Great Day for the Deadly Read Online Free PDF

by herself. He had half a mind to pick up the phone again and call someone at the Motherhouse, to let them know what was going on. Then he told himself he was being nosy, and he hated nosy people. Nuns had to be trained to deal with all kinds of places and all kinds of people. They were supposed to help the poor. What he’d just seen could have been some kind of educational exercise.
    He turned the telescope away from Diamond Place and tried to fix it on the library, where She worked. He couldn’t do it. The library was deep into the valley, on one of the lowest plots of land in town. The best he could do was catch a flash of the dark green border of its lawn. He folded the telescope up, sat back, and found his cigarette burned to a cylinder of ash in his ashtray.
    Glinda Daniels. That was her name. Glinda Daniels. Sam wondered if her mother had been obsessed with the movie or the book, if she’d been named for the Good Witch of the North or of the South. He refused to believe that her mother had been obsessed with Billie Burke.

[4]
    F OR FATHER MICHAEL DOHERTY , rain in February was the worst kind of news. It was bad enough for being impossible. It never got warm enough for rain up here in February. Even his most freshly arrived parishioner knew it. Even his old established stalwarts were beginning to revert. Father Michael knew what they were doing every time he turned his back: coming together in groups, speaking not so much in Spanish as in the jungle dialects most of them had been born into, talking about the evil eye. Michael Doherty knew something about the staying power of superstitions that had been given to you in childhood. “Michael,” his mother had always told him, “if you throw the bread away without kissing it, God will see. God will let you starve.” Michael Doherty had a degree in biology from Georgetown, a degree in theology from Notre Dame, and an M.D. from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He had been in Korea as a medic and come to the priesthood late, after a disastrous marriage that had ended in the death of his wife by drunk driving. He was a tall, spare, ruthlessly logical man of sixty-five—and he never threw bread away without kissing it first.
    The other reason rain in February was such a bad idea was that it caused so much sickness. Michael hadn’t thought of that in advance—whatever for?—but now that it had happened he could see it made sense. St. Andrew’s Parish stretched itself across the dead end of Beckner Street, off Clare Avenue just above Diamond Place. On either side of it, marching back toward town, were four- and five-story tenements. Since Clare Avenue was now entirely commercial and Diamond Place was deserted, the people in the tenements on Beckner made up all of Michael’s parish. There were more of them than Michael would have thought, if he hadn’t lived here. They had a tendency to catch cold. Michael supposed that was perfectly natural. They were used to temperatures that grew very hot instead of very cold, and that changed gradually instead of on the spur of the moment. Their bodies were probably on circuit overload, trying to figure out how to deal with the change of planet.
    It was now eleven thirty on the morning of Thursday, February 21, and the weather showed no signs of returning to normal. If anything, it looked about to get more strange. Michael hadn’t been in Maryville for the flood of 1953, but he’d seen enough flooding in his life. He knew the signs. All morning he had been pacing back and forth in his small office off of St. Andrew’s vestibule, trying to get a glimpse of the river or some sensible weather news on WKPZ. His view was blocked by the disintegrating brownstones on Diamond Place and WKPZ was having a Beach Boys bonanza. Downstairs in the basement, his clinic was open for business, as it was every morning except Sunday. On Sunday, it was open after twelve o’clock Mass, all afternoon.
    There was a knock on his