True Believers

by Jane Haddam

  Gregor went into the church and looked around. It was empty. He went to the back and out the back door to the courtyard and saw lights on in the annex. He went across the courtyard to the annex and let himself inside. It was warm and light in here. Most of the office doors were open.

  “Can I help you?” somebody said.

  Gregor turned to see Chickie George sitting behind a desk in the office to his left. He hadn’t recognized the voice, because for some reason Chickie wasn’t putting on the camp this morning. “I’m looking for Father Burdock,” Gregor said. “Is he around somewhere?”

  “Up the stairs, first office you get to,” Chickie said. “I’d show you up, but I’m being held together by plaster of Paris.”

  “So I heard. I hope it isn’t too painful.”

  “It wouldn’t be painful at all if I could use it to sue that son of a bitch up the road. Dan’s in. Just tell Mrs. Reed who you are.”

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “Of course I do,” Chickie said, and suddenly the camp was back. “You’re the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.”

  Gregor went down the hall—he had only himself to blame for that one; he’d been asking for it—and found the stairs with no difficulty. He went up and around, thinking as he did that he was being routed back toward the church proper, and found a pleasant-looking middle-aged woman in a flowered dress, typing away at a computer on a desk.

  “Is Father Burdock here?” he asked. “My name is—”

  “Gregor Demarkian,” the woman said.

  “Gregor Demarkian,” Dan Burdock said, sticking his head out the door of the inner office. “Hello. Is this the official interrogation? I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “It isn’t an interrogation at all,” Gregor told him. “I’m actually on my way to somewhere else. I have a friend picking me up in your parking lot in less than half an hour. It was just something that struck me, that’s all, and since you were more or less on the way—”

  “Sure. Come on in. Mrs. Reed can get you coffee, if you like.”

  “No, no. I don’t have time for coffee. It really is a small thing.”

  Dan Burdock stepped back and shooed Gregor through the door into the inner office. Gregor found himself in a high-ceilinged, paneled room with a wide fireplace, like the libraries in private clubs for men that used to dot the better neighborhoods of the city. There was an enormous leather wing-backed chair just in front of Dan Burdock’s desk. Gregor sat down in that and waited for the priest to settle himself.

  “Well,” Dan said. “What’s the problem? I can’t imagine we’ve done anything in the last few days that hasn’t been thoroughly documented on the evening news.”

  “You probably haven’t. No, it isn’t anything you’ve done. It’s—” Gregor tried to think of a way to make this sound sensible, and realized he couldn’t. “It bothers me, in a way, that you and the Reverend Phipps are on the same block. It seems like too much of a coincidence. So I thought that perhaps it wasn’t one.”

  “You’re right,” Dan said. “It isn’t one.”

  “So the Reverend Phipps moved into his town house in order to harass St. Stephen’s. Was that before or after you became pastor here?”

  “I’ve been pastor here for twenty-five years,” Dan Burdock said. “Roy has only been up the block for the last ten. And he didn’t come to harass St. Stephen’s. He came to harass me.”

  “You personally?”

  “Got it in one.”

  “But why?”

  Dan Burdock sighed. “We were in college together,” he said. “At Princeton. We were roommates one year. We were in the same entryway for two years. I’m the one he knows.”

  “The one what?”

  “Gay man.”

  “Are you gay?” Gregor asked.

  Dan Burdock sighed again. “Of course I’m gay,” he said. “I’m not practicing, as the church likes to put it, but I’m gay. Everybody knows it. Nobody will talk about it. Except, of course, Roy. Sometimes I think it would be easier if I posted a sign on the church bulletin board out there by the sidewalk that said, ‘The pastor of this church is a homosexual. Other homosexuals welcome to worship.’ Except that everybody knows that, too. It drives me nuts.”

  Gregor nodded. “What about Roy Phipps? Is he also gay?”

