by Jane Haddam
“Margaret,” he said, “sometimes I wish I wasn’t so educated. Sometimes I wish I could be like that woman who came to my office this morning and believe in physical miracles. Sometimes I just wish I didn’t have to spend nights like tonight.”
He closed his eyes and put back his head and thought about it all, the way he had thought about it when he first decided to enter the seminary, the things that had convinced him. The lame will walk and the blind will see, he thought, and it was true. It just wasn’t true the way they wanted it to be, the skeptics and believers both. Nothing went poof. No instant cures rained down from the sky or blossomed out of pairs of praying hands. The blind will see and the lame will walk and they did—because in every place Christian civilization had touched, the progress of medical technology had been startling. It was nice to say that medical science had done it only in rebellion against Christianity, as a friend of his had told him when he’d tried to explain all this, but the fact was that a hundred years ago, most of the world had been made up of societies hostile to science. Why had it all happened here? It was a weak argument and he knew it. It didn’t begin to answer the questions he asked on nights like tonight. It was still the only argument he had and he held to it, because it was the only way he could explain the emotional part. The emotional part was solid. It harbored no doubts at all.
It was cold in the chapel and he was feeling sleepy. He had a parish to look out for and a few dozen parishioners who were going to need his help. He had only so much time to spend hiding from the world like this. He opened his eyes and said, “Well, Margaret, I’m going to go back to work. That’s why I’m so in favor of having you declared a saint. You were always going back to work.”
He grabbed ahold of the kneeler rail in front of him and started to stand up, and that was when he noticed it. Actually, that was when he didn’t notice it, the pain in the little finger of his right hand. The pain had been there, a sharp stabbing thing, since he knew the fight for the child was lost. It had probably been there before that, but unnoticed. He looked down at his hand and blinked.
There was nothing there.
No line of red.
No blood smeared against the skin.
No ridge of skin jutting up from the cut.
Nothing.
Father Michael Doherty looked back up at the picture of the Blessed Margaret Finney and then to the crucified Christ above her and started to smile.
He could have been mistaken.
He might never have had a cut at all.
He could have imagined the whole thing.
Imagined or not, he was never going to tell a single soul on earth what had just happened to him.
They would never believe him.
Epilogue
[1]
AT TEN O’CLOCK ON the morning of Sunday, March 17, just as the Maryville St. Patrick’s Day Parade was beginning its march from the Maryville Public Library to the steps of St. Mary of the Hill, Gregor Demarkian and Bennis Hannaford decided to remove themselves from the festivities for a while and get to someplace warm. Because it was Sunday and all the stores on the street were closed, this amounted to finding a handy doorway to stand in out of the wind, where Bennis could get a cigarette lit and Gregor could feel safe about taking off his hat. When they’d decided to take the Cardinal and Reverend Mother General up on their invitation and come to Maryville for St. Pat’s, Gregor had gone out and purchased a hat with ear flaps especially. It looked ridiculous worn with his citified winter coat and good leather gloves, but it kept his ears from freezing. Bennis, as usual, was dressed in jeans and an assortment of wrapped garments Gregor had no way of identifying. The top half of her looked a little like the drawings of children in the wind in Evelyn Nisbett books. The doorway they found was close to the Motherhouse, just south of Iggy Loy. Gregor chose it for both its practical and sentimental values. It was the doorway of the shoe repair shop owned by Jack O’Brien.
Bennis got her cigarettes out and got one lit and blew a stream of smoke into the air. Gregor thought about giving her another lecture on how she had to give up smoking and decided against it. He was sure the lectures goaded her into smoking more. Bennis was like that. She blew another stream of smoke into the air and Gregor found himself wondering if it was smoke at all. It was cold enough to turn their breath to mist.
Bennis took off something that looked like a large scarf and dropped it on the concrete step beneath her. Then she sat down on the scarf and stretched her legs.
“What I don’t understand,” she said, “is when you knew it was Ann-Harriet who was dead in the greenhouse and not Miriam Bailey. I mean, you didn’t even see her.”
