Hardscrabble Road
Authors: Jane Haddam
HARDSCRABBLE
ROAD
THE GREGOR DEMARKIAN BOOKS BY JANE HADDAM
Not a Creature Was Stirring
Precious Blood
Quoth the Raven
A Great Day for the Deadly
Feast of Murder
A Stillness in Bethlehem
Murder Superior
Dear Old Dead
Festival of Deaths
Bleeding Hearts
Fountain of Death
And One to Die On
Baptism in Blood
Deadly Beloved
Skeleton Key
True Believers
Somebody Else’s Music
Conspiracy Theory
The Headmaster’s Wife
Hardscrabble Road
HARDSCRABBLE
ROAD
JANE HADDAM
ST. MARTIN’S MINOTAUR
New York
HARDSCRABBLE ROAD
. Copyright © 2006 by Orania Papazoglou. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Design by Jamie Kerner-Scott
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Haddam, Jane, 1951–
Hardscrabble road / by Jane Haddam.—1st St. Martin’s Minotaur ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-35373-1
EAN 978-0-312-35373-5
1. Demarkian, Gregor (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia—Fiction. 3. Philadelphia—
Fiction. 4. Armenian Americans—Fiction. 5. Talk shows—Fiction. 6. Homeless men—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3566.A613H37 2006
813’.54—dc22
2005054793
First Edition: April 2006
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Carol Stone and Richard Siddall,
who saved this book.
Literally.
Contents
Most of the time I let books go by without acknowledgment pages, because I never seem to have the kind of things to say that
everybody else does. This time, though, I have two things to mention.
First, the dedication is no joke. Through a series of absolutely impossible coincidences and screwups—my publisher was moving,
I forgot to send a back-up copy to my agent, my computer hard drive disintegrated—this book was nearly lost. Completely lost.
Gone into digital hell. Carol Stone and Richard Siddall retrieved it when it looked unretrievable, and I thought I would have
to write it over from scratch. They keep my Web site running, too.
Second, Holli Zampano brought the cats—Creamsicle and Holli (named Holliday, since he turned out to be a boy)—who now make
writing an adventure every morning. And they’re so much help.
I also want to thank Joan of Green Bay from RAM, for sending the Cheesehead. Which I wear. While working.
And finally, thanks are due to Don Maass, my agent; Keith Kahla, my editor; and Steve and Gregory, editorial assistants, and
all the people at St. Martin’s who keep this series going by putting in far more work than I do.
—L
ITCHFIELD
C
OUNTY
, C
ONNECTICUT
11 November 2005
HARDSCRABBLE
ROAD
PROLOGUE
Monday, January 27
High 9F, Low–11F
And the work which we collective children of God do, our grand centre of life, our city which we have builded for us to dwell
in, is London! London, with its unutterable external hideousness, and with its internal canker of publice egestas, privatim
opulentia… unequaled in the world!
—M
ATTHEW
A
RNOLD
Oh, what a great act of charity and what a service to God a nun would perform if when she sees she cannot follow the customs
of this house she would recognize the fact and leave! And she ought to do so if she doesn’t want to go through a hell here
on earth….
—S
T
. T
ERESA OF
A
VILA
Where it comes close to an ideal of disinterested, shared progress, scientific discovery is the most mature construct of human
freedom.
—G
EORGE
S
TEINER
T
here was no thermometer
outside the door of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Monastery, but Sister Maria Beata of the Incarnation didn’t need one to tell
her that the temperature was well below zero and getting worse. She reached through the heavy wool folds of her habit for
the leather sack purse she had pinned to the pocket of her skirt. The pocket was pinned, too, rather than sewn on, and for
a moment she found herself thinking the kind of thought—Why in the name of God can’t we at least force ourselves into the
eighteenth century?—that had kept her doing penance in Chapter for most of her formation. Behind her, Sister Mary Immaculata
of the Child Jesus was unwinding herself from the bowels of the cab. There was a wind coming down the dark street, whipping
stray pieces of litter into the air and then sucking them out of sight, heavenward. The old men who materialized out of nowhere
to sleep in the monastery’s barn on cold winter nights were already lined up at the door. One of them was wearing a bright
red cap that was not only clean but looked new. Beata found the correct change and enough of a tip not to embarrass herself,
and paid the cabbie.
