Great Day for the Deadly Read Free Page A

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