Murder Superior (17 page)

“Neila Connelly,” Gregor said.

He hadn’t been aware that Bennis was talking to somebody. Now he looked at the small girl in the white veil standing by Bennis’s side and thought that, yes, she might actually be Neila Connelly, but only a Neila Connelly significantly more grown up than the one he had met in Maryville so many months ago.

“Sister Mary Angelus,” he said, feeling a little stupid. What was he supposed to say?

“It’s just Sister Angelus,” Neila Connelly told him. “Everybody has ‘Mary’ in their name so almost nobody uses it, except of course old traditionalists like Mother Mary Bellarmine, except it isn’t all that traditional because even in the old days almost nobody used it. And I don’t think it’s fair to call Mother Mary Bellarmine a traditionalist. I don’t think she is a traditionalist.”

“Mother Mary Bellarmine,” Gregor repeated.

Bennis helped him out “Mother Mary Bellarmine is the woman who got the flowers dumped on her,” she explained, “and turned all green and had to go change. She’s apparently infamous from one end of this convention to the other.”

“She’s driving everybody crazy,” Sister Angelus said. “Even me, and you know me, Mr. Demarkian. I don’t drive easily. And I’ve only been here for about a week.”

“Is she back yet?” Gregor asked. “I didn’t see her when I came through.”

The three of them looked through the double doors leading to the foyer, but if Mother Mary Bellarmine was around, they didn’t see her. They might not have even if she was standing right next to their little group. There were so many nuns. Gregor did see the man Bennis had pointed out to him as the famous Norman Kevic. He had planted himself next to one of the empty cloth-covered tables that were supposed to hold the food when someone decided to get around to it. From the look on his face, he would refuse to budge for anything less than the General Judgment.

“Anyway,” Bennis said, “Sister Angelus has been filling me in on Mother Mary Bellarmine, as far as I can be filled in, because we still don’t know why Mrs. Hare dumped the flowers on her.”

“Mother Mary Bellarmine having problems with Mrs. Hare isn’t something I’ve heard about,” Sister Angelus said.

“But the thing is, the other stories are much better, which are all about this woman named Sister Joan Esther—”

“She works in Alaska,” Sister Angelus said.

“And Sister Joan Esther’s done something to get Mother Mary Bellarmine really furious, so all week the two of them have been fighting.”

“It’s been worse than fighting.” Sister Angelus blushed. “Mr. Demarkian, you must be getting just the worst impression of us. First Brigit and now this. We’re really not like this. Most of the time we’re a very dedicated, very God-centered community of women—”

“That sounds like a publicity brochure,” Bennis said.

“It is.” Sister Angelus blushed even harder. “It’s from the pamphlet they send you when you think you might want to join.”

“Wonderful,” Bennis said.

“Never mind,” Gregor broke in hastily. “I hope you’re not really worrying about the impression you’re making. That mess in Maryville wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t your Order’s fault.”

“Oh, I know. And good things came out of it, too. The wedding. They write us, you know, and send us things. They’re in Tahiti and they’re going to Egypt at the end of the summer. But Brigit’s still dead. And the way they behave sometimes—”

“Who’s they?” Gregor asked.

Sister Angelus turned around and looked doubtfully in the crowd. “I don’t see either one of them. Not that I blame Joan Esther. She’s not the one who’s persecuting anybody.”

“Right,” Bennis said.

Pronouns, Gregor thought Neila Connelly had always had a lot of trouble with pronouns. “Who’s persecuting whom?” he demanded.

“Mother Mary Bellarmine is persecuting Joan Esther, of course,” Sister Angelus said. “At least, it sounds like persecution to me. I don’t know. Maybe I’m too thin skinned. Sister Margarita—she was Carole Randolph when you were in Maryville, Mr. Demarkian, you met her—anyway, Margarita says Joan Esther doesn’t pay any attention to it at all, that it just rolls right off her back. And maybe it does.”

“What does?” Gregor asked.

“Well,” Sister Angelus said, “take the night before last at dinner. It’s not like the Motherhouse here. We don’t all have lunch at the same time and dinner at the same time and we don’t all go in to prayers together the way we do up in Maryville. People have too much to do and too many places they have to be, so all that gets made up catch-as-catch can. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a dinnertime, if you see what I mean. Sister Agnes Bernadette puts dinner out every night at five thirty and if you’re around you eat it, because leftovers are cold unless you’ve got access to the microwave, and getting access to the microwave around here at night is like the camel and the eye of the needle, if you know what I mean. Everybody wants to use it.”

