Great Day for the Deadly Read Free

had shifted in the mid-sixties, she had made sure she was always exceptionally thin. It was too bad she never wanted to retire. There were days when all she wanted was to sit down in front of a table full of hot fudge sundaes and eat.
    Don Bollander had passed beyond foot shifting to hopping. He was getting positively apoplectic. Miriam sat forward, took a deep breath, and dragged herself into the present. Don Bollander’s present.
    “All right,” she said. “Lourdes.”
    Don Bollander looked hurt. He was a tall, abstemious-looking man who always wore a very bad toupee. When he looked hurt, his lips swelled.
    “I’m only trying to look out for the interests of the company,” he said. “The company has a lot invested in local real estate.”
    “I own half the town. Say what you mean.”
    “I am saying what I mean,” Don said. “Do you know anything about the process by which people are made saints in the Catholic Church?”
    “I know a little.” Miriam knew a lot. She had attended parochial school right here in Maryville, then the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Noroton, then Manhattanville in the days when it was still a Catholic college. Her early life had been a paradigm of the proper upbringing for a rich Catholic girl.
    “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