Quoth the Raven (38 page)

“Forty-two,” he said out loud. “Maybe forty-five.”

He had been holding the phone again. Charlie said, “What?”

“Never mind,” Sam said. He thought he’d been saying it all morning. “I just want you to realize, before you go accepting that invitation, that the Sisters may have no idea they’re giving a reception.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about Cardinal Archbishops and Princes of the Church. Especially enthusiastic ones, and John O’Bannion certainly is one of those.”

“Are you saying you
won’t
go?”

“No, Charlie, I’m not saying I won’t go. I’m just saying you should let me check this thing out a little. Let me find out what the Sisters really want. I don’t care what John O’Bannion really wants. I don’t have to live with John O’Bannion.”

“But—”

“Trust me.”

The hesitation on the other end of the line was like a physical entity. Charlie didn’t trust him, and Sam didn’t blame him. Sam knew he had never been particularly trustworthy. Finally, though, Charlie sighed, and Sam knew he had won the point, at least for the moment.

“All right,” Charlie said. “But Sam, this thing has a deadline on it. March 1. Get back to me before then or I’ll accept in your name and stick you with it.”

“Right.”

“I mean it, Sam.”

“I said right.”

“You never take me seriously,” Charlie said.

There was a sharp click in Sam’s ear—sharp enough to make Sam wince—and then the phone went to dial tone. Sam put the receiver back in the cradle and sighed. He had been hanging onto the telescope for the whole of his last series of exchanges with Charlie, but it hadn’t done much good. Between the rain and the bright green budding caused by the thaw that had allowed the rain and the crazy way Maryville went about celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, Sam had been able to keep her car in sight only sporadically. He kept getting fuzzed out by pouring water or blocked by leaves and plastic decorations. He hadn’t trained the telescope on the hill below him before. Now that he had, he seriously wondered if the people of Maryville took drugs in preparation for their celebration of the seventeenth. They seemed to have swarmed up here and stuck plastic shamrocks and little ceramic shillelaghs to every branch.

At the very bottom of the hill, the bright red Saab shot out of the trees, turned left onto Londonderry Street and raced out of sight. Sam kept the telescope trained on the place where she had disappeared, thinking. He hadn’t realized how good it was, how clearly he could see what was down there. His picture of Londonderry Street and Clare Avenue and Diamond Place was so clear, he could have been watching them on television. He watched a garbage truck rumble down Clare Avenue on its way to the warehouse on the river. He followed a pair of old men moving from store window to store window on this lower end of Londonderry Street. Then he saw a very curious thing. The buildings on Diamond Place were all abandoned. Sometimes in the summer they were claimed by drifters and by bums, but in the winter they were always empty. Up here it didn’t do to try to live without central heat. Since Diamond Place didn’t lead anywhere, it was possible for that short street to go months at a time without any human presence. Now, though, it quite definitely had one. Sam saw her turn off Clare Avenue and head up toward the worst of the abandoned buildings, the ones at the end whose front walls seemed to be coming down. Sam recognized her clothes, too. She was one of those nuns-in-training from the Sisters of Divine Grace, a postulant, with a long black dress and a black thing on her head that wasn’t exactly a veil. She was walking swiftly, as if she knew where she was going, and so intently she seemed not to notice the rain. When she got to the barrier of the dead end, she stopped, looked closely at the buildings on either side of her, and nodded at one. Then she climbed its steps, opened its door, and disappeared.

I wonder if the other nuns know what she’s doing, Sam thought. They’re crazy if they let her go into a place like that by herself. He had half a mind to pick up the phone again and call someone at the Motherhouse, to let them know what was going on. Then he told himself he was being nosy, and he hated nosy people. Nuns had to be trained to deal with all kinds of places and all kinds of people. They were supposed to help the poor. What he’d just seen could have been some kind of educational exercise.

He turned the telescope away from Diamond Place and tried to fix it on the library, where She worked. He couldn’t do it. The library was deep into the valley, on one of the lowest plots of land in town. The best he could do was catch a flash of the dark green border of its lawn. He folded the telescope up, sat back, and found his cigarette burned to a cylinder of ash in his ashtray.

Glinda Daniels. That was her name. Glinda Daniels. Sam wondered if her mother had been obsessed with the movie or the book, if she’d been named for the Good Witch of the North or of the South. He refused to believe that her mother had been obsessed with Billie Burke.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1991 by Jane Haddam

cover design by Heather Kern

ISBN 978-1-4532-9310-2

This 2013 edition distributed by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.mysteriouspress.com

www.openroadmedia.com

FROM MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA

Available wherever ebooks are sold

FIND OUT MORE AT

WWW.MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

FOLLOW US:

@emysteries
and
Facebook.com/MysteriousPressCom

MysteriousPress.com is one of a select group of publishing partners of Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.