“Sister,” she said, as Immaculata came around to the curb, shaking out the folds of her cape against the wind.
Immaculata didn’t say anything, but Beata didn’t expect her to. Immaculata was a very old nun, old chronologically and old
in the order. She didn’t approve of much of anything. Beata didn’t think she ever spoke unless she was spoken to, and even
then she seemed to hate it, as if the act of speech had been taught to her as the one necessary element of any mortal sin.
And maybe it had, Beata thought. It was hard to know what people had been taught in Immaculata’s day.
Beata went up the stone steps to the monastery’s front door and rang the bell. Sister Marie Bernadette of the Holy Innocents
opened up and stepped
back to let them pass, holding out her hand for the briefcase Beata carried in the process. Beata shook her head, and Marie
Bernadette retreated.
“You must be frozen,” she said. “I’ve rung upstairs for Mother. She left word you were to meet her in the office as soon as
you got back. Immaculata, you ought to go somewhere and have a cup of tea.”
Immaculata inclined her head. Beata bit her lip to keep from laughing. “I’ll go on through to the enclosure,” she said. “The
Cardinal asked us all to pray for him. I told him we already did, every day. I didn’t tell him we prayed for him to retire.
Somebody ought to open up for the men out there.”
“Are they out there already? We’re not supposed to open until six o’clock.”
“It’s cold,” Beata said.
Marie Bernadette had her keys out and was fumbling with the door to the enclosure. It had an old-fashioned lock, the kind
that took a heavy iron key with a little cutout square hanging at the end. The door swung back and Beata went through it.
“If we don’t get someone out there soon, we’re going to have at least one corpse before morning,” she said. “Their bodies
can’t handle this cold.”
The enclosure started with a hallway, long and narrow, with a crucifix in a wall niche at the very end. Beata unhooked her
cape and pulled it off her shoulders. It was as hot in here as it was cold out there. She put the cape over her arm and went
down the hall, genuflecting quickly when she got to the crucifix. Then she turned to the right and went down yet another hall
to Mother Constanzia’s office. At least the ceilings were high, she thought. It was odd that it had never occurred to her
that enclosure could cause claustrophobia.
Mother Constanzia of the Assumption of Mary was already waiting, standing at the window that looked out onto the enclosure
courtyard as if there was something she could see out there that she hadn’t seen a thousand times before. Beata cleared her
throat.
“I knew you were there,” Constanzia said. “I was just thinking. I tried to talk you out of becoming an extern sister, didn’t
I?”
“You threatened not to admit me to Carmel if I insisted on becoming an extern sister.”
“It’s another example of how God knows better than we do what we need. I’ve got to admit that I never did think we’d need
a lawyer.”
“We have lawyers.”
“I mean a lawyer we could trust.” Constanzia turned around. “I’m not going to say that I don’t trust the Cardinal or his lawyers,
or that I don’t trust the order and its lawyers, but—”
“—You don’t trust either.”
“Something like that. You did well in law school, didn’t you?”
“Tolerably well,” Beata said. “I was only ninth in my class, but it was a fairly big class, and it was Yale.”
“Sorry.” Constanzia motioned to the chair in front of the desk. “I’m a little on edge. This hasn’t been the best month of
my life, let me tell you. Are we in as much trouble as you thought we were?”
“Pretty much.” Beata let her cape fall over the back of the chair, put the briefcase on the desk, and sat down. “First, let
me confirm what I thought this morning. The Justice Project is taking this very seriously. They’re bringing in Kate Daniel
herself to handle it—”
“Good grief. That woman.”
“She’s a very smart woman. She’s a brilliant attorney.”
“She’s an anti-Catholic bigot.”
“I don’t know that she is. She does see this as an opportunity, and I don’t blame her. But the game she’s after isn’t the
Catholic Church.”
“It’s the game she’s going to get.”
“Then she’ll count it as a loss. What she wants is Drew Harrigan, stuffed like a turkey and served up for Thanksgiving dinner,
and if you ask me, she’s going to get him. In the process, she may drive us into bankruptcy, or worse, but I don’t think that’s
what she’s after.”