Great Day for the Deadly Read online

  “The thing is,” Don Bollander told her, “now that Margaret Finney has been beatified, the nuns on the hill there will probably begin running a campaign to collect evidence of miracles that have occurred because of Margaret Finney’s intercession. That’s what they have to have to get Margaret Finney canonized. Evidence of miracles after her death.”

  “Yes, Don, I know.”

  “Well, think about it. Miracles. Here. Pilgrims. The town full of people even in the winter. It could be—a bonanza.”

  “A bonanza,” Miriam repeated.

  “Of course. We just have to manage the publicity. We could get our people in New York right on it. The Sisters would probably welcome the help.”

  “Help, Don? What kind of help do you want us to give them?”

  “I told you. Publicity help. And maybe other kinds. Maybe we could build a shrine on one of the properties we own out on Clare Avenue or Diamond Place. God only knows we aren’t doing anything with the stuff out there anyway. It’s falling down.”

  “It’s probably being washed out to sea, at the moment. Look at this rain.”

  “I wasn’t talking about the rain.” Now Don looked not only hurt, but angry. He always got angry when his more ridiculous ideas weren’t taken seriously. “I’ve been working on this all night, Miriam. I really have. It’s not a stupid way to go about things. This is going to make the news around here any minute now. It’s going to be all over this part of New York State.”

  Miriam hauled herself out of her chair, walked to her window, and looked out at the rain. It was ten minutes after ten in the morning. Two stories below her, sheltered under the broad black expanse of a nunly umbrella, one of the postulants from St. Mary of the Hill was making her way along Londonderry Street. Miriam knew it was a postulant because of the shoes and the ankles. Nuns and postulants and novices all wore the same shoes, but only postulants showed their ankles. Miriam wondered who it was and what she was doing here. The Sisters of Divine Grace were a very conservative order. You rarely saw any of them wandering around town on their own.

  Miriam raised her head a little and looked into the parking lot across the street. She owned that parking lot, just as she owned every building on this block, but she wasn’t interested in the condition of it or the business it was doing. She had a maintenance department to keep track of the condition and an accounting office to keep track of the business. What she wanted to see was whether the bright red Jaguar XKE was still parked along the east wall, which it was. She didn’t expect it to be there for long. When she asked herself if she expected Josh to be with her for long, she didn’t come up with an answer. The proposition should have been straightforward. It made her a little crazy that it wasn’t. Josh was a young man without skills and without prospects. He had his body and his docility to sell, and he could get a good price for it or a bad. Miriam thought she had given him a very good price for it, and that that should be enough. Millions of young women had made the same bargain over the centuries and managed to keep up their end of it. Why should it be any different for men?

  Out on Londonderry Street, the postulant was slipping out of sight in the direction of the river. Across the way at the edge of the parking lot, the back door to Madigan’s Dry Goods swung open and let out a slight figure in a bright blue slicker. Her name was Ann-Harriet Severan and she had hair almost as brightly red as the slicker was blue. Miriam knew that even though the hair was invisible under a thick plastic rain hat, just as she knew that Ann-Harriet wore size seven narrow shoes and size twelve dresses. It was all contained in the private detective’s report she had commissioned over a month ago. Ann-Harriet stopped at the side of the Jaguar, fumbled in her pockets, and came up with the key. For a moment, she seemed to be frozen in contemplation, maybe of the postulant still making her way in the rain out of Miriam’s sight. Whatever it was didn’t hold her attention long. Ann-Harriet shook her head, rubbed the key dry on the lining of her slicker, and then opened the Jaguar up. Seconds later, the exhaust began to belch white smoke and the windshield wipers began to sweep and pulse. The Jaguar had cost $92,528, not including tax. Miriam had bought it for Josh on his last birthday. She had bought him other things during their time together, including a menagerie that had once held a lion and now kept an eclectic collection that ranged from a llama to snakes, but Josh had shown no inclination to share that with Ann-Harriet Severan.

  Miriam turned away from the window, went back to her desk and sat down. “Don,” she said, “do you know what it takes to get a miracle accepted by the Catholic Church?”

  “What it takes? Why should it take anything? I thought the Church wanted miracles.”

  “I don’t know if it does or not,” Miriam said. “In a case like this, where there is a chance of canonization, once a miracle has been claimed, Rome will send an investigator. Rome may send several. One or more than one, it doesn’t matter, because if there’s more than one, they’ll be clones. Priests, of course, and very well educated priests. Priests who don’t believe in miracles.”