  “You mean, as a handy explanation for why he feels the need to persecute homosexuals? If you want my private opinion, and that’s all it could be, the answer is no. I threaten the hell out of Roy, and I always have, but it’s not because he’s latent.”

  “What is it, then?”

  Dan Burdock stood up. “Do you know anything about Roy? I mean, beyond the rhetoric and the newspaper stories about picket lines at gay funerals?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I do. He came from a dirt-poor family in some backwater hollow in West Virginia, at a time when kids like that didn’t get to places like Princeton. He fought his way through high school. He fought his way to a scholarship. He spent four years of college working three jobs and studying his head off and managed to graduate salutatorian of our class. He’s a very unusual man, Roy is. He could have been anything. I’ve always thought of what he did become as a form of reaction formation. He finally couldn’t stand it anymore. He wanted to bring us all down. Those of us who didn’t have to fight, if you know what I mean.”

  “But why pick on homosexuals?”

  “I don’t think he decided to pick on homosexuals. I think he decided to pick on me. And since I happen to be gay—well, there it is.”

  “He’s going to a lot of trouble, just to pick on you.”

  “I agree. But I do think that is what this is. I always have. Is that really all you came here to find out? Why Roy took up residence on this block?”

  “More or less, yes. And I’m interested in the coincidences. The two churches, for instance, with their layouts so similar, the courtyards, the annexes, the parking lots.”

  “Except that St. Anselm’s has the school. But that’s not a coincidence either,” Dan Burdock said, “and you must have known that. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to live in a world where everybody wanted to be an Episcopalian.”

  “I think I lived through that era,” Gregor said. “But then, I’m a lot younger than you are. I’d better go downstairs and make sure my friend isn’t freezing in his car in the parking lot. I told him to come in if he didn’t see me, but I don’t really know what he’ll do. Thank you for your time.”

  “You’re more than welcome. Is there going to be an official interrogation one of these days? With the cops present, and all that sort of thing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ve been getting ready for it for days,” Dan Burdock said. “No, longer than that. I’ve been getting ready for it since I first knew Scott hadn’t died a natural death. Does that make any sense to you?”

  “Yes. Some.”

  “Let me come down with you and see you out.”

  Gregor nodded slightly, and Dan Burdock led the way to his own office door. Outside the office windows, the day was already grey and dark, and it wasn’t yet noon. It was lucky they hadn’t had snow.

  Gregor realized, at the last minute, that he’d left the Valentine’s Day box on the floor next to the chair he had been sitting in, and went back to get it.

  SEVEN

  1

  There were funeral arrangements to be made for Sister Harriet Garrity. It wouldn’t be a quick funeral, or even necessarily a local one, but Sister Scholastica felt as if life would make a bit more sense if she could get the details straightened out, and so that was what she was trying to do. The first requirement had been to notify Harriet’s order, which was called the Daughters of the Immaculate Conception—a name, Scholastica thought, that had probably made Harriet’s teeth grate. It was strange to think of the things they had all taken for granted in 1962: the First Fridays and First Saturdays devotions; the brown scapulars and Miraculous Medals; the intentions made in the
hopes of gaining indulgences for the suffering souls in Purgatory. Scholastica still remembered the kinds of indulgences there were—partial and plenary. A plenary indulgence got the soul out of Purgatory immediately. A partial indulgence got some of the years of suffering taken off that soul’s sentence, and the years were long. There were partial indulgences that took off hundreds of years, and yet, since they were only partial, there must still be years left. Once, when she was eleven, Scholastica had found herself kneeling in the middle of the cathedral in Rochester, thinking that there would never be an end to it. No matter what the nuns said, Purgatory was forever, and if you got stuck there you would suffer only a little less than if you got stuck in hell, and you would never get out. For a moment, the room had seemed to dissolve, and she had thought herself surrounded by souls in agony, crying out to God for the cool relief of water. Then she had snapped back into the present, and there had been Judy Sullivan, sitting in the pew right in front of her, wearing a blue angora sweater over her parochial-school uniform skirt. The colors clashed, but Scholastica had wanted that sweater even so.

