The Death of Faith Read Free Page A

Suor’Immacolata, Brunetti realized, twenty when she arrived at the nursing home where his mother was, the age when most women are getting jobs, deciding on professions, meeting lovers, having children. He thought of what those other women would have achieved in those years, and then he thought of what life must have been for Suor’Immacolata, surrounded by the howls of the mad and the smells of the incontinent. Had he been a man with a religious sense, a belief in some higher being, perhaps Brunetti could have taken consolation in the ultimate spiritual reward she would receive in return for the years she had given away. He turned from that thought and asked, setting the list down in front of him and smoothing it with the side of his hand, ‘What was unusual about the deaths of these people?’
     
    She paused a moment before she answered, and when she did, she confused him utterly ‘Nothing. Usually we have a death every few months, sometimes more than that just after the holidays.’
     
    Decades of experience in questioning the willing and the unwilling underlay the calm with which Brunetti asked, ‘Then why have you made out this list?’
     
    ‘Two of the women were widows, and the other one never married. One of the men never had anyone come to visit.’ She looked at him, waiting to be prodded, but still he said nothing.
     
    Her voice grew softer, and Brunetti had a sudden fantasy of Suor’Immacolata, still in her black and white habit, struggling against the admonition never to spread slander, never to speak ill, even of a sinner. ‘I heard two of them,’ she finally said, ‘at one time or another, say that they wanted to remember the casa di cura when they died.’ She stopped at this and glanced down at her hands, which had abandoned the purse and now held one another in a death grip.
     
    ‘And did they do that?’
     
    She shook her head from side to side but said nothing.
     
    ‘Maria,’ he said, casting his voice intentionally low, ‘does that mean they didn’t do it or you don’t know?’
     
    She didn’t look up at him when she answered. ‘I don’t know. But two of them, Signorina da Prè and Signora Cristanti. . . both of them said that they wanted to.’
     
    ‘What did they say?’
     
    ‘Signorina da Prè said, one day after Mass — there’s no collection when Padre Pio says the Mass for us, said the Mass for us.’ Suddenly conscious of the confusion of tenses caused by her having left the order, she stopped. She reached a nervous hand up to her temple, and Brunetti saw her slide her fingers back, seeking the protective comfort of her wimple. But instead, her fingers encountered only her exposed hair, and she pulled them away as though they had been burned.
     
    ‘After the Mass,’ she repeated, ‘as I was helping her back to her room, she said that it didn’t matter that there was no collection, that they’d find out after she was gone how generous she had been.’
     
    ‘Did you ask her what she meant?’
     
    ‘No. I thought it was clear, that she had left them her money, or some of it.’
     
    ‘And?’
     
    Again, she shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’
     
    ‘How long after that did she die?’
     
    ‘Three months.’
     
    ‘Did she say this to anyone else, about the money?’
     
    ‘I don’t know. She didn’t talk to many people.’
     
    ‘And the other woman?’
     
    ‘Signora Cristanti,’ Maria clarified. ‘She was much more direct. She said that she wanted to leave her money to the people who had been good to her. She said it to everyone, all the time. But she wasn’t... I don’t think she was able to make that decision, not really, not when I knew her.’
     
    ‘Why do you say that?’
     
    ‘She wasn’t very clear in her mind,’ Maria answered. ‘At least not all of the time. There were some days when she seemed all right, but most days she wandered; thought she was a girl again, asked to be taken places.’ After a moment’s pause, in an