Sins Out of School (8 page)

Double doors led out of the foyer into, I discovered, the main worship space of the church. At least I supposed it was. It resembled no church I'd ever seen. An assembly hall in some old and poverty-stricken school, perhaps. The walls, paneled in the same disgusting brown tongue and groove, rose to a high peaked ceiling painted prison beige. No pictures hung on the walls, no plaques commemorating pious or generous parishioners, no stained-glass windows, oh, no. The windows were narrow and plain, with the kind of knobbly glass found in bus-station rest rooms. Come to think of it, the place smelled like a public rest room, too—eau de Lysol. The odor of sanctity, perhaps.

There were a lot of plain wooden chairs, arranged in precise rows. At the far end of the room, a raised platform accommodated a few more chairs. And that was it. No altar, no candles, no flowers. No organ, not so much as a modest upright piano. Linoleum tile on the floor in a predictable brown and beige checkerboard. Industrial fluorescent fixtures hanging from the ceiling.

The One True God appeared to be a drab, dreary deity.

There were small doors on either side of the platform. In most churches they would have led to a robing room or sacristy on one side and perhaps a choir room on the other. In this odd establishment, I hated to think what might lie behind them, and I was reluctant to find out. Indeed, the place reminded me of the horrible mission church in a 1930s Hitchcock film,
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, and I was getting cold feet. Some very nasty things went on in that Hitchcock church.

My feet weren't the only cold parts of me. There was no sign of radiators in the room, and the longer I stood there, the colder I got, both literally and figuratively. I had to make up my mind. Go in search of someone to talk to, or turn tail and run.

My sneakers squeaking on the tiled floor, despite my earnest attempts at stealth, I edged along the wall toward the door to the right of the platform.

It opened. I thought for a moment I was going to scream. There was no creak of hinges, no sound of footsteps, but a woman appeared in the doorway.

She didn't really look like a Hitchcock housekeeper. It was just my imagination, or the dim light, that gave her a long black gown and black hair pulled back in a bun.

“What do you want?” was her cordial greeting. Hitch would have loved her chilly voice.

I moistened my dry lips. “I was looking for the church secretary, or the—er—pastor.”

“I am in charge of the business affairs of the chapel. Mr. Rookwood, the elder, has left for the day, and I was about to do so when I heard a noise in here. Since no one should be in the meeting hall at this time of day, I naturally checked. So I ask again, what is it that you want?” She hadn't moved from the doorway. She was shouting and expecting me to shout back.

I was no longer afraid of her. Bad manners rouse my anger, which is always a galvanizing force. I drew myself up and moved closer to the platform. “My name is Dorothy Martin, and I'm here on behalf of one of your parishioners, Mrs. Doyle. And her daughter, Miriam.”

“You are misinformed.” Her voice had become positively glacial. “There are no followers of the One True God named Doyle.”

“Mr. John Doyle—”

“Mr. Doyle is dead, at the hands of the woman you mention. This chapel has no interest in her, save to hope and trust that she will receive the punishment she so richly deserves. It is a pity that capital punishment has been abolished. Good day.”

“Just a moment, Mrs.—”

She ignored me and started to step back.

“Wait! What is your name, please?”

“Mrs. Rookwood.” She said it grudgingly, and her glare dared me to comment.

“Mrs. Rookwood, you should know that the police are not entirely convinced that the murder lies at Mrs. Doyle's feet. There is considerable doubt, and they are looking into other possibilities. Meanwhile, she and her daughter—who I believe attends your school—are in financial need, and in need of comfort, as well. Surely the church—the chapel—must have some sort of plan, some routine for bereaved—er—members.”

“Madam, our faith tells us to shun the sinner and avoid the path of the evildoer. It is plain that you do not follow this commandment, but we in this chapel do. We have no communication with whited sepulchres.”

She turned away and shut the door firmly behind her. I heard the snick of an efficient lock.

Yes, definitely my day to annoy people. I left the depressing place, got in my car (which by some miracle had not collected a parking ticket), and drove thoughtfully home.

I'd gone to the church to learn what I could about John Doyle. In a way I'd hit a blank wall, but in another way I'd learned quite a lot. Any man who could devote himself to such a religion and associate with people like Mrs. Rookwood was a man few normal people would like. I could easily believe he'd made enemies.

And if I intended to go through with this, to try to prove that neither his wife nor his daughter killed him, it behooved me to track down a few of those enemies.

I would come back to this travesty of a church and talk to as many of its members as possible before I got thrown out. Meanwhile, there were other paths to follow.

His job. Frictions often arose on the job. Where had Mrs. Beecham said he worked? A bank, wasn't it? That was unfortunate, because the weekend was upon us, and I'd have to wait until Monday.

On the other hand, the weekend was the perfect time to visit a church. I wished I'd taken a leaflet from that tract rack in the foyer, since it would presumably list service times. Never mind. I'd find out. And tomorrow I'd talk to some of the neighbors, find out if any of the animosities Mrs. Doyle had talked about had been serious enough to lead to murder.

The only thing was, what was I going to tell Alan?

I didn't want to tell him about Miriam. Alan was a kind man. His first wife, who had died some years ago, had presented him with children, and they with grandchildren, to all of whom he was devoted. He was also, however, a policeman. He had a deeply ingrained respect for the laws and procedures under which he had operated for a lifetime. I was sure he wouldn't want to keep my terrible secret. He would argue, quite plausibly, that the officers in charge would take great care of the little girl, that there would be psychiatric help available if she needed it, that even if she were to be found guilty, some form of rehabilitation was far more likely than a prison sentence. And if she
were
guilty, then surely I, a responsible adult, didn't want her to go free, perhaps to kill again.

