you warmer in the cold. What an odd thing for you to call up and ask me, under the circumstances.”

  “Mmm,” Gregor said. He had reached the door. He slipped into the foyer and closed it after him, with a click, as if doing something definitive. “Well, there I was, standing outside my own hotel, and it hit me I could ask you what I had to ask you on the phone as well as in person. It wasn’t as if there was anything else I needed up here.”

  “Except there was,” Scholastica said.

  “Well, that depends on what Neila Connelly has to say. Have you done the checking I asked you to?”

  Scholastica nodded. “When you called we were just going into chapel. Most of the Sisters are there now. Reverend Mother stood up and asked the congregation right out before prayers started. It’s the most efficient way to get anything done around here.”

  “Reverend Mother was telling me all about it earlier,” Gregor said. “Nobody came forward? Nobody admitted to even knowing that somebody else had been in town on the day Brigit died?”

  “No,” Scholastica said, “and quite frankly, I didn’t expect them to. I really do think Neila’s explanation is the right one. I realize that was the day of the flood and things were a little less organized around here than they usually are.” Scholastica looked to see if Gregor seemed to be thinking that that wasn’t very organized at all, but she couldn’t tell. “Anyway,” she went on, “it’s still not 1966. There aren’t two or three hundred women in the house. There are only about sixty.”

  “Meaning you would have noticed.”

  “Meaning Reverend Mother would have noticed,” Scholastica said. “And I know there weren’t any postulants missing, because right before we started working on the evacuation I counted them. Brigit was gone. The rest of them were sitting in my classroom, listening to me make a hash out of the theology of Thomas Aquinas. Or somebody.”

  Gregor Demarkian was getting that glazed look on his face Scholastica remembered from the first time she had led him through these halls. She was so used to the Motherhouse after seventeen years of long and short visits to its halls, it didn’t faze her any more. She did remember what it had been like in the beginning, though, and decided to help him out.

  “Through here we have the office corridor,” she said, opening a fire door and shoving him through. �
�And that door second from the end on the right is Reverend Mother’s. It’s open. Go right in. Reverend Mother and Neila are waiting for us.”

  Reverend Mother General and Neila Connelly were indeed waiting for them. In fact, they were sitting right where Scholastica had left them, Reverend Mother General in the chair behind her desk, Neila on a small folding chair Scholastica had had to bring in from outside during their first discussion. That had been hours ago, and the strain was telling on Neila’s face. It had that glassy, rough-shined look of skin that has recently been bathed in tears. Still, Scholastica thought, it was better than she had been expecting. She was sure that as soon as she was out of sight, Reverend Mother General was going to take the opportunity to take Neila Connelly apart. It didn’t seem to have happened. In fact, Reverend Mother General and Neila Connelly seemed to be sitting quite companionably, as if they’d come to a new understanding of each other while Scholastica had been away.

  I’m making that up, Scholastica told herself, shooing Gregor in ahead of her. Then she put a big smile on her face and said in her perkiest voice, “Well. Here’s Mr. Demarkian. We all know Mr. Demarkian.”

  The rest of them looked at her as if she’d gone insane.

  Reverend Mother General rose up from behind her desk and motioned Gregor Demarkian to a seat. When he declined, she sat down again and spread her hands. Scholastica breathed a sigh of relief. It was always easier when Reverend Mother General took charge.

  “Now,” Reverend Mother General said, “it seems to me we have two issues to consider in this present matter. One is the matter of a postulant not Brigit Ann Reilly having been seen by Father Doherty on Beckner Street on the day of the flood—”