Authors: Jane Haddam

True Believers (42 page)

BOOK: True Believers

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“But not the last time you saw her.”

Mrs. Kelly got another beer bottle out of the six-pack box on the floor and opened it with a can opener. Gregor found himself wondering why she bought bottles instead of cans. “The last time I saw her,” she said with deliberate slowness, “the priest was gone and she was going into her own damned trailer, which was always as clean as a hospital. Maybe nobody killed her at all. Maybe she killed herself from all the cleaning stuff she had in that place. It's poison, most of it. It's worse than cyanide.”

“Maybe,” Gregor said.

“She wasn't sick the last time I saw her,” Mrs. Kelly said. “She was walking just fine, like there was never anything wrong with her. I always thought she put it all on, with the diabetes and all that. I always thought she was going to stage a miraculous cure one day and say she saw the Virgin Mary. You know what I'm talking about?'

“Maybe,” Gregor said, but he only said it because he was afraid that if he said no she would try to explain. He looked at Garry and Lou and nodded. The trailer door was still open, and cold air was still pouring in. Lou had gathered up the cockroaches and killed them.

“Right,” Garry said, suddenly perky. “Well, Mrs. Kelly, thank you for your time. With any luck, we won't have to bother you again.”

They were out of there so fast, Gregor found himself facing Mrs. Kelly on his own in no time at all.

It was not a comfortable moment.

SIX

When the “exorcism” was over, Sister Scholastica went back to St. Anselm's convent and sat in the single small chair in her own room, with the chair pulled up to the window so that she could look out. It was not what she should have been doing. At the very least, she should have been at her own desk in her own office, so that anyone who needed her could consult her aboutâthings. She didn't have much she could have told them. She didn't know why she and the Sisters had participated in that charade, set up by the Cardinal Archbishop. At base, she supposed, it was mostly anger, because she was so sick and tired of Roy Phipps and his posturing and the way it all intruded on her life. Still, there were a thousand things she ought to be doing, about the school, about the parish, about the Sisters she had been sent to take care of. Mary McAllister's request papers were sitting on her green felt desk blotter, waiting for her to put them into shape and send them to upstate New York. Reverend Mother General would be waiting for them. Sister Scholastica couldn't make herself do anything but look out the window and wonder what Roy Phipps was doing now. She had expected him to have some kind of reaction that would be both public and dramatic. Instead, the street was so quiet, it might as well have been deserted.

In this order, Sisters did not have clocks in their rooms, unless they were serving as bell ringer, which Sister Scholastica never did. They did have watches, but Scholastica hadn't turned on the light when she came in, and in the deepening dusk she found it impossible to look at hers. Outside, the streetlights had begun to glow, faintly, against the failing light.
She always thought of February as the deepest part of winter. She forgot that it was really a time when the light had begun to return to the early evenings. She wished she could see beyond the courtyard to the street itself. If Roy Phipps wasn't doing something to mark the exorcism, maybe the people of St. Anselm's were, or the men of St. Stephen's. She wished she knew, for certain, how she felt about the entire question of homosexuality. It wasn't enough to know what the Church said and to believe that the Church was bound to be rightâthat the Church was right, really, when it came to questions of faith and morals. Right and wrong were not the issue here. She wanted to know what she
felt
, and every time she tried to get to the bottom of that, she stumbled over a pit of confusion. She didn't know how she felt. She didn't know what she thought. She only knew that she wished she could stop obsessing about it, and both St. Stephen's and Roy Phipps stood in the way of that.

When the courtyard outside was dark enough so that she could no longer see the grass, Sister Scholastica got up and put on her cloak. Somebody else might have called it a cape, which it was, technically. It was black and had a rounded collar like a raincoat's, with slits at the sides near the slash pocket openings for her hands to come through. She buttoned the top four buttons and let it go at that. The cloak had buttons going all the way down, but she had never seen anybody use all of them. She left her room and went down the convent stairs, listening for the sounds of Sisters in the parlor or the kitchen. She heard nothing, which possibly made sense. It was likely to be much earlier than she thought it was. They were probably all over at the chapel for Office, or maybe even in the cafeteria.