“I have the same trouble in my own house,” Bennis said, “and I live alone.”

“You live alone in name only,” Gregor said sharply.

“The thing is,” Sister Angelus said, “Mother Mary Bellarmine always makes it to dinner. She gives this big lecture about how in the old days nobody was ever allowed to skip dinner unless they asked permission, and she thinks all this disorganized nonsense is ruining the Order. Only I don’t know, Mr. Demarkian, I mean, there’s a fair percentage of our Order that does nursing, you know what I’m saying? What did they do in the old days when they had a woman in labor and the dinner bell rang?”

“Tell her to wait?” Bennis suggested.

Sister Angelus brushed this away. “Of course they didn’t. Mother Mary Bellarmine is just being—Excuse me. I was about to be uncharitable. Anyway, she comes to dinner every night and she has this lecture, so she came to dinner two nights ago and she had the lecture ready again, and most of us were just resigned to putting up with it. Especially the novices. You’re not allowed to complain about holes in your socks when you’re a novice.”

“Do you wear socks?” Bennis asked curiously. Gregor shot her a furious look and she shrugged. Her cigarette had been smoked to the filter. She made sure the fire was out and put the filter in her pocket. Then she lit up again.

“Dinner,” she said gamely. “The night before last.”

“You really shouldn’t smoke,” Sister Angelus said. “It can kill you.”

“I’m counting on it,” Bennis said.

Gregor cleared his throat

“Oh,” Sister Angelus said. “Yes. Well. Um. Dinner. So, Mother Mary Bellarmine always comes, Sister Joan Esther never comes, it works out. On purpose, I would say. But the night before last, Mother Mary Bellarmine wasn’t supposed to come. She was supposed to be at a meeting about the new field house—I don’t know if you’ve heard, but St. Elizabeth’s is in the middle of building a new field house—anyway, Mother Mary Bellarmine has expertise in that area, building things, and she was supposed to be at this meeting with Henry Hare and the Archbishop and I don’t know who else, and she wasn’t supposed to be back in time for dinner. So it gets to be dinnertime, and who should be in the front of the line waiting to get into the refectory but Joan Esther—”

“Who figured she could have a hot meal for once because her nemesis was going to be out of town,” Gregor put in.

“I wouldn’t call her a nemesis, Mr. Demarkian. I mean, that would imply that she was in the right, wouldn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Gregor answered truthfully.

“Well, I don’t think she was in the right.” Sister Angelus shook her head. “And it’s not just because she’s nasty to everybody she meets, including me. So. Joan Esther is in the front of the line and she goes in and sits down with Scholastica and Mary Alice and all these other people she knew from formation, and they’re talking away about who knows what and letting the postulants and novices get away with murder, when who should walk in at the very end of the line but Mother Mary Bellarmine.”

“Did she get back from her meeting early?” Gregor asked.

“It turned out the meeting was canceled. Nobody had heard about it. We would have heard about it if Domenica Anne had come back—Domenica Anne is the Sister who’s handling things for St. Elizabeth’s College—but Domenica Anne had a lot of work to do and she went to her workroom instead of coming to the convent so nobody saw her. And Mother Mary Bellarmine wasn’t around either, but I don’t know where she was.”

“Maybe she was hiding,” Bennis suggested, slipping her extinguished match into her pocket too. “Maybe she was trying to catch this Sister Joan Esther unprepared.”

“Maybe she was,” Sister Angelus said. “She did catch Joan Esther unprepared, let me tell you that. When she walked in, I thought Joan Esther was going to rise from her place like she was sitting in an ejector seat. She went all red and absolutely furious. Mother Mary Bellarmine looked very smug. If you want my opinion. Which you probably don’t.
Anyway.
There wasn’t any room at the table where Joan Esther was sitting, and Mother Mary Bellarmine wouldn’t have sat there anyway, because it was a secondary table. There’s always one table in the refectory reserved for Sisters Superior and guests, that’s assuming there’s more than one table in the refectory at all, and besides, with all the new people in residence—oh, I should have told you.”

“Told me what?” Gregor asked.