It would all sound reasonable. And I simply couldn't accept it.

If the police, acting by themselves, conceived a suspicion that Miriam might have murdered her father, I wouldn't do anything about it, but I would not take the responsibility for pointing them in her direction.

In fact, now that I thought of it, I was going to have to have a private talk with Mrs. Doyle. If she behaved with everyone the way she did with me, the police, who are not stupid, would soon draw the same conclusion I had. She was, somehow, going to have to polish up her act. Maybe she should send Miriam away. If the child weren't around to utter those chilling remarks about her father, people wouldn't notice the mother's nerves so much, or would attribute them to other causes. Goodness knows she had enough to be nervous about.

I was avoiding the real issue: what to tell Alan. And I had to make up my mind soon, because I was almost home.

In the end I decided to stick to a version of the truth. I was concerned about the Doyles, who seemed to have no friends. I wanted to do what I could to help, blah, blah, blah. He would accept that, I hoped, as a screen for my curiosity about the murder. I had something of a reputation for poking my nose into crime, and Alan had learned to be tolerant, so long as I kept myself out of danger and didn't get in the way of the police.

But I hated not telling him everything.

As it turned out, I didn't have to say much. He had just hung up the phone when I walked into the kitchen.

“Hello, love. I thought you'd fallen off the ends of the earth. How did you find Mrs. Doyle?”

“A good deal upset, and pretty prickly about accepting help. I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to talk someone from her church—or her husband's church—into offering a little support, but I might as well have talked to the bricks on the wall. They'd have been just as sympathetic.”

“Well, I have some news for you. That was Derek on the phone. He did manage to push through the autopsy, over the usual bitter complaints about overwork and everyone always wanting everything yesterday.”

“And?”

“They came up with a time of death, for one thing. Doyle died at some time after midnight Wednesday night. Thursday morning that would make it, officially. Between midnight and two, they think, and probably closer to midnight, though the doctor wouldn't commit himself to an exact time, naturally. They never will.

“The interesting thing is that it turns out they were quite right about the stab wound. It was made after death. Quite soon after, probably, because there was some blood, but not a lot. I'll spare you the details, but the kicker is that the man died of an overdose of some form of digitalis.”

“Foxglove,” I said automatically. In novels, when someone dies of digitalis poisoning, it's always because the bad guy has brewed up some foxglove tea.

“Not in this case, apparently. I didn't grasp the niceties of the medical explanation, but apparently he was bungful of ordinary medicinal digitalis, the kind given for certain kinds of heart trouble.”

“Did he have heart trouble?”

“Don't know. Derek hasn't managed to reach his doctor yet. But he says there was no digitalis in the house when his men searched. No medicine of any kind; they noticed particularly. It's pretty unusual for a family not to have any aspirin around, or cold medicine, or that sort of thing, but there was nothing at all.”

Well, that was a relief. “Then it looks as though Mrs. Doyle is out of it, after all.”

“It's too soon to say that, Dorothy. But the likelihood has certainly been reduced. Derek phoned the woman and asked if she wanted police protection.”

“Why—oh, because someone killed Doyle and might be a danger to the rest of the family, you mean?”

“That was the idea. But Mrs. Doyle rejected the offer quite flatly. Said she was perfectly capable of taking care of herself and her daughter. Rather a peculiar woman, is she?”

I took a moment over that one and answered with care. “Not so much peculiar, I think, as overwhelmed. Her husband's dead, and even though she didn't get along with him, it's a terrible shock. And she has suffered so long under his domination that I don't imagine she's able to cope very well by herself. It isn't that she's stupid. She's a teacher, after all, and a good one. It's just that he made the decisions all their married life, and she hasn't learned how, just as she hasn't learned how to make friends.”

Alan smiled a little and shook his head. “I knew I'd hear it sooner or later.”

“Hear what?”

“That tone of voice that means you're about to take another lame duck under your wing.”

“Well—she does need someone with some common sense on her side. And I feel sorry for that poor little girl.”

“My dear, you don't have to make excuses. Unlike Mr. Doyle, I don't presume to make your decisions for you. Except, as it's getting late and I'm getting peckish, suppose I make a unilateral decision that we're going out to dinner.”

“That's one I'll never challenge. Shall I change into something nicer?”

“Not if a pub meal will do.”

“Lead me to it.”

We had a pleasant meal, but I was conscious, all the time, of an underlying feeling of guilt. Alan was being so nice about this, and all the time I was being devious with him.

And with splendid inconsistency, I also wondered, in between snatches of conversation, if there was any way Miriam Doyle could have known about the toxic properties of digitalis.

T
HE
next morning I decided it was time to enlist some help, and there was only one person I could go to. I looked up Ruth Beecham's phone number and gave her a ring.

“Mrs. Beecham? This is Dorothy Martin. Look, I know I've been something of a pest lately, but there's something I need to talk to you about. Yes, about the Doyles. I'm sure you're frantically busy on weekends, I always was when I was teaching, but if you can spare me half an hour or so, I'd be grateful. Well, right now if that'll work.”

Alan was busy with his book. I kissed the top of his head and told him to expect me when he saw me. He grunted something.

When I got to Mrs. Beecham's, she was alone, her husband and the kids out on various pursuits. “I hope you don't mind if I carry on with my shopping list,” she said as she seated me, somewhat reluctantly, at the kitchen table.