When she got to the convent's front door she went out, and then across the courtyard and around the side of the church to the street. St. Anselm's was lit up for the evening, its front doors propped open so that the homeless men and women Father Healy had been so meticulous about admitting would be admitted still. There was no way to know if the new priest, brought in from God only knew where, would maintain the practice. When they released the body from the medical examiner's office, it would lie in its plain pine casket in front of this altar. Father Healy's family would come in from wherever
they lived in suburban Philadelphia. She thought about going in and looking at the attarâwhy?âand then she passed by down the street on the St. Anselm's side. St. Stephen's was lit up, too, but, as usual, it looked far more deserted than St. Anselm's ever did. Far more deserted and far less chaotic. There was something concrete she could hold on to. In a church whose parishioners were mostly gay men, life was far less chaotic.

She thought she was going all the way down the two-block stretch to Roy Phipps's church, although she had no idea why, but when she was halfway there, she found herself stopping in front of Edith Lawton's house. It was dark, except for a light way in the back on the first floor that Scholastica assumed must be the kitchen, or a room just off the kitchen. All the town houses in this neighborhood were alike. She looked at the door and the steps in front of it, but they were no different than the doors and steps in front of any of the other houses on the street. She looked at the narrow driveway to her left and saw that it was empty of cars. Either everybody was out, or whoever was in didn't drive. Then she wondered what it was she was looking for. Everybody in the neighborhood knew that Edith Lawton made a profession of being an atheist. Were there symbols that atheists hung on their doors, the way Christians hung crosses? Scholastica shook her head slightly and backed away from the door. The cloak was heavy but not as effective against the cold as she wished it could be.

She intended to turn around and go back up the street to St. Anselm's, or, if she were still feeling restless, down a little farther to look at Roy Phipps's place once and for all. Instead, she went down the short drive and around to the side of Edith Lawton's house. From there, she could see even more light. It looked as if whatever was lit was some kind of sunroom. She went farther to the back and pushed against the door of the high wooden fence. It slid open without protest. If it were meant to be some kind of security, it was woefully underused. She stepped through the fence and into the backyard and looked around. The ground was mostly taken up with paving bricks. At the far end of it, there was a brick barbecue that looked blackened and worn in the light that spilled out of the back windows. The overhead security light was not on. Past
the wooden fence at the back, the nearest neighbor's house was absolutely dark.

I should turn around and go home, Scholastica thought. What am I doing here?

She went farther around to the back again. The windows were indeed to some kind of sunroom. It jutted off the kitchen like a wooden rendition of a sugar cube, and there was enough light coming from inside it to have served adequately as illumination for major surgery. There was light in the kitchen beyond, too, but with both the overhead and the desk lamp lit to full in the sunroom that hadn't been immediately apparent. Scholastica pulled her arms inside her cloak and held them against her body, hesitating. She most certainly ought to go home. She just didn't want to.

She went to the door of the sunroom and tried it, telling herself that if it didn't open she would take it as a sign from God that she ought to turn around and go straight back to her convent. It opened easily and without complaint. She stepped into the sunroom and looked around. The computer was on and set to a word processing program and a file entitled “The Evils of Public Piety.” Behind the computer, there were piles of papers that looked like manuscripts and another pile that seemed to be copies of a single magazine. That pile had a huge black glass cat sitting on top of it as a paperweight, so that all Scholastica could read of the title was
Free Think
.

She turned away from the computer and went into the kitchen. There was nobody there, either, and for the first time since she had begun this nonsense she began to feel ashamed of herself. What was she doing, breaking into somebody's house, and especially this somebody, who would surely make a fuss about it if she were ever to discover it? Scholastica could see the headlines now, from the pages of everything from the
Philadelphia Inquirer
to the specialty atheist magazines.
The Housebreaking Nun. Sister Home Invader
.

The hall next to the kitchen was dark. Scholastica turned on the light at the switch just outside the kitchen door and looked down into the dining room and the living room. Then she went down to the dining room and turned the light on there, too. On the dining-room table there was a copy of the
Vanity Fair
that had the interview with Bennis Hannaford in
it. She went through the dining room and into the living room and stopped.

For some time now, she had known she was not alone in the house, but she hadn't been able to put her finger on why. Now she understood. She could hear breathing, heavy, labored breathing, as if somebody with emphysema had fallen asleep. She felt around on the walls closest to her for a light switch, but found nothing. She reached out to see if her hand would hit a lamp on the floor or on a table, but found nothing of that, either. Finally, she just moved forward, toward the breathing, thinking that if she could just find out who was here and where they were, she could get them to tell her where the lights were.

