Murder Superior (18 page)

“There is also another possibility,” Gregor said carefully. There is the possibility that Mother Mary Bellarmine, unpleasant though she may be on a personal level, may have a point. There may be something wrong with the books. And Sister Joan Esther may be the one who made that wrong.”

Sister Angelus shook her head. “Impossible,” she said definitely. “Sister Joan Esther doesn’t know one end of a quarter from another. She’s a Sister without pence.”

“What?” Bennis asked.

“It’s a kind of religious discipline,” Sister Angelus explained. “Some of the Sisters take a kind of corollary vow with the vow of poverty and they go without money. Literally. No change in their pockets, not even for the bus. No checking accounts. Nothing. When Joan Esther goes off to those small villages she serves in Alaska, somebody has to go with her to carry the money, because she doesn’t carry any at all. And sometimes there isn’t anyone to go with her, so she has to go by herself. She’s got the most remarkable stories about getting stuck. In fact, she took that discipline because of the first fight she ever had with Mother Mary Bellarmine. Over a fifty dollar birthday gift.”

“It’s enough to make you ill,” Bennis said.

“It’s just a lot of bad feeling over silliness,” Sister Angelus declared. “Mother Mary Bellarmine is like that. Everybody says so. Everybody says that if our Reverend Mother General had been Reverend Mother General when Mother Mary Bellarmine was a postulant, Mother Mary Bellarmine would never have made it through formation. It isn’t just Joan Esther she’s got it in for. You should see the things she does to Sister Domenica Anne. Just yesterday it got so bad, Domenica Anne came
this close
to slapping Mother Mary Bellarmine in the face, and we all thought she was going to do it, too, because that was about money as well. Mother Mary Bellarmine was saying that Domenica Anne was going to cost the Order a million dollars with her bungling if it was bungling, and that was the point when Domenica Anne—”

“Wait,” Bennis said. “Look. I sense deliverance. I think it’s the food.”

G
REGOR DIDN’T KNOW WHAT
Bennis wanted deliverance from—hunger or Sister Mary Angelus—but he was starving, and as the crowd pressed back away from the double doors that led to the foyer and let the long procession in, he felt a good deal of relief himself. When he was younger he used to go without food for considerable periods of time. When he was first in the Bureau and doing kidnapping stakeouts he would sometimes forget to eat for more than an entire day. Since he’d been back on Cavanaugh Street, such nonchalance had not been possible. The women on Cavanaugh Street cooked and so did some of the men. Both men and women thought it part of their Christian duty to feed any stray human being who might not be getting enough to eat. This resulted in some very desirable outcomes. Father Tibor Kasparian had managed to set up an excellent soup kitchen and a food basket distribution network in a downtown Philadelphia neighborhood not as fortunate in urban renewal as their own. He had also organized a relief effort for the victims of the Armenian earthquake and to help after the political upheavals that resulted in Armenian independence that had been rewarded by a letter from the Armenian government that came very near to canonizing everyone on Cavanaugh Street. What this attitude also resulted in, however, was the fanatical determination of every woman in the neighborhood over the age of fifty that neither Gregor Demarkian nor Bennis Hannaford should be allowed to “starve.” Bennis burned it off with cigarettes and late nights. Gregor didn’t burn it off at all. Bennis sometimes described him as “a Harrison Ford with twenty pounds too much weight on him,” but any day now she was going to have to increase that number to forty, or worse. Gregor was no longer used to going without meals. He didn’t want to be.

The procession coming through the double doors was truly a procession. It was headed by a cheerfully plump middle-aged nun with nothing in her hands at all, followed by nuns in a two-by-two row. At the front of that row was Reverend Mother General with a Sister whom Gregor didn’t recognize. The Sister was carrying a tray on which there was an ice sculpture of a nun in a very old-fashioned habit and a lit candle. Gregor couldn’t imagine why the candle didn’t melt the ice. After Reverend Mother General came the woman Gregor thought he remembered as Mother Deborah, from Australia. The Sister walking next to her—with an identical ice sculpture and an identical candle—was the one Gregor had been introduced to as Peter Rose. That had been in Colchester, in the first case he had ever handled for the Catholic Church. He looked down the line—snaking through the hushed crowd with ease now—and found Mother Mary Bellarmine, looking clean and pressed in what he assumed must be a fresh habit. At least that scapular thing had been changed. Even with that long collar that fell halfway down the arms like a cape, the torn scapular could not have been pinned up without looking pinned up. This didn’t look pinned up.

Bennis whispered in his ear, “You know what Sister Angelus just told me? That woman carrying the ice sculpture for Mother Mary Bellarmine is the unfortunate Joan Esther. How do you think that came about?”