“Well, Mr. Demarkian, with all the Sisters in attendance, the dinner I’m talking about isn’t the only dinner. We go in shifts. And not all in the same place, either. I mean, about twenty-one hundred of us go to the refectory here in three sittings, about seven hundred each, which is what the refectory can hold when the folding doors are opened up and they use the rooms on either side of it. We go at five thirty, six thirty, and seven thirty. Then the rest of everybody eats in the all-college dining hall. That seats about eleven hundred. They go at five thirty, six thirty, and seven thirty, too. You’re assigned a place and a time and you aren’t allowed to go in at any of the other places or times because it messes everything up. If you miss your seating you have to wait until eight thirty or eat out. They’re really strict about it.”

“Do you mean they’d turn you away at the door?” Bennis asked. “If you got held up by your bus breaking down in Philadelphia and didn’t make it until an hour later, they’d just make you wait some more?”

“Sister Justin Martyr spent two days straight without any sitting with Sister Dymphna because Sister Dymphna was dying, and after Sister Dymphna was dead and Justin Martyr stumbled in practically dead herself they turned her away from the seven-thirty over at the dining hall because she was supposed to be at the six-thirty. And the seven-thirty at the dining hall is undersubscribed. Reverend Mother General had to intervene.”

“If it was some sort of subscription, you’d think your Sister Joan Esther would have known better,” Bennis said. “She should have found out which sitting in which place Sister Mary Bellarmine was signing up for, and signed up for something different.”

“She wouldn’t have known,” Sister Angelus said. “It was all done by mail. Everybody signed up to sit with their friends from formation. Of course, Sister Scholastica is Sister Joan Esther’s closest friend in the Order, even though Joan Esther was a couple of years ahead or something, maybe I’ve got that wrong, but Scholastica would have to be at the sitting she was at which is the same sitting Mother Mary Bellarmine is at because that’s when all the administrators eat. Together. You know. And us. They like to keep an eye on us.” She tapped her white veil.

“Back to what Mother Mary Bellarmine did,” Gregor said.

“She did what she always does whenever Joan Esther’s in earshot,” Sister Angelus said promptly. “She started talking in this really loud voice about loyalty and commitment and religious obedience, and about how some people these days don’t understand what it really means to be a nun. Well, Joan Esther had heard all that before. Mother Mary Bellarmine is supposed to be incredibly furious that Joan Esther requested a transfer out of her province and up to Alaska. So Joan Esther didn’t react at all. She just went on eating and at least pretending to talk to the other Sisters at her table.”

“That seems calm enough,” Bennis put in.

“Oh, it was,” Sister Angelus agreed. “It was all par for the course. Mother Mary Bellarmine had pulled the same sort of thing half a dozen times during the week at recreation or just around where she and Joan Esther happened to be together. It’s what happened next that got everybody talking.”

“What happened next?” This was Gregor.

“Well, Mother Mary Bellarmine started to say how they had just started their five-year audit out on the coast, except that she wasn’t letting it rest in the hands of the accountants anymore because she didn’t trust them. She knew more about fraud and flimflam than any second assistant bookkeeper from Deloitte ever would, so she was going over the books just as soon as Deloitte got finished with them. And that it had already paid off, because she’d caught two pieces of petty fraud the accountants hadn’t noticed. And of course there would be more to come.”

“And?” Bennis asked.

“And she went on and on like that for a long while, and then Joan Esther raised her voice so loud her people back in Alaska could probably have heard her and said, ‘People shouldn’t go searching under rocks if they don’t want to be bitten by snakes.’ And then everybody in the entire place shut up.”

“I’ll bet they did,” Bennis said. “What happened next?”

“What happened next was that Mother Mary Bellarmine lost it,” Sister Angelus said. “She rose right up out of her chair, looked straight at Joan Esther and said, ‘If I go searching under rocks, the only snake I’m going to get bitten by is you.’ And then Joan Esther stood up and said, ‘You can bet it’s going to be me.’ And then Reverend Mother General stood up and made us all observe silence for the rest of the meal.”

“Whoosh,” Bennis said. “What do you suppose all that was about?”

“Oh, we all know what it was about,” Sister Angelus said. “Mother Mary Bellarmine thinks Joan Esther made her look bad when she requested the transfer, and now she’s doing anything she can to make Joan Esther look even worse. And of course Joan Esther did make Mother Mary Bellarmine look bad. She told Reverend Mother General that Mother Mary Bellarmine was such an impossible woman to work for, she’d rather show religious obedience to a squirrel. And that got around.”