Great Day for the Deadly
Read Great Day for the Deadly Online
Authors: Jane Haddam
A Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mystery
Jane Haddam
A MysteriousPress.com
Open Road Integrated Media
Ebook
Preview: A Stillness in Bethlehem
Thursday, February 21
[1]
T
HERE WAS A BIG
maple on the front lawn of St. Ignatius Loyola Parochial School, covered with papier-mâché leprechauns and painted-plastic glitter-encrusted shamrocks. Brigit Ann Reilly passed it every day on her walk from the Motherhouse of the Sisters of Divine Grace to the Maryville Public Library. Sometimes she thought the tree was pretty, a perfect example of the simple faith of children. Sometimes she thought it was wrong, because it replaced the sacred symbols of Christianity with representations of a lot of pagan superstitions. Mostly she didn’t notice it at all. Brigit Ann Reilly was very self-conscious about her walks. She was only eighteen years old, just out of high school, and she had arrived in Maryville to enter the convent just this past September. Before coming, she had watched a dozen movies about girls who decided to become nuns and read a handful of books put out by the Church on the same subject. She hadn’t even begun to be prepared for what it was like. She had imagined herself in a habit more times than she could remember. She hadn’t realized how exposed it would make her feel to actually wear one. A postulant’s habit wasn’t much—a long-sleeved black dress that reached to the bottom of the calves; a caplike French babushka—but it was enough to make Brigit feel that everyone must be staring at her. Especially today. On top of being naturally shy and more than a little self-involved, Brigit was one of those people who are pathologically self-conscious in guilt. She was supposed to go directly from St. Mary of the Hill to the library. St. Mary of the Hill was on one end of Delaney Street, at the top of the highest rise in town. The library was at the other end. It was a straight shot, without detours or side issues, right through the center of town. Brigit went down the hill with books to return and a list of books needed. She came up again with whatever Glinda Daniels could find of what was on the list. It was, as Sister Scholastica always said, a position of trust and a test of religious obedience. Brigit had been very obedient for most of the past six months. Today, she was getting ready to make an excursion of her own.
It was ten o’clock on the morning of Thursday, February 21. On this day of any other year, the landscape would have been frozen solid, full of snow and grit. This far north in New York State, edging up toward the banks of the St. Lawrence Seaway, February was a hard month. This year, for some reason no one could tell, there had been an unprecedented thaw. On Valentine’s Day the temperature had risen to fifty-two degrees. Three days later, the rain had started, washing away what was left of another big rock candy winter. Today the temperature was nearly sixty and the rain a thick curtain threatening to bring flood. Brigit wore a simple shawl over the shoulders of her habit and carried an umbrella to keep the rain off her head.
“Good morning, Mr. O’Brien,” she sang out, when she got to the shoe store, just half a block past Iggy Loy. The shoe store was worse than the school, in terms of Irish decorations. Its window was hung with green paper streamers studded with buttons that said “Erin Go Bragh.” Brigit didn’t know what “Erin Go Bragh” meant, but she did know that Sister Scholastica hated it. Sister Scholastica was Mistress of Postulants. She always said there ought to be a murder mystery out there called
Erin Go Bang.
Brigit skidded to a stop at the shoe store’s door and said, “You shouldn’t be standing out in the rain without a hat, Mr. O’Brien. You’ll catch a cold.”
“I never catch colds,” Jack O’Brien said. Then he rubbed the rain off the top of his bald head with the flat of his hand and sighed. “Never mind. That’s the kind of thing I used to say when I was twenty-two. These days, I’d be glad to go back to sixty-two.”
“I never think of you as old,” Brigit said virtuously.
“Hunh. Must be why you’re going to be a holy nun. Excess of charity. What are you doing out in weather like this?”
“What I always do. Going to the library.”
“Well, the good Sister Scholastica must not have looked out her window this morning. Assuming she’s got windows. Don’t you realize, child, there’s going to be a flood.”
“Is there really?”
O’Brien shrugged. “Not a big one. Not like the disaster we had in ’53. But if the rain keeps on coming down like this, I’d expect the streets along the river to be underwater by three this afternoon.”
Brigit turned in the direction of the river, invisible behind block after block of solid two-story frame buildings, stores, and houses that made up the center of town. She had never been down by the river. The only times she was allowed into town from the Motherhouse were on her library trips and her literacy days, Wednesdays, when she and half a dozen other postulants and novices were bussed over to St. Andrew’s parish to teach reading to adults. Literacy days were Brigit’s first experience of Doing Good to the Poor. That, like entering the convent, had turned out to be not at all what Brigit expected. Sometimes Brigit wondered if there was something wrong with her. Her best friend among the postulants, Neila Connelly, never seemed to have the same kinds of trouble. Neila never seemed to have any kind of trouble. Neila just... floated.
Brigit turned her head away from the river, thinking she might be giving herself away—although that was silly—and smiled at Jack O’Brien again. “Sister Scholastica was probably just excited,” she said. “About Margaret Finney. You know.”
“Margaret Finney?”
“The founder of our Order. She was beatified last week.”
“Ah,” Jack O’Brien said.
“If she actually gets all the way to being canonized, she’ll be the first Irish-American saint. You wouldn’t believe the kind of fuss that’s going on up at the house. We’re even having our parents up for St. Patrick’s Day and putting on a program.”
“What kind of a program would that be? Nuns dancing?”
“Some of us,” Brigit said. “Mostly it’s going to be postulants and novices singing and giving speeches. You can come if you want. The whole town’s going to be invited for after the parade. I’m going to speak on ‘The Snake in Irish Myth and Legend’ and ‘The History of the Immigrants National Bank.’”