“Hello?” she said.

All that answered her was yet more breathing. She moved forward inch by inch and then her shins hit a low table. She bent down and put her hands on the table's surface and leaned across it. The breathing was closer now, but just as labored.

“Hello,” she said again.

Her eyes had adjusted to the lack of light just enough for her to know that somebody was lying on the couch. She put her hands out to touch whoever it was, to shake them awakeâ

âand then the lights went on.

They went on right over her head, so that she was blinded for a moment, and stumbled. She would have fallen if she hadn't felt so desperately that she mustn't do any such thing. A moment later, the form on the couch began to come clear. It was a man, apparently fast asleep, bound hand and foot and mouth in masking tape. Scholastica had the sudden, inexplicable urge to laugh out loud. What else could you do in this situation but laugh out loud? She even knew who the man was. She'd seen him a dozen times. It was Ian Holden, the lawyer for the archdiocese, but he was wearing a shirt and no trousers and he had on green argyle socks.

“Turn around,” somebody said.

Scholastica turned, and saw that Edith Lawton was standing over her, holding a gun pointed more or less in her general direction. The more or less was important. Edith Lawton was shaking, and every time she inhaled the gun wobbled in her hands. Scholastica wasn't afraid at all. She almost felt as if she were playing a part in a soap opera. The scene felt unreal,
and was unreal, and nothing Edith Lawton did from here on out could change that.

“Go and sit down in the chair,” Edith Lawton said.

“I don't think so,” Scholastica said.

“Go and sit down in the chair or I'll shoot you,” Edith Lawton said. “I should have shot him, you know. I could do it right now.”

“I don't think so,” Scholastica said again.

Then she took three large steps across the room to where Edith Lawton was and took the gun out of the woman's hand.

“You can't shoot a gun when the barrel's open,” she said gently, chucking the two bullets still left in the chambers into her hand. “What's the matter with him? Does he have a concussion?”

“He's a thief. I hit him on the head.”

“He's probably got a concussion. He looks all right, though. We ought to call him a doctor. Do you have emergency numbers next to your phone?”

“There's another one,” Edith Lawton said. “In my bedroom. He's awake, though. I'll bet he doesn't have a concussion.”

Sister Scholastica blinked. “Another one? Another man? You've got another man tied up in this house?”

“He's my husband. Will. He came in and Iâ” Edith Lawton looked around, confused. “It isn't fair. Did I tell you that? It isn't fair. But I couldn't do anything about it. And I wanted them both to stop yelling at me. So I hit them on the head. What do you think of that?”

Sister Scholastica thought Edith Lawton had had a psychotic break, but she didn't say it. She put the gun in the pocket of her habit and nodded toward the stairs.

“Let's go,” she said. “Let's get the other one, and call the ambulance, and sit down and talk. I think you're going to be in a lot of trouble.”

Bennis Hannaford had wanted her brother Christopher to come to Philadelphia by plane. After all, what sane person came to Philadelphia from California any other way? Christopher had had another way, one that involved going to New York first
and seeing some people and coming on by Amtrak from Penn Station, and now Bennis was standing next to a long bench in the train station, wondering where all the homeless people came from. She wasn't unaware that some people were homeless. She'd written an op-ed about it for the
New York Times
, and several times a year she forked over a significant amount of cash for one of Father Tibor's relief funds. What bothered her was how the homeless seemed to congregate in some places rather than others. There were none living on Cavanaugh Street, or on any of the blocks near it, but here there seemed to be dozens, and the police were making it clear that they were barely welcome. Or worse. Bennis wrapped her arms around her body and paced back and forth in front of the ticket booths, listening to the sound of her clogs on the hard floor under her feet. Once, after one of her novels had been chosen for Oprah's Book Club, she had been recognized in this station, and approached, too. It was the only time in her life she had ever been asked for an autograph on something besides one of her own books. She didn't expect to be approached today. She had a feeling that she didn't look anything like herself today. Her hair, thick and wild and as black as a little help from L'Oreal could make it, felt flat against her head. Her body felt four inches shorter than it normally was, and she wasn't tall by anybody's measure. “Bennis Hannaford,” somebody had once said, “is the sort of person who glows in the dark.” Bennis was fairly sure she didn't glow in the dark at the moment. She barely had wattage in reflected light.

