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

Do you know what that means?”
    “No, Reverend Mother. But it shouldn’t be any problem. The plans we’ve worked out will accommodate—”
    “I’m sure they will, Sister. I’m sure you’ve all been very efficient. There is absolutely no reason to tell the Archbishop about that. I’ve got him feeling thoroughly guilty. The Archdiocese is going to pay for the food.”
    “Ah,” Scholastica said.
    “Exactly,” Reverend Mother General said. “Now I’ve got more immediate matters on my mind. Have you looked out the window lately?”
    Technically, outside of Reverend Mother General’s office, there wasn’t much in the way of windows to look out of in this part of the Motherhouse. There were openings in the walls with glass in them, but they looked onto the courtyard and were sheltered by trellises and hanging vines. The hanging vines were of so venerable an age that their twisted stems were thick and matted enough to cut off any access to the sun, even in winter when they were denuded of leaves. At the moment, they weren’t even denuded of leaves. The thaw had been a kind of false spring,
    “I stick my head out every once in a while,” Scholastica said cautiously. “It’s raining very hard.”
    “It may be doing something worse than that. Were you alive in 1953?”
    “No, Reverend Mother, as a matter of fact, I wasn’t.”
    “Of course, you weren’t,” Reverend Mother General said. “You’re only thirty-six. Well, I was not only alive, I was assistant to the Mistress of Novices in this house—that was in the days when we needed assistants. Anyway, there was a flood. You may have heard about it.”
    “I have, Reverend Mother. I’ve heard it was horrible.”
    “It was. Now, I’m not saying that what’s going on out there is going to be as bad as that, but there was a lot of snow and ice on the ground before the thaw, and now we’ve got all this rain and the river is rising. I’ve had a call from Father Doherty down at St. Andrew’s. They’re going to evacuate the whole neighborhood up to Iggy Loy as soon as possible. They need our vans.”
    “Yes, of course, Reverend Mother.”
    “They probably need our new gymnasium as well,” Reverend Mother General said. “Oh, what we couldn’t have done with that in ’53. We ended up putting cots and mattresses in the hallways of the cloister and the whole house had to be prayed over right and left when the waters receded. Silliest thing I ever heard of in my life. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that Vatican Two was an unqualified disaster. It wasn’t. Have you ever been part of a disaster relief team before?”
    “No, Reverend Mother.”
    “Sister Alice Marie has. She’ll know what to do. Go find her and get her up here, and in the meantime assign one of your postulants to monitor the weather reports. Uh—good grief, I’m becoming disorganized. Are you standing there like that for some reason, Sister? I thought I just asked you to go.”
    “Yes,” Scholastica said. “Yes, you did. The thing is—”
    “What?”
    Sister Scholastica had spent most of her life dealing with people like Reverend Mother General. She had wanted to be one from the time she was six or seven years old. She had certainly long gotten over the inclination to be intimidated by sharp eyes, black habits, and spines as straight as executioner’s swords.
    What was making it hard for her to speak was this: Less than ten minutes ago, she had been worried (and slightly annoyed) at the possibility that Brigit Ann Reilly might have done a bolt. She had called Jack O’Brien first at his shop and then at home. She had found out that Brigit had stopped in to say hello at just the usual time. Then she had called Glinda Daniels at the library and found out that Brigit hadn’t been there at all, although Glinda wouldn’t have seen her if she had been. Glinda had overslept. Scholastica had talked to the young woman who had been at the check-out desk in Glinda’s place. At that