by Jane Haddam
“Sam?” Charlie said. Sorry.
“You ought to be sorry,” Charlie said. “You’re not listening to a word I say. This is important.”
“In case I meet the Cardinal Archbishop of Colchester.”
“For Christ’s sake. Sam, let me start again from the beginning, all right? Maybe, if I repeat it one more time, you’ll retain enough of it so that we can discuss it. Do you remember my saying that you’d received an invitation to attend a reception on St. Patrick’s Day at the sisterhouse of the—”
“Motherhouse.”
“What?”
“Motherhouse,” Sam repeated. “Not sisterhouse. A Motherhouse is the first and principal house of a religious order. I take it I’ve been invited up to St. Mary of the Hill.”
“The Sisters of Divine Grace,” Charlie said.
“Same difference. What do they want me up there for?”
“I think they’re putting on some kind of program.”
There’s going to be a Mass. ‘Celebrated’ by John Cardinal O’Bannion. That’s what it says here. ‘Celebrated.’”
“That’s what it would say, Charlie. That’s how it’s said.”
“Yes, well, that wouldn’t have got to me. Even the Cardinal Archbishop wouldn’t have gotten to me necessarily. It’s what this reception thing is for. Those nuns are going to have a saint.”
“What?”
“Listen to this, Sam. ‘On the occasion of the beatification of the Blessed Margaret Finney, a Mass of petition for her successful canonization.’ Doesn’t that mean that they’re going to have a saint?”
There was a pack of cigarettes lying on the low picnic-style rough pine coffee table, torn open on one corner and shedding flecks of tobacco. Sam picked them up, extracted one, and lit it with a wooden kitchen match. He had wooden-handled kitchen matches all over the house and kerosene lamps to go with them, because his electricity up here was provided by his own private generator and something was always going wrong with it. He took a deep drag and exhaled and stared through his screen. There was still no movement at the little house, but something hopeful had occurred to him. Her car was a bright red two-door Saab. It was parked just where it belonged, halfway up her drive.
He took another drag on his cigarette, stared at the porch ceiling and sighed. It really was a mess out there today. Maybe she had decided to call in sick so she wouldn’t have to go out into the wet. Maybe she really was sick, and he ought to go down there and rescue her. He imagined her lying curled up on the carpet in her living room, burning up with fever, only half-conscious. He didn’t even know if she had a carpet in her living room. He only knew her name because of an accident. He was either insane or regressing to an adolescent state. This was the way he had fallen in love for the first time, when he was fourteen, with little Ginnie MacIver. Little Ginnie MacIver had had a head full of bubble bath and a size thirty-eight chest.
Sam took yet another drag, blew yet another stream of smoke into the sodden air, and chucked the burning butt into the tin ashtray he kept on the plant shelf. Charlie Wicklow was babbling on and on, on and on. Sam didn’t want to listen to him. Charlie Wicklow was a Protestant, and like all Protestants he was going to end up giving Sam a headache. This was true even though Sam hadn’t been inside a Catholic Church for over twenty-five years.
“Charlie,” Sam said, “calm down a minute. Why did that invitation come to you?”
“Your invitations always come to me,” Charlie said. “At least, they do when they’re from somebody you don’t know.”
“Right. They come here when they’re from somebody I do know.”
“I don’t get it.”
“It’s just this, Charlie. I don’t know any of the Sisters of Divine Grace on a first-name basis, to put it both awkwardly and inaccurately, but I do know them. They send a pair to knock on my door twice a year collecting for their missions, and I give to their missions, too, to the tune of four or five hundred dollars a visit—”
“That must be why you got invited.”
“Maybe so, Charlie, but the point is, if they want to invite me to this reception, why don’t they just send another pair up to deliver the invitation? They love coming up here. They stand around and sniff and try to figure out what I’m making in the kitchen.”
“What are you making in the kitchen?”
“Usually popcorn. Charlie, take a look at that invitation you’ve got and tell me—’”
But for once, Charlie didn’t have to be told. He was rustling papers. He was coughing and heaving and hemming and hawing. Finally, he got back on the line and said,
“The invitation didn’t actually come from the Sisters of Divine Grace. It’s for a reception at the Motherhouse of the Sisters of Divine Grace, but the invitation itself is from the Cardinal’s office.”
“Ah.”
“What do you mean, ‘ah.’”
“I mean you’ve got to hold on for a second. There’s something I want to do.”
The something Sam wanted to do was get closer to the screen. He could have done that with the phone in his hand, but then he would have been distracted by Charlie’s nattering. There was movement at the little house down the hill at last. The front door had been flung open and slammed shut. The drive had been possessed by a swirling storm of beige raincoat and wide-legged dark blue pants. She always dressed like that, in pants with legs so wide they might as well have been culottes and tight little shells topped by oversize jackets that flowed almost to her knees. She had straight blond hair blunt cut to her shoulders and across her forehead that reminded Sam of Mary from the folk song group from the sixties. She was five feet four and maybe a hundred and forty-five pounds. Like most American women with the kind of figure Sam liked, she probably thought she was fat.