  The nun from Sister Harriet’s order had been more gracious than Scholastica had expected her to be. Maybe, being used to Harriet, Scholastica had expected an argument, just as a matter of principle.

  “We’ll send somebody up, of course,” Sister Hilary Etchen had said. “Although I must admit I don’t know who it will be. We only have four of us now in the motherhouse, and two of us are over seventy. You don’t have that problem, do you, at Divine Grace?”

  “We’re short on vocations,” Scholastica had said. “Everybody is.”

  “Yes, everybody is. But last year you had eight. And the average age of your Sisters is under fifty. Sometimes I think we should have kept the habit, just for its drawing power. Do you take girls right out of high school?”

  “Sometimes. A lot of the time now we prefer to take them out of college.”

  “And they come?”

  “Well,” Scholastica had said, “some of them do, although not as many as used to when they all came as soon as they left parochial school. But it’s mostly from the Catholic colleges, anyway, and from the conservative ones at that. We don’t get a lot of candidates from the public universities.”

  “No,” Sister Hilary had said, “I don’t suppose you do. It makes me wonder, sometimes, if I had my head screwed on right, when I voted in favor of the changes we made in this order. I used to think that people would want to be part of us more if we were authentic, if we didn’t traffic in ceremony and formality. But it seems the opposite is the case.”

  “I think adolescent girls like to play dress-up,” Scholastica had said.

  “We’ll find somebody to come up. Sister Joanne Fuselli is serving in a parish in Wilmington, maybe she can get away. And we’ll inform the relatives, of course. Harriet had quite a few relatives. It’s hard to believe, isn’t it? Sisters get murdered sometimes, on the street, in muggings, but something like this … . Do you have a place to put the body if, you know, if it takes us some time to get this organized?”

  “The body is at the medical examiner’s. There has to be an autopsy. It won’t even be released for a couple of days.”

  “Oh. That’s fine, then. I can manage something in a couple of days. Thank you so much for calling. We managed to get the news to her brother before it hit the newscasts. That was worth everything.”

  “Yes,” Sister Scholastica had said. Then she had put the phone down and stared out her window, and fifteen minutes later she was still staring out her window. Reality had lost its edges, once again.

  She got out from behind her desk and went into the hall. The office women were all at work, which meant that it was either before or after the noon rosary. She made it a point to attend the rosary every day, if only to set a good example for the other Sisters. The laywomen were always so grateful when their rosary was joined by the Sisters. Sister Scholastica went down the hall and stopped in Sister Thomasetta’s doorway.

  “So,” she said. “Where are we? Or aren’t you getting much done today, either?”

  “I’d be getting more done if the police didn’t call every twenty minutes to ask silly questions. Where did Sister Harriet sleep. What did Sister Harriet have for breakfast. As if I were supposed to know. You remember what Harriet was like. She wouldn’t eat with us. She wouldn’t stay with us. Sometimes I think she would have been happier if we’d disappeared from the face of the earth.”

  “It was a difference in political agendas,” Scholastica said, coming inside. “Except I never think of myself as having a political agenda. Have the police really been calling every twenty minutes?”

  “That Detective Mansfield, yes. I’ve been imagining him sitting in his office somewhere, obsessing about Sister Harriet and her murder. But the thing is, there are better people to ask about the things he wants to know than me. Why should he ask me, just because I’m the one who happens to be answering the phone this morning?”

  “You can send him down to me, if you’d like to.”

  “What I’d like is for Sister Peter Rose to get the day off so that she can talk to him. I’m sorry, Sister. I don’t mean to sound so irritated. I suppose I’ve had a bad day, with one thing and another, all day.”

  “We all have.” Scholastica paced around the room. Sister Thomasetta was a woman of the old school in more ways than one. She had a framed picture of Our Lady of Fatima on her desk, and another of her niece and nephew, dressed to the death for Christmas. “So,” Scholastica said. “What else has been happening around here? Did Mary get the things she needed for the soup kitchen?”

