America, she explained. He could go anywhere he wanted. It wasn’t the ancient story that got to her. It was Joseph Smith, a convicted felon, translating the sacred tablets into pseudo King James English, in spite of finding them in New York State in the nineteenth century. The assumption that God spoke to humankind in a seventeenth-century dialect was, to her, both offensive and silly. Still, she admitted, the few Mormons she had known appeared blessed.
“What does that mean?” asked Rachel.
“Like ‘radiant’: touched by the light.”
“You mean, smug and sanctimonious.”
“Don’t you envy people who know the answers?”
“Miranda, I haven’t even figured out all the questions.”
“Exactly.”
“So, you like televangelists, exuding righteousness, oozing self-unction, offering deliverance on the wings of a buck and a grin. Yechh.”
“No-o-o,” said Miranda. “But look at the other extreme — the spiritually humble.”
“Where do you find them? Not saints, surely not in Sunday church.”
“We see people doing good works all the time. What about them?”
“Exactly. They’re the true saints. There is no correlation between religion and goodness.”
They conceded there are good people in the world, and they also conceded that they were both being tremendously arrogant, pronouncing on other people’s states of grace and salvation. Neither could fully comprehend sainthood in the Church calendar, although many canonized saints extended their presence far beyond the boundaries of Catholicism or even of organized religion: St. Nicholas and St. Valentine, most commonly, but others as well, like St. George and his dragon, St. Patrick and Ireland.
“It’s nice to know she’s making a comeback,” said Rachel.
“Who?”
“The Virgin Mary.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you read the tabloids, Miranda? The image of Mary has appeared on the wall of a derelict church. I was reading in the lineup at the supermarket last night. Turns out, it could be the church in Beausoleil. They’re vague on the details. And they quote an unidentified authority as saying the image may only be a water stain bleeding though the plaster.”
“You’re assuming Alexander’s the authority. There’s no water damage in his church.”
“Well, the paper said that the authority admitted it might be a wall painting under the plaster showing through, in which case it wasn’t the Virgin but a local folk saint.”
“Sister Marie Celeste! Amazing. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I assumed you keep tabs on the tabloids.”
Miranda could imagine Alexander Pope’s annoyance at this turn of events. Rachel thought it an amusing bit of trivia, but Miranda knew he would be swarmed with fanatics, desperate for a sign — the same people who yearn to see Christ’s face in a tortilla, his Holy Mother in cracks on a ceiling. It was diverting enough when the followers of Sister Marie Celeste hovered silently in the background or solemnly cleaned, but tabloid salvation is a raucous affair. His work would become unbearable. And how could he protect the revealed frescoes from vandalism when zealous visitors pried bits from the wall as holy relics? She hoped whoever Alexander’s angels were, underwriting his project, they would have the power to restrict access to the building until the inevitable frenzy dissipated. As it would, once Alexander revealed the source of the image in the fresco beneath.
“What I don’t get is why Sister Marie would not be the perfect saint, from the Church’s perspective.”
“Because,” said Miranda, “she was beyond their control.”
“She was dead.”
“Exactly. It’s harder to control the dead.”
“I would have thought it was easier,” said Rachel. “They can’t argue back.”
“But they can. The dead can speak eloquently. It’s the living who can’t argue back. The dead have the authority of having crossed over, and even the pope can’t pretend to do that.”
“But sainthood is all about what the living can make of the dead.”
“What the living can make of the dead? That’s what the Church is all about. And Shelagh Hubbard. Think about what she made of the dead. We’ll have to ask her if she was divinely inspired.”
“If you ever find her.”
“We’ll find her,” said Miranda. “You can count on it. There’s no way someone like her can stay hidden for long.”
“Not if she’s competing with Rome.”
Miranda was uneasy. In spite of being an agnostic, she was not as far off the scale as Rachel or Morgan, she was sensitive to what a believer would consider blasphemy. Her conditioning in a Christian world and her affection for the rituals, her respect for the fundamental values, made her uneasily defensive about organized religion. At a visceral level, she thrilled to the idea that there was something inaccessible in her life that was holy. Yet she knew with certainty that she would never turn, in either peace or in sorrow, to what her world had constructed as God. That, she thought, would violate her sense of the truly spiritual in human experience.
She revised their postulation. “I think what Shelagh Hubbard has done is antithetical to religious practice.”
“You sound like my religion professor.”
“The woman discards the souls of her victims as refuse. She uses their physical remains like so much clay. She sculpts and positions them into shapes that amuse her. I’d say that’s the polar opposite to what religions try to do. Virtually all religions celebrate the spirit within, whether to set it free or contain it with meaning. The end result may be not that much different — posing the dead for the living — but the intent surely is.”
“So, she’s kind of an Antichrist.”
“No, I’d say she’s the antithesis of the Mary triumvirate. At least Sister Marie Celeste and Sister Mary Joseph and Mary, the Mother of God, co-opted each other in good conscience. They brought something profound to the lives of their witnesses, even if you and I don’t have access to such things ourselves. If they offer female salvation of sorts, Hubbard exemplifies its absolute absence.”
“So, she’s the anti-Marialogical principle at work.”
Miranda stared at her friend, amused and yet dismayed at the cheerful cynicism that she wrapped around herself like invisible armour. She reached across the table and touched her hand. Miranda’s own hand was pale and lightly corded with blue-green veins — a beautiful, mature hand. And Rachel’s was dark and smooth, with flecks of childhood scar tissue — the hand of youth and promise.
Rachel rolled her hand over and gave Miranda’s a squeeze, then they both sat back and for a few minutes said nothing.
It was Rachel who brought the conversation back to murder. She wanted to work homicide eventually. The bodies at Hogg’s Hollow were her first murder victims.
“It’s been two weeks since Hubbard disappeared,” Rachel said. “You’ve read her journals cover to cover. The forensic evidence is in: they were killed in the farmhouse. The provincial coroner’s office concurs: they died separately in the sauna — him first, and he was stored in the freezer. So, what don’t you know? What will she be able to add? You’ve got an airtight case, right?”
“Well, she could add herself, for a start. It’s hard to prosecute without her. But at least we won’t have another deadly scenario.”
“How so? How can you be sure?” The younger woman clearly regarded Miranda as her mentor in criminal matters, although Miranda suspected they were equally experienced in life.
“She doesn’t have access to the tools of her trade, so to speak. Think about reducing Morgan to a bunch of old bones and secreting them in an Indian burial tomb. That would have been a very complex affair.”
“Morgan was lucky.”
“Yes, he was. Of course, it was probably his one shot at sainthood.”
“Pity.”
“He’ll live with it.”
“A lot of what you do is wait.”