She got to her car, dropped her keys, managed to pick them up without ruining her clothes in a mud puddle, and let herself into her car. Seconds later, smoke began to pump out of her exhaust pipe. Sam leaned sideways and grabbed his telescope. He had never done that before—he didn’t spy on her, for God’s sake; that wasn’t what the telescope was for—but today he was worried. The road to the bottom of the hill was narrow and twisting and hardly safe for a vehicle meant to cruise on city streets. He should have gone down and offered her a lift this morning. It would have been a good way to get himself introduced.
“Forty-two,” he said out loud. “Maybe forty-five.”
He had been holding the phone again. Charlie said, “What?”
“Never mind,” Sam said. He thought he’d been saying it all morning. “I just want you to realize, before you go accepting that invitation, that the Sisters may have no idea they’re giving a reception.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about Cardinal Archbishops and Princes of the Church. Especially enthusiastic ones, and John O’Bannion certainly is one of those.”
“Are you saying you won’t go?”
“No, Charlie, I’m not saying I won’t go. I’m just saying you should let me check this thing out a little. Let me find out what the Sisters really want. I don’t care what John O’Bannion really wants. I don’t have to live with John O’Bannion.”
“But—”
“Trust me.”
The hesitation on the other end of the line was like a physical entity. Charlie didn’t trust him, and Sam didn’t blame him. Sam knew he had never been particularly trustworthy. Finally, though, Charlie sighed, and Sam knew he had won the point, at least for the moment.
“All right,” Charlie said. “But Sam, this thing has a deadline on it. March 1. Get back to me before then or I’ll accept in your name and stick you with it.”
“Right.”
“I mean it, Sam.”
“I said right.”
“You never take me seriously,” Charlie said.
There was a sharp click in Sam’s ear—sharp enough to make Sam wince—and then the phone went to dial tone. Sam put the receiver back in the cradle and sighe
d. He had been hanging onto the telescope for the whole of his last series of exchanges with Charlie, but it hadn’t done much good. Between the rain and the bright green budding caused by the thaw that had allowed the rain and the crazy way Maryville went about celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, Sam had been able to keep her car in sight only sporadically. He kept getting fuzzed out by pouring water or blocked by leaves and plastic decorations. He hadn’t trained the telescope on the hill below him before. Now that he had, he seriously wondered if the people of Maryville took drugs in preparation for their celebration of the seventeenth. They seemed to have swarmed up here and stuck plastic shamrocks and little ceramic shillelaghs to every branch.
At the very bottom of the hill, the bright red Saab shot out of the trees, turned left onto Londonderry Street and raced out of sight. Sam kept the telescope trained on the place where she had disappeared, thinking. He hadn’t realized how good it was, how clearly he could see what was down there. His picture of Londonderry Street and Clare Avenue and Diamond Place was so clear, he could have been watching them on television. He watched a garbage truck rumble down Clare Avenue on its way to the warehouse on the river. He followed a pair of old men moving from store window to store window on this lower end of Londonderry Street. Then he saw a very curious thing. The buildings on Diamond Place were all abandoned. Sometimes in the summer they were claimed by drifters and by bums, but in the winter they were always empty. Up here it didn’t do to try to live without central heat. Since Diamond Place didn’t lead anywhere, it was possible for that short street to go months at a time without any human presence. Now, though, it quite definitely had one. Sam saw her turn off Clare Avenue and head up toward the worst of the abandoned buildings, the ones at the end whose front walls seemed to be coming down. Sam recognized her clothes, too. She was one of those nuns-in-training from the Sisters of Divine Grace, a postulant, with a long black dress and a black thing on her head that wasn’t exactly a veil. She was walking swiftly, as if she knew where she was going, and so intently she seemed not to notice the rain. When she got to the barrier of the dead end, she stopped, looked closely at the buildings on either side of her, and nodded at one. Then she climbed its steps, opened its door, and disappeared.
I wonder if the other nuns know what she’s doing, Sam thought. They’re crazy if they let her go into a place like that by herself. He had half a mind to pick up the phone again and call someone at the Motherhouse, to let them know what was going on. Then he told himself he was being nosy, and he hated nosy people. Nuns had to be trained to deal with all kinds of places and all kinds of people. They were supposed to help the poor. What he’d just seen could have been some kind of educational exercise.
He turned the telescope away from Diamond Place and tried to fix it on the library, where She worked. He couldn’t do it. The library was deep into the valley, on one of the lowest plots of land in town. The best he could do was catch a flash of the dark green border of its lawn. He folded the telescope up, sat back, and found his cigarette burned to a cylinder of ash in his ashtray.
Glinda Daniels. That was her name. Glinda Daniels. Sam wondered if her mother had been obsessed with the movie or the book, if she’d been named for the Good Witch of the North or of the South. He refused to believe that her mother had been obsessed with Billie Burke.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1991 by Jane Haddam
cover design by Heather Kern
ISBN 978-1-4532-9310-2
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