There was a newspaper vending machine against a wall near the benches. The paper was full of the death of Father Robert Healy. It even had a picture of St. Anselm's Roman Catholic Church on the front page, in badly tinted color. It bothered Bennis a little to realize that she thought of this as good luck. Four murders on Baldwin Place meant that Anne Marie's story had almost ceased to exist as far as the media were concerned. This was not turning into a circus, the way the execution of Karla Faye Tucker had. On the other hand, maybe it couldn't have. Anne Marie was no Karla Faye Tucker, except maybe in bloody viciousness. Anne Marie was not a creature of the camera, and nobody in her half-long life had ever called her attractive. Anne Marie, the ugly one. Anne
Marie, the stupid one. Anne Marie, the one without prospects.

I'm losing my mind, Bennis thought, and then people began streaming out into the waiting room from the tall archways that led to the trains. There were a lot of themâwhy were so many people coming to Philadelphia on this particular day?âand it wasn't until they were almost all gone that she saw Christopher, still as tall and lean as a caricature, carrying a large leather grip in one hand and wearing his sports jacket open. That was all he had, a sports jacket, made of camel's hair, with a sweater under it. The sweater was probably cashmere, but Bennis didn't see how that was supposed to help. He was going to freeze to death.

“Hey,” she said, when she came up next to him.

He dropped his grip on the floor and gave her a hug. This was something he had picked up in California: hugs.

“Hey to you,” he said.

“Why didn't you bring a coat?” she asked him. “It's minus nine out there.”

“We don't have minus nine in Santa Barbara. Don't worry about it. If I get too uncomfortable, I'll buy something to wear. How's Lida?”

“At home. Cooking you something.”

“Excellent.”

“Are you going to stay over there this trip?”

Christopher picked up his grip. “I think it's the only sensible thing, don't you? I mean, not only do I want to, but from what I gather your life is not exactly solitary any longer. Not that it was ever really solitary. You know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean. Are you going to go up there for the execution?”

“No,” Christopher said. “That I definitely am not going to do. But Teddy is.”

“You talked to him.”

“He says your phone is unlisted. I didn't give him the number. I figured you didn't want me to. I talked to Bobby, too, by the way. He's out of jail.”

“And living on the Main Line,” Bennis said, turning so that they could start the long walk to the front doors and to find a cab. She could have brought her car, but she hadn't. She'd been feeling far too distracted to drive. “Trust funds are forever,” she said. “You've got to wonder what Bobby was thinking.
If he thinks. And no. I don't want to talk to Teddy.”

“I didn't either, but I got stuck. He called the station. Look, what about you? Are you all right? We've had some news out west about this thing your boyfriend is involved inâ”

“Oh, for God's sake,” Bennis said. “Don't call Gregor my boyfriend.”

“Whatever. The thing is, I figure by now it doesn't upset you when he gets caught up in this stuff, so I wasn't worried about that. But I was worried about the other thing. About Anne Marie. Did you ever get to see her?”

“No.” Bennis bit her lip. “Gregor saw her. He went up there yesterday.”

“Without you?”

“She didn't ask for me,” Bennis said. “He got in touch with her lawyer to, you know, see if he could get her to talk to me, but in the end she only wanted to talk to him.”

“Did he tell you what she said?”

“No. But I have a feeling that it was really nasty. If it wasn't nasty, he probably would have told me. If you see what I mean.”

They were out on the street. Bennis had no idea how they had gotten there. In the however-long-it-was since she had been waiting at the station, it had gotten dark again. Why was it that this February it was almost always dark? Daytime was supposed to happen sometimes. She was sure it was. At the very least, there were supposed to be a couple of hours of sunlight in the morning. Maybe she slept through it. Maybe that was the explanation. She was getting a migraine.

Christopher was getting a cab. It was as true in Philadelphia as it was anywhere else. A good-looking white man in expensive clothes could get cabs to appear out of thin air. One of them pulled up at the curb next to them, and Christopher leaned forward to open the door for her.

“Cavanaugh Street,” he told the driver. “It'sâ”

“I know where it is,” the driver said.

Bennis climbed in and slid as far over toward the opposite door as she could. The cab's seats were torn and grimy. The window between the backseat and the front had had so much dirt ground into it for so long, it would never again be able to be clean. Christopher got in and closed the door beside him.
His legs were so long they didn't really fit in the back of the cab.