  “They sent somebody else. Mary went to take that young man from across the street around to do some things. You know the one. He’s always sort of swishing around. He got a couple of ribs broken in the riot.”

  “Chickie George.”

  “That’s it. Anyway, then she had to study. I have no idea how that girl does it. She’s been Dean’s List at St. Joe’s for the past three years, did you know that? Peter Rose told me. And the soup kitchen and the Sodality and praying the Office every day. And that boyfriend of hers treats her like cornflakes. Someday she’s going to wise up and walk out on him, and then he’ll be sorry.”

  “I guess. Is that it? Have we really managed to go through a day where nothing happened?”

  “Pretty much,” Thomasetta said. “Oh, I managed to go through those records you sent me. Only once, mind you, I’ve been doing payroll. But I looked through them. You’re right. They’re a mess.”

  “I thought so. Father Healy is a nice man, but he’s hopeless when it comes to things like this. And you know if the archdiocese catches the discrepancy, we’ll all be in trouble whether it was our responsibility or not. The Cardinal Archbishop isn’t the world’s easiest person. Do you think you can fix it?”

  “Give me a day or two, yes. It’s just sloppiness. It isn’t even unusual sloppiness. Maybe you ought to go over to the house and have something to eat.”

  “Maybe I should,” Scholastica said. “Don’t you wonder how they did it? Whoever killed Sister Harriet. How they got her to eat the arsenic. You’d think she would have known that the person hated her.”

  “Harriet? Harriet had the emotional intelligence of a sea slug.”

  Scholastica wanted to laugh, but she caught herself at the last minute. Then she left Sister Thomasetta’s office and went down the hall again, but in the other direction. When she got to the end, she opened the fire door and stepped into the cold. She looked up at the big brick building that was St. Anselm’s School—and that had been, for almost a hundred years now—and decided that she just couldn’t face playing principal at the moment. She was being very unfair to Sister Peter Rose, she knew, but she couldn’t help herself. Maybe she wasn’t cut out to be a nun, at least not a nun of the kind that Reverend Mother General was. By now, Reverend Mother General would have solved the crime and provided Gregor Demarkian with incontrovertible and fully admissible evidenc
e of the same.

  Scholastica went in the side door of the church, looked around at the people praying in the pews, and then went around the back to the stairs that led to the basement. She checked the boxes that had been set out for the food drive, and the other boxes, left against the wall in piles on the floor, that held the rosaries and the scapulars for the First Holy Communion classes. Then she reminded herself that somebody else had already seen to all this, and that none of it was her job at all. She was just looking for a way to waste time that would not make her feel guilty. She felt guilty every time she thought of the way she had behaved at the sight of Sister Harriet’s body.

  She came back up to the first floor and went out the front door of the church. She looked across at St. Stephen’s and wondered what they were doing in there. There was more activity than there usually was in the middle of the day in the middle of the week. She looked up the street in the direction of Roy Phipps’s place, but that was calm enough, too, this morning. Maybe they were tired of picketing. It always surprised her that nobody had ever done any damage to Roy Phipps or his church. You would think, given the nonsense he pulled, that violence would be inevitable.

  Scholastica started to turn back to the church, but as she did she saw a woman coming up the street, and because the woman was familiar, she stopped. A second later, she realized who it was: that Edith Lawton person, the professional atheist, who lived with her husband in one of the single-family town houses on the block. Scholastica didn’t want to know what one of those town houses cost, or how you could afford one on the money you made by being a professional atheist—but then, Edith Lawton was supposed to be married. At the moment, she looked oddly mismatched, as if she were the living embodiment of one of those Picasso paintings from the 1920s. The parts of her didn’t go together. She was dressed like a teenager, in jeans and a down jacket, and she was almost thin enough to pull it off, but her face was the face of a fifty-year-old woman. In the harsh light of the intermittent sun, it looked even older.