“I didn’t have to see her,” Gregor said. “Pete Donovan told me Miriam Bailey had died and he was convinced Ann-Harriet Severan had killed her. Well, I tried to work the whole thing out as Ann-Harriet’s doing and it wouldn’t go. There were too many conditions she couldn’t meet. There was the key to the Motherhouse’s front door, for one thing. Without that, I had Don Bollander trapped in a locked-room puzzle, and there just isn’t any such thing as a locked-room puzzle. People don’t do things like that. Then there was the timing of Brigit Ann Reilly’s murder—the murder, not her death. Brigit had to have taken that poison during the half hour that nobody saw her that morning, and that was between ten thirty and eleven. She had to have taken it down by the river, too, because that’s where she was the last time anyone had seen her. That meant that Ann-Harriet would have had to have gone down to the river, administered the poison and got hold of the extra postulant’s habit, and got back to her desk—it would have taken a good hour if not more. Here’s a woman working for a hostile boss. Do you think she would have been able to take an hour away from her desk in the middle of the morning without causing a stink?”
“And you’d have heard about a stink,” Bennis said slowly.
“In a town this size, with a woman as universally disliked as Ann-Harriet Severan, the news would have been all over the place in ten minutes. Then there’s Josh Malley to consider. Everybody said Ann-Harriet was sleeping with Josh Malley, and I’m sure it was true. But so what? Look at what Miriam was doing with Josh Malley.”
“I really don’t get all this business about Josh Malley.”
“It’s simple,” Gregor said. Out on the street, some band had just struck up “The Wearing of the Green.” “Miriam Bailey went to Corfu and picked up Josh Malley and brought him home and married him, or married him and brought him home, it doesn’t matter which. It surprised everybody, not just because it wasn’t like her—older women and older men have crises of that kind all the time—but because she didn’t change in any other way. She should have been going in for silly clothes or spending too much money on cosmetics or something. That’s how women usually act when they discover sex in their late middle age, but Miriam Bailey didn’t. She spent money on Josh Malley. She spent an ostentatious amount of money on Josh Malley. Otherwise, she went on just as before. And that figures, you see, because she hadn’t discovered sex in late middle age. She’d discovered a scapegoat.”
“She went in for scapegoats, didn’t she?” Bennis said. “Sending fake hate mail to the Cardinal and the convent on a computer that could have belonged to anybody—”
“Pete Donovan told me about that. Miriam gave the library a new computer system last year. It’s compatible to the one used at the bank. That tied in with the little game she played with Ann-Harriet just before she killed her. Miriam told Ann-Harriet that Glinda had told Miriam about Ann-Harriet and Josh. Ann-Harriet did what she always did when Miriam goaded her, went off half-cocked and staged a very public confrontation. Of course, as soon as Glinda told her she’d been tricked, Ann-Harriet knew it was true, so she went barreling off again to have another confrontation, this time with Miriam. Miriam, in the meantime, was sitting calmly at home, knowing perfectly well that Ann-Harriet would show up on her doorstep eventually. And in the meantime—”
“In the meantime, it looked like Gli
nda and Ann-Harriet had had a fight, so if Ann-Harriet showed up dead and was identified, the first person the police would want to talk to would be Glinda.”
“Maybe the second one,” Gregor said.
“Well,” Bennis told him, “I just met your Glinda about ten minutes ago. I was talking to Sister Scholastica and she came by with Sam Harrigan, and, of course, I’ve met Sam on and off the talk show circuit, that happens, I told you. Anyway, he says he’s been in love for two weeks and he’s going to marry her.”
“Good,” Gregor says.
“She said he had to give up cigarettes because she isn’t running away to Tahiti with anybody who’s trying to commit suicide, and as soon as she said that he threw his cigarette on the ground and put it out. It was the strangest thing. He looks very happy. I always had the feeling he was an enormously lonely man.”
“He’s an enormously outrageous man,” Gregor said, “and she’s probably one out of three women on earth who could put up with him. I talked to Cardinal O’Bannion. He says she’s bringing him back to the Church.”
“I’ll bet he’s talked her into premarital sexual intercourse anyway,” Bennis said.
“Stop thinking about sex,” Gregor said. “Think about food. Glinda looks very nice, you know, and she’s just your height. She doesn’t look as if she hasn’t been able to afford a decent lunch since 1964.”
“Never mind,” Bennis said. “Get back to the point. Miriam picked up Josh Bailey meaning to use him as a scapegoat and a blind while she stole a lot of money from the bank—”
“Exactly.” Gregor was engaged immediately. He didn’t want to discuss anybody’s sex life anyway. “Miriam went to Corfu looking for a young man for just that purpose,” he said, “because it was just the kind of thing that would divert attention from anything and everything else she was doing. And the money she spent on him was a good diversion, too. There was a lot of outgo and activity in her accounts because of it. It was a lot easier to move around the money she was embezzling when she was moving a lot of money around anyway. Everybody thought she was doing her usual thing to keep on pampering Josh. I’m expressing myself badly.”
“Tibor would understand you with no problem at all.”