“Two speeches?”
“Everybody’s giving two speeches. We have to. Sister Scholastica is always saying how they wouldn’t have had to in her day because there were a hundred girls in her postulant class. Can you imagine that? A hundred.”
“Yes, well,” Jack O’Brien said, “the good Sister’s right about that. There aren’t nearly enough vocations these days. People are too selfish.”
“Maybe there aren’t as many people.”
Jack O’Brien cocked a single eyebrow. “That’s a kind of selfishness, too. ‘I’d rather have a new TV set than raise another child.’ Or are you one of those people who thinks the ban on birth control ought to go?”
“To tell you the truth, I never think about it.”
“Yes,” Jack O’Brien said. “Maybe that’s natural. In the old days, nuns never thought about birth control.” He rubbed the top of his head again, and sighed again, and looked back through the door of his store. It was empty and likely to stay that way, with the weather this bad. Brigit could practically see him making up his mind to close up and go home. “Listen,” he told her, “you get back up the hill from the library, you tell the good Sister how bad it is down here, all right?”
“All right.”
“The nuns have always been good for this town. In ’53 the lady who’s now your Reverend Mother General came right down to Hibernia Street in that big flowing habit they used to wear and hauled sandbags with her own two hands. The old Reverend Mother General opened the doors of the convent to anybody who needed shelter and half the town was up there before midnight. Caused a terrible fuss. Had to have something or the other reconsecrated.”
Brigit shifted uneasily under her umbrella. It really was raining very hard. The air itself was saturated, thick with wet. Brigit could feel the damp chill under her habit and inside her shoes.
“Well,” she said, “I’d better get going. Sister fusses so much when I get back too late.”
“Sister ought to fuss when you’re back late. It’s a form of protection.”
“I’m eighteen years old, Mr. O’Brien. I can take care of myself.”
“Hunh. Well. You try to do that for the rest of the day. I think I’ll pack it in and see how my Mary is getting along. You sure you don’t need an escort?”
“Positive.”
Jack O’Brien nodded, turned, and went back into his store.
Out on the sidewalk, Brigit Ann Reilly bit her lip, looked at the rain streaming past the edges of her umbrella, and wondered if she ought to go through with what she had agreed to do. Her sense of local geography was weak, so she couldn’t be sure, but she thought the place she was supposed to be going to was down near the river. If the river really was flooding, then what? She turned in the direction of the library and started to move, slowly, sloshing along the pavement as if she were wading in surf.
All around her, Maryville, New York—founded by Irish immigrants just after the Civil War and sustained by them for more than a 125 years since—was getting ready for St. Patrick’s Day. It was getting ready in ways that had nothing to do with the conscious will of the people living in it, too. There were so many deliberate things—like the polished ’57 Chevy Stu Morrissey kept on the roof of his body shop on Corrigan Street, wrapped now in green ribbons and sporting a larger-than-life-size leprechaun at the wheel—but what struck Brigit were the undeliberate ones. The rain and the thaw had done their work. Grass was sprouting in thick emerald green carpets on all the lawns. At the library, the border made of a deeper green plant Brigit didn’t know the name of had gone wild. It was at least half an inch taller than the grass beside it, and thick, and very dark. It reminded Brigit of a dust ruffle. She stared at it for a moment and shook her head.
If she had any sense, she would go right down to the bottom of the hill and in through the library doors, get her job done, and then go right on home. That was what she owed Sister Mary Scholastica and the Sisters of Divine Grace and the Catholic Church. It was called religious obedience and she had made a promise to practice it all the way back in September. The problem was, she no longer knew what religious anything meant any more. Ever since she had entered the convent, religion had been falling apart on her. Neila Connelly was always telling her it was a very bad sign, that it meant she had no vocation, but Brigit didn’t like to think that. She was one of those girls who had “always” wanted to be a nun, the way other girls “always” wanted to be mothers or ballet dancers or models. She couldn’t imagine herself doing anything else.
There was an old-fashioned lamppost at the intersection to Londonderry Street, where she would have to turn if she wanted to go on her extracurricular errand. It had been left standing by the town as a gesture to the “history” of Maryville, and festooned with green satin ribbons with gold harps and mock shillelaghs at their hearts. The ribbons were drooping in the rain and the harps were losing their gold. Brigit stopped beside the mess and looked first toward the library and then down Londonderry Street. Londonderry Street seemed to stretch out into fog and blackness, mysterious.
When she had set out from the Motherhouse this morning, Brigit had had a whole set of rationalizations. Her errand was important, maybe even a matter of life and death. Her errand would hurt nobody and take nothing away from the Sisters of Divine Grace. There wasn’t any reason not to bend the rules a little to help a friend. Now it struck her with particular force that it wasn’t the errand she was desperate to carry out, but the person who had asked her to do it that she was desperate to keep as a friend. Like most girls her age, Brigit would never have admitted to anyone that she was unsophisticated or naive—but she was both. She had grown up in a small town in New Hampshire where the rest of the population had been made up of people exactly like herself, except that some of them had been Protestants. Before coming to Maryville, she had never met an atheist or a Jew, never mind a really rich person or a really poor person or someone from an entirely different culture. Maryville hardly seemed the place to throw her into contact with things like that, but it had. In the process, it had taught her something that disturbed her greatly. In Maryville, all the things that weren’t supposed to matter—beauty and money, surface brilliance and superficial shine—actually did.