“Anyway,” Bennis said.

Christopher held out his hand and let Bennis put hers into it. It made her feel as if she were nine years old again, and her father was downstairs, screaming, threatening, promising death and destruction, if she didn't immediately change everything about herself and apologize while she wasn't doing it.

“Do you think it's inherited?” she asked. “Schizophrenia is inherited. Maybe this is, too. Psychopathy. Sociopathy. Whatever.”

“I don't know.”

“We certainly have a lot of them in this family, though, don't you think? Not just Anne Marie. Bobby. And Teddy. Sometimes it seems to me that most of the normal ones are dead.”

“I think that if you haven't been drinking, you ought to start. You can't do this to yourself, Bennis. It isn't your fault. It isn't even your responsibility.”

“I helped them catch her,” Bennis said. “That's my fault.”

“And what was the alternative? To leave her running around loose? She'd already killed three people, and the next on the list was you, and you must know that. Demarkian must have told you that. I mean, hell, you were there.”

Bennis looked out her window. Stores were going by, their windows lit but empty-looking all the same. She was wearing a heavy wool jacket, but she was cold.

“Gregor says that poisoners are particular kinds of people,” she said. “They'reâthey're psychologically different. People who murder with guns and knives tend to be angry. Either they're angry right at the moment and they go off like bombs, or they're really furious and have been for a long time and it gets obsessional. Gregor says that to kill with a gun or a knife in anger, you're looking to avenge yourself or somebody else. Even if that's not really real, it's what you think you're doing. Am I making any sense?”

“Some, yes. I just don't know what this is getting to.”

“Well,” Bennis said, “he said people who used poison were different. They weren't angry like that. They felt,” Bennis drummed her fingers against her knee. “It was like the gun and the knife murderers were angry in the explosive sense.
Something in particular happened and they got mad. But poisoners wereâresentful, rather than angry. That's the word. They believed that life should have been better for them, and it wasn't, so they believed they had the right to make it better by any means necessary. I'm getting this hopelessly messed up.”

“I don't think so,” Christopher said. “It sounds like Anne Marie, don't you think? I don't mean that our father was fair when he set his sons up with trust funds and didn't do the same for his daughters, but you and Emma and Myra never thought you had to kill to make up for it.”

“He also said that nobody ever really committed murder for religion,” Bennis said. “No, I know what you're going to say. I said it, too. But he meant this kind of murder. Anne Marie's kind of murder. And the ones he's investigating now. So I've been thinking about it, you know. I've been thinking about his case, because I guess it stops me from thinking about Anne Marie. And something occurred to me.”

“What?”

“Well, that there's only one person I can think of, of all the people he's told me about, that would fit the description. And it seems stupid to think so, because, you know, I don't know most of those people. I've never met them. But in this case there only seems to be one, but nothing he's said has given me any indication that he suspects that person. And I was wondering, you know, if some people have some kind of cosmic purpose, if they're fatedâ”

“Bennis?”

“Oh, hear me out, for once.”

“You're an agnostic and a skeptic. You don't believe in fate,” Christopher said.

“I believe that I don't want her to die,” Bennis said. “Anne Marie, I mean. I don't want them to execute her. I don't want them to execute anybody, but I especially don't want them to execute her, because she's my sister, and I don't care if she's a psychopath. Does that make any sense?”

“It makes about as much sense as anything else you've ever said. And we're at Cavanaugh Street. Let's get out of the cab.”

“Right,” Bennis said.

Cavanaugh Street looked ready for Valentine's Day. Donna's house was decorated to death. Even Holy Trinity Armenian
Christian Church had its front door wrapped in ribbons and bows. The cab had stopped on the curb outside her own apartment. Across the street, Lida's house was lit up in every window.

Bennis got out onto the sidewalk and let Christopher pay for the cab. When he was out, too, she crossed the street to Lida's side and waited for him to come after her.

“I don't want her to die,” she said, and then she buried her head in his chest the way she had once wished she was able to do with their father. It was, she thought, crazy the way that had turned out. Engine House, where they had all grown up, and their mother, and their father, and each day crazier than the last. Now she thought that she was going to freeze here on Cavanaugh Street. She would turn absolutely solid, and when she did they could put her body up on display in a public park.

“I don't want her to die,” she said again.

Christopher put his hand on her head and stroked her hair.

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