“Tibor’s in the parade. Can you imagine John O’Bannion insisting on that?”
“They’re old friends.”
“Never mind that,” Gregor said. “The thing is, it was a perfect plan. She got Josh. She had all the time in the world. Eventually, she was going to be free and on her own and seriously rich. You know, everybody kept saying how rich she was, and in relation to ordinary people she was rich. But she was Maryville rich, not New York City rich. And she was greedy.”
“Isn’t everybody?”
“No,” Gregor said. “Anyway, I don’t think she meant it all to come to a head so quickly. I think she meant to take her time, two or three more years, but then the Feds announced their audit and there she was. She, of course, had the fake computer fiddle, all set up to incriminate Ann-Harriet Severan. The Feds would find that first. The problem was, the Feds would find the rest of it in no time at all. The only chance she had was to get out before the fifth of March, and she had to pick up some serious cash in the meantime. You know, for a last minute bail-out plan, the one she came up with was very good.”
“A little bloody, wouldn’t you say?”
“There was no blood, Bennis. There was only poison. And yes, there was too much, but it’s the way I told Pete Donovan. The last one was for hate. She brought Josh Malley back here and she expected him to keep up his half of their bargain. She paid for a very nice life for him and he pretended to be devoted to her instead. If she’d known more about people, she’d have realized that that was unlikely to be the way it worked out. I’ve met half a dozen women in my life who’ve married boys like Josh Malley. Not one of those boys was faithful.”
“But,” Bennis said, “she didn’t care at all for Josh Malley. Why did it matter if he wasn’t faithful?”
“Vanity.” Gregor shrugged. “She’s an arrogant woman and a conceited one, too. That love affair infuriated her. In the beginning I think she’d only meant to make Josh look foolish, to use him as a cover and then discard him. In the end, just to get back at him and Ann-Harriet for their extracurricular sex, she not only killed Ann-Harriet, she set up her murder to look as if Josh had committed it. Pete Donovan and his boys found a jar—a jar, mind you—of distilled coniine in Josh’s gym bag. They also found kerosene. If Miriam didn’t get him one way, she was going to get him another.”
“But how did you know it wasn’t Miriam dead in the greenhouse?” Bennis asked again. “How could you have?”
“I told you,” Gregor said, “logically it couldn’t have been. Then I started to ask around, and it was immediately apparent that nobody had actually seen her face. They’d seen her clothes. And then there were the shoes.”
“The shoes?”
“Miriam Bailey was wearing stack-heeled shoes when I saw her outside the bank earlier that day. From the way the corpse was described to me by various people, it was wearing the same clothes Miriam had been wearing then, but spike heels. I’d also seen Ann-Harriet Severan earlier that day. She’d been wearing spike heels.”
“Why do I feel,” Bennis asked him, “that you’re making this all up? That you made a lucky guess and it worked out and now you’re taking credit for it.”
“I’m not taking credit for anything,” Gregor said. “Believe me, I’ve never felt so stupid in all my life.”
“Time called it your most brilliant piece of deduction so far.”
Gregor fixed Bennis with a stern look. “It is not a brilliant piece of deduction,” he said, “to drive yourself crazy for two hours trying to figure out how a corpse came to be in a locked building to which your chief suspect happens to have a key. It is not even common stupidity.”
Bennis giggled. “Oh, dear. Was it that bad?”
“I was standing with Reverend Mother General in a room full of floor plans listening to her tell me that the only people who had a key to the front door that could circumvent the security system from the outside were herself, the security company that had installed the system, and the bank that held their mortgage and insisted on the system. I don’t know how many times I’d been told by how many people that the Immigrants National Bank always held the mortgages on the Motherhouse when the Motherhouse needed them.”
“It was that bad,” Bennis said. “I’ll have to get you something really nice to make up for it.”
“Don’t get me something really nice. Every time you get me something really nice, I feel like I ought to get it insured.”
“It’s silly to get things insured,” Bennis said, “unless you’re talking about houses or cars or something. Things are just things.”
“Whatever that’s supposed to mean.”
“That’s the float,” Bennis said. “There’s Tibor in a chair right behind Cardinal O’Bannion, next to the guest rabbi or whatever he is. At least Tibor’s face is green.”