  “I didn’t think that was allowed,” Don said stiffly. “Priests who don’t believe in miracles.”

  “All Catholics are required to believe in the miracles attributed to Christ and his apostles in the Gospels and any other miracles directly asserted in Scripture. Beyond that, they aren’t required to believe in miracles at all. The Church doesn’t declare miracles to be authentic. It merely declares that belief in the miraculous nature of certain events is not contrary to reason—meaning they’ve investigated the event and can explain it in no other way—and not contrary to faith. That’s it. Not real, just not contrary.”

  “But Lourdes—”

  “What about Lourdes? The Church has declared three specific healings to be ‘not immediately explicable in any other way’ and belief in the intercession of Mary in those cases and in the appearance of Mary to Bernadette to be ‘not contrary to faith.’ Just three, Don, in over a hundred years. And any Catholic who wants to is free to think that even those three are a lot of superstitious bunk and that Bernadette herself was an hysterical girl who was seeing things that weren’t there.”

  “I don’t see—”

  “I do.” Miriam hauled herself to her feet again, she didn’t know why. Ever since she had been absolutely sure of the affair between Josh and Ann-Harriet Severan, she had been restless. It bothered her, because the only other time she had ever been restless in the same way was when she was waiting for her father to die. Then she had had a perfectly sensible reason to be restless. Only after her father’s death had she been able to make her move to take control of the Bank. The old chauvinist fool would never have allowed it. If he’d realized what she’d intended to do, he would never have left her the stock that made it possible for her to do it. This thing with Josh was an entirely different matter. If he proved unsatisfactory he could always be fired—meaning divorced. If a boy toy was really what she required at this stage in her life, she could always find another one. She had picked Josh up in a bar in Corfu. Greece was a good place for things like that.

  She went back to the window, looked down into the empty parking lot, and frowned. She had to get control of herself. She was beginning to think like an Irishwoman, and that could end in blood.

  “Don,” she said, “pay attention. I remember the campaign to have Elizabeth Ann Seton canonized.”

  “And?”

  “And you want to push but you don’t want to push too hard. Pushing too hard holds things up. Like with this business in Yugoslavia. There’s been too much publicity. Rome is dragging its feet.”

  “Having Margaret Finney declared a saint would be very good for the town,” Don said.

  “Yes,” Miriam said, “I agree with you. It would also be very good for the Sisters, and we all owe a great deal to the Sisters. Just—go easy, will you please? Try not to jinx this thing.”

  “Jinx it,” Don repeated. He looked disapproving, with his mouth clamped into a thin line, but he often looked that way w
hen there was nothing wrong with him but a little indigestion. Maybe he had indigestion all the time. He was a holdover from that interim time between her father’s death and her successful coup, and she had only kept him on because he was accommodating. In fact, he seemed to have no sense of what a job description should entail at all. No matter what she asked him to do—no matter how bizarre or how unrelated to work—he did it.

  She went back to her desk again, and sat down again, and rubbed her face with her hands. She was pacing, like the heroine of a bad forties “women’s” picture.

  “On your way out, tell Julie to tell Kevin Hale I’m going out for a couple of hours. We were supposed to have a meeting about that glitch in the computer system we haven’t got straightened out yet.”

  “Are you sure it is a glitch in the computer system? I was thinking about it last week, you know. It just might be that what we’ve got here is a theft.”

  “It certainly looks like a theft,” Miriam sighed, “a really clumsy theft. The mistake sticks out a mile. Still, with the bank examiners coming in on the fifth, we’ve got to keep on top of it. I hate to put off this meeting, but there’s something I have to do. Just tell Julie to tell Kevin I’ll be gone and I’ll get back to him when I can.”

  “All right. But I hear rumors, Miriam. I hear that that mistake can be traced straight back to Ann-Harriet Severan’s desk.”

  “It can’t be traced back to anybody’s desk at the moment.”

  “If you say so. But you’re much too trusting, Miriam. That’s the problem with women in business. They don’t know what kind of absolute moral cesspools most people really are.”

  Absolute moral cesspools, Miriam thought, closing her eyes as Don went out the door. She just wished that most people were absolute moral cesspools. It would make them far more interesting than what they really were, which was not much of anything. It amazed her sometimes, just how wishy-washy and unimpressive people could be.

