The Death of Faith Read Free Page B

entirely clinical voice, she added, ‘It’s very common.’
     
    ‘Going back into the past?’ Brunetti asked.
     
    ‘Yes. Poor things. I suppose the past is better for them than the present. Any past.’
     
    Brunetti remembered his last visit to his mother but pushed the memory away. Instead, he asked, ‘What happened to her?’
     
    ‘Signora Cristanti?’
     
    ‘Yes.’
     
    ‘She died of a heart attack about four months ago.’
     
    ‘Where did she die?’
     
    ‘There. At the casa di cura.’
     
    ‘Where did she have the heart attack? In her room or in some place where there were other people?’ Brunetti didn’t call them ‘witnesses’, not even in his mind.
     
    ‘No, she died in her sleep. Quietly.’
     
    ‘I see,’ Brunetti said, not really meaning it. He allowed some time to pass before he asked, ‘Does this list mean you think these people died of something else? Other than what’s written by their names?’
     
    She looked up at him, and he was puzzled by her surprise. If she had got so far as to come to see him about this, surely she must understand the implications of what she was saying.
     
    In an obvious attempt to stall for time, she repeated, ‘Something else?’ When Brunetti didn’t answer, she said, ‘Signora Cristanti never had any trouble with her heart before.’
     
    ‘And the other people on this list who died of heart attacks or strokes?’
     
    ‘Signor Lerini had a history of heart trouble,’ she said. ‘No one else.’
     
    Brunetti looked down at the list again. ‘This other woman, Signora Galasso. Did she have trouble with her health before?’
     
    Instead of answering him, she began to run one finger along the top of her bag, back and forth, back and forth.
     
    ‘Maria,’ he said and paused after he said her name, waiting for her to look up at him. When she did, he continued, ‘I know it’s a serious thing to bear false witness against your neighbour.’ That startled her, as if the devil had started to quote the Bible. ‘But it is important to protect the weak and those who can’t protect themselves.’ Brunetti didn’t remember that as being in the Bible, though he thought it certainly should be. She said nothing to this, and so he asked, ‘Do you understand, Maria?’ When she still didn’t answer, he changed the question and asked, ‘Do you agree?’
     
    ‘Of course, I agree,’ she said, voice edgy. ‘But what if I’m wrong? What if this is all my imagination and nothing happened to those people?’
     
    ‘If you believed that, I doubt you would be here. And you certainly wouldn’t be dressed the way you are.’ As soon as he said it, he realized that it sounded like deprecation of the way she was dressed, though his words referred only to her decision to leave the order and remove her habit.
     
    Brunetti pushed the list to the side of his desk and, in a verbal equivalent of that gesture, changed the subject. ‘When did you decide to leave?’
     
    If she had been waiting for the question, her answer could have come no more quickly. ‘After I spoke to the Mother Superior,’ she said, voice rough with some remembered emotion. ‘But first I spoke to Padre Pio, my confessor.’
     
    ‘Can you tell me what you said to them?’ Brunetti had been away from the Church and all its works and pomps for so long that he no longer remembered just what could and could not be repeated about a confession or what the penalty for doing so was, but he remembered enough to know that confession was something people were not supposed to talk about.
     
    ‘Yes, I think so.’
     
    ‘Is he the same priest who says Mass?’
     
    ‘Yes. He’s a member of our order, but he doesn’t live there. He comes twice a week.’
     
    ‘From where?’
     
    ‘From our chapter house, here in Venice. He was my confessor in the other nursing home, too.’
     
    Brunetti saw how willing she was to be diverted by details, and so he asked, ‘What did you tell