[2]
Bennis had stood up and gone out to the sidewalk. Now Gregor went out after her, marveling again at how small she was. She had a great deal of force of personality. He often forgot that she was only five feet four. He stood behind her and looked out on Delaney Street, at the Cardinal in full regalia and his priests in fairly impressive costume as well. Behind them sat what Father Tibor had earlier that morning called “the ecumenical contingent.” “It is a show of solidarity, Krekor, but it is silly. Between John and me there is solidarity. Between John and Reverend Marshall from the Baptists there is at this moment war.” Gregor watched Tibor sitting bolt upright and staring straight ahead and smiled. It was going to be good to get back to Cavanaugh Street, even if it was going to be a few months before Tibor was finished with his teaching and in residence full-time. Bennis, at least, had finished the first draft of her book—if she hadn’t, she wouldn’t be here—and would be available for lunch and conversation.
“Bennis?” he asked. “When are the rest of them coming home?”
“The rest of who? Oh. Well. Old George Tekemanian is home.”
“I thought he wasn’t due back until the first of April.”
“He wasn’t. He got thrown out of Nassau.”
“What?”
Bennis whirled around. “Now, Gregor,” she said, “don’t get upset. I mean, you know George, he’s eighty-something, he couldn’t really have been smoking marijuana, he says he was just trying to talk this boy he met out of smoking it and I believe him and as to the pinching women, well you know how he gets and he doesn’t mean any harm by it—”
“Whom did he pinch?” Gregor demanded.
“Well, it was the governor’s wife or the somebody’s wife at any rate and you know he didn’t mean—”
Out on Delaney Street, a new band had struck up “Danny Boy” in a distinctly marchlike, unsentimental way. Gregor took a deep breath and did his best to keep his face as stern as it ought to be. After all, he was the designated purveyor of Right Thinking and Common Sense on Cavanaugh Street. He couldn’t have them thinking he liked all the nutsy things they did.
Stern or not, though, he was going to be glad to eat his way through this celebration and get himself home.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries
One
1
LIKE DOZENS OF OTHER small towns scattered across the White Mountains and the Green Mountains and the Berkshires, Bethlehem often got its first dusting of snow just after Halloween and found itself hip-deep in white by the first of December. This first of December had not been that bad. It had been a mild season from the beginning, causing squeals of panic and indignation to rise from the flatlanders who had bought up the ski resorts to the north. The squeals and panic were noted with a certain amount of satisfaction by the natives, who didn’t much like the flatlanders in spite of the money they spent. Then, in the middle of everything, there had been a quick-mud thaw. The temperature had dropped far enough to freeze that over only on the first of December itself. It was now December second, the official opening day of the Bethlehem Nativity Celebration, and everything looked a little skewed. Peter Callisher thought that what it really looked like was haphazard. The people of Bethlehem, Vermont, had been putting on their Nativity Celebration since 1934. The Celebration had grown from a small collection of rough sheds propped up with two-by-fours around the gazebo in the town park to a kind of psychic delusion that possessed the whole town three weeks out of every year. Each cycle of the Nativity play now took a full week, starting on Monday and ending on Saturday, bringing new and bewildered bevies of tourists into the inns around Main Street every Sunday afternoon. The Holy Family had taken up residence in the gazebo itself, and the cow and the donkey and the sheep that surrounded them were all real enough to cause difficulties in managing their manure. It all looked eerily authentic, in spite of the fact that Palestine rarely got this much snow—or any snow at all. For Peter Callisher, standing at the window of the living room in the apartment he kept over the offices of the Bethlehem News and Mail, it all looked depressing, as if they were trying to hold on to something they should have let go of long ago. Peter wasn’t a flatlander, but he looked like one. He was tall and angular and bookish, complete with wire-rimmed glasses and a parka from L. L. Bean, and there was something about the way he moved his hands that spoke very strongly of Away. It should have. Peter Callisher was forty-four years old. He had been born and raised in Bethlehem, in the small brick house on Dencher Street his father had built around the time he took over the News and Mail. Peter had sold that house exactly six years ago, when his father died and he had taken over the News and Mail himself. In the time between, he had been about as Away as anyone could get. At first, there had been the usual things. He had gone south to Yale for college and then to New York to take a master’s degree at the Columbia School of Journalism. After that, he had gone to work for The New York Times. It was what happened after that that got to people, because they found it inexplicable. Running away to Boston or New York or the Ivy League: That was all right. That was about sex. Running away to Pakistan, even if The New York Times was paying you to do it and calling you a foreign correspondent: That was something else again. As for coming back to town with a bullet in your hip when you hadn’t even been in a war, and trailing rumors about Afghanistan and the mujahadeen—that was enough to put an end to conversations all over town, even down in the basement of the Congregational Church, where the old ladies made holiday baskets for the poor in Burlington and talked about the children of friends of theirs who’d died.