  She got her thermos of tea out of her bottom left hand drawer and stood up to stuff it into the deep pocket of her cashmere coat. She had a good five minutes or so before she had to leave. She decided to use the time to think herself into another place, or maybe another century. A place where a woman, betrayed by a man as Josh had betrayed her, would resort to murder as a matter of course.

  There had probably never been such a place or such a century, but Miriam always wished there were.

  [3]

  SAMUEL XAVIER HARRIGAN WAS an Irishman who had been raised in Scotland, educated in England, and brought to the pinnacle of his career in places like Borneo. He had built his precut cedar log house halfway up an Adirondack mountain on the west side of Maryville because he wanted to spend his free time in a place where there was snow. At least that was what he told people, especially media people. When the silly, skinny girls came out from Time and TV Guide, he couldn’t help himself. Samuel Xavier Harrigan had a reputation as a wild man. He was big and his white hair was shaggy, although not particularly long. He had a sheepskin lined winter jacket and a thick-timbred baritone voice that tended to roar. He had once eaten roast grubs with chicory and chives on the Public Broadcasting System. He could have told them he came up here to commune with the spirits of reincarnated squirrels and gotten them to believe.

  The truth was somewhat more prosaic. Years ago, when Sam had been nothing more than a decently respected herpetologist with enormous stage presence and an even more enormous appetite for a good time, his best friend from Oxford had come up here to teach at one of the local universities. He had also come up here to die. This was back in 1980, before anybody really knew what AIDS was, but AIDS was what James had—and once Sam did know something about it, he wasn’t particularly surprised. James had always put the lie to the Oxford stereotype of the homosexual as effete. James had always been a rip, and he remained a rip until very nearly the end. In the meantime, Sam built the house, kept him company, and tried to write a book. James always said Sam would have been perfect if he could get over this thing about wanting to go to bed with girls.

  After James was gone, Sam could have moved onto something more—well—suitable, but he hadn’t wanted to. James died in 1984, and by then Sam was already on PBS, cooking wild dandelion greens over an open fire in the Scottish highlands. The Fearless Epicure had been born and was about to go into a growth spurt. In 1985, the schedule would include wild goat with thistles in Albania, buffalo in a prairie grass shell in Montana, and stewed carpenter ants in Mozambique. Summer of Love Productions, the company that funded him, didn’t care what Sam did as long as he didn’t cook anything that was endangered. He just kept on getting wilder and wilder, farther and farther out, until he got tired for the season and decided to come home. Every once in a while he thought about moving, and then he thought how stupid that would be. The Rocky Mountains were full of people who did the kind of thing he did. So were New Mexico and southern California. So, God help him, was Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Sometimes it seemed like the Adirondack Mountains were the only place in America that hadn’t been invaded by television. Sam Harrigan definitely wanted to stay in America. He thought his reasons were too complicated to explain to Americans, but he wanted to stay.

  At eleven o’clock on the morning of Thursday, February 21, he wanted to get dry. He had been sitting on his screened porch since seven thirty, watching the rain come down and no one at all come out of the little house halfway down the hill. He had been worried about his animals. Most of them hibernated and their schedules had been thrown way off by this false spring. His red panda was agitated and tearful. His lizards were jumpy and upset. His snakes seemed to have disappeared. He was worried about the little house down the hill, too, and the person who lived there. It was much too late for nobody to have come out. Worst of all, for the last ten minutes he’d had his ear glued to the telephone. Charlie Wicklow was calling up from Boston, steamed up in that underpowered WASP way of his about something or other. Charlie Wicklow was Sam’s agent,

  “All I want from you,” Charlie was saying, “is a promise that you’ll at least not offend anybody. Especially not the Cardinal Archbishop of Colchester. And especially not in public in front of half the town of Maryville.”

  “I don’t know the Cardinal Archbishop of Colchester,” Sam said reasonably. “Maryville is used to me. Is that the back door?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” As it turned out, it was nothing. Sam was sitting watching the little house down the hill. He’d thought for a moment that he’d seen movement there, finally, after a thoroughly dead day. It bothered him. She always left for work between seven thirty and eight, Monday through Friday, without fail. He didn’t know what she did at night—he didn’t watch her at night—but whatever it was it never kept her out to the next day. Or it hadn’t, until now. Sam rubbed his knuckles against the stubble on his chin and fretted. Maybe she’d found a man she wanted to see. Maybe she’d decided to move in with him. Why hadn’t he made his move before this, when he still had a chance?

  “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 b
e 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.