Great Day for the Deadly by Jane Haddam Read Free Book Online

Reilly’s best friend. Neila was worried, too.
    Scholastica was standing reasonably near the door. She leaned over, opened it wide, and stared across the hall at Reverend Mother General’s office. Hanging over the transom there was a bouquet of papier-mâché leprechauns sent up by the children at Iggy Loy. Taped to the wall next to the door was a shamrock cut out of white construction paper and plastered over with green glitter. There weren’t supposed to be any secular ornaments in that part of the convent considered part of the cloister—which this was—but somehow the rule always seemed to get relaxed around St. Patrick’s Day.
    Reverend Mother General had got up from behind her chair and gone to stand at her window. Scholastica could just see the back of her, stiff and straight and still as a wooden doll.
    “Just a minute,” Scholastica said to her postulants. “I want to talk to Reverend Mother now that she has a minute. Why don’t the bunch of you look at chapter five in the Merton again and we’ll discuss it when I get back.”
    “Can we talk?” Cara Fenster asked.
    “Yes,” Scholastica said. “Quietly. If you get loud enough for Sister Alice Marie to come in here, we’ll all be in trouble.”
    There was an outbreak of giggling again. Scholastica smiled indulgently at the pack of them, nodded encouragingly to the ever-more-worried Neila Connelly, and took off across the hall. Scholastica knew what Neila was thinking. The same thought had been bothering her. Brigit hadn’t been very happy here the last few months. That happened—girls came up and found out they just weren’t suited to the life—but when it did it was supposed to be hedged about by custom and ritual. There were things to be done and said and promised and performed when a girl left before the end of formation. The Order liked to keep in touch with girls like that. It even ran a kind of alumnae organization. Every once in a while, though, a girl would let her unhappiness get too deep and the pressure build up too high. Then one day, in the middle of everything, she would just snap. Snap, crackle, pop, Scholastica thought. A mile’s walk down to Exit 56 on Route 144. A thumb in the air. A ride to Colchester. Gone.
    Reverend Mother General had opened her window and was leaning out, into the rain. Scholastica knocked sharply on the open door and waited for her to turn around.
    “Oh, Sister,” Reverend Mother General said, when she did, “one of the people I wanted to see. Are you in the middle of a class?”
    “A formation class, Reverend Mother, yes.”
    “Sister Alice Marie is rehearsing the novices for the folk singing. Maybe I can send one of your postulants to get her. I’m afraid we’re going to have a very disrupted day.”
    “Your day has already been disrupted, Reverend Mother. I heard you on the phone to the Chancery.”
    “What? Oh. That. You know, Sister, the finances of this Order would be in a good deal worse shape than they are if John O’Bannion wasn’t such a pigheaded, arrogant old Irishman.”
    “Is that what he is?”
    “Don’t be ridiculous. You’ve known him most of your life. You know he is. Do you know what he pulled this time?”
    “No, Reverend Mother.”
    “Well, I’ll tell you. He decided that he had a wonderful idea. Margaret Finney had been beatified. He was going to come up here on St. Pat’s and say a Mass of petition for her canonization, give one of his great day for the Irish speeches and watch the town parade. It was the perfect time, the absolutely perfect time, for us to throw a party.”
    Scholastica was confused. “We are throwing a party, Reverend Mother. I had the postulants making posters about it all yesterday afternoon. We’re inviting their parents and the whole town.”
    “I know that,” Reverend Mother said, “and you know that, but John didn’t know it. He didn’t bother to call and ask, either. He just had that assistant of his send invitations to forty people.