“Coincidence,” Gregor said firmly.

“I say it was deliberate,” Bennis said. “Joan Esther has had enough, so she’s got herself taken on as Mother Mary Bellarmine’s temporary lackey. Only the thing is, she’s poisoned the whatever it is—”

“Bennis,” Gregor warned.

“—as soon as Mother Mary Bellarmine takes the first bite,
wham
. What do you think of that?” Bennis said this with relish.

“I think you ought to be locked up,” Gregor said.

“My father thought that, too, and he tried, but even with his money he couldn’t make them do it. Look at Norman Kevic. If that man gets any closer to that table, his molecules will merge.”

Gregor looked at the last ice sculpture in the row. There was a hollowed-out part at the back of its head that was indeed filled with food. “What do they have in those things?” he asked Sister Mary Angelus. Sister Mary Angelus shrugged.

“Chicken liver pâté,” she said. “It’s not something I like, but nobody thought to give us any caviar. I suppose they think it isn’t suitable for nuns. That’s Sister Domenica Anne at the end there, by the way, carrying the tray for Mother Andrew Loretta. Mother Andrew Loretta is from Japan.”

“Who’s the woman who looks like Woodstock revisited in old age?” Bennis asked.

Gregor looked in the direction she was pointing and decided that her description was more than apt. The grey-haired woman looked painfully awkward and excruciatingly out of date, as ridiculous as a man would have if he’d shown up in this place wearing plus fours and spats. She was not, however, any one Sister Angelus knew.

“I think she works for the college somewhere,” Sister Angelus said. “I’ve seen her around. What’s she carrying?”

“She’s got a lot of roses wrapped in paper,” Bennis said. “She’s with a nun.”

“Oh, the nun,” Sister Angelus said. “That’s Catherine Grace. She works in the Registrar’s Office. I knew that woman looked familiar. She works in the Registrar’s Office, too. I don’t remember her name. But we all had to go over there to get our room keys, and I met her.”

“Room keys through the Registrar’s Office,” Bennis said. “What a concept.”

“Oh, my Heavens,” Sister Angelus said. “That’s Nancy Hare.”

Gregor swung around to find Nancy Hare, but he didn’t have a chance. The crowd was impenetrable and there was too much going on at the tables. Reverend Mother General stepped forward. She clapped her hands together sharply and silenced everyone in the room. Gregor told himself it happened because the nuns were used to those clapping hands, but it seemed eerie to him nonetheless.

Reverend Mother General raised her hand to her forehead. “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Bless us O Lord—”

The nuns finished. “—and these thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty.

“Through Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with You in unity with the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

“Amen.”

“Sister Agnes Bernadette,” Reverend Mother General told the crowd, “who is Sister Cook for the convent here at St. Elizabeth’s, has made for all the Mothers Provincial and for myself these ice sculptures in our honor, and she has done us the great favor of making them all alike. Not one of us has to be reminded of her imperfections. When I look at this sculpture of myself, I am not old. When Mother Maria Hilde looks at hers, she is not fat. This is what God has promised to do for us all at the Resurrection of the Body, except of course not in ice. I for one very much appreciate this intimation of immortality as provided for me by Sister.”

All the nuns laughed. Gregor didn’t know what for.

“Now,” Reverend Mother said, “I know you’re all hungry—”

A good-humored groan went up from the crowd.

“And I know Sister Agnes Bernadette is anxious to feed you. She’s got enough food coming up to feed the greater metropolitan area. So let’s get started. If the Mothers Provincial are ready—”

“Oh, we’re ready,” Mother Mary Deborah said in her thick Australian drawl.

The crowd laughed again.

“Mother of God, give us food,” someone in the back prayed, and the crowd laughed again.

“I’m sure the Mother of God was a very good cook,” Reverend Mother General said. “Mothers, if you will, please.”

The Mothers Provincial raised their hands in the air. Gregor was fascinated to see that each hand held a cracker. He supposed that each cracker was smeared with chicken liver pâté. This was the oddest spectacle he had ever witnessed. He hadn’t the faintest idea what to think of it.

“Now,” Reverend Mother General said.

At the sound of “now” all the Mothers Provincial bit down on their crackers, and the crowd cheered. At that moment more nuns began to come through the double doors from the foyer, a long line of them, with each carrying a heavy silver tray. This was lunch for real coming on. The semimilitary precision of the scene at the tables broke up. Gregor looked at Bennis and found her just as astonished as he was.

“Wasn’t that strange?” she demanded.

But Sister Angelus barged in. “It was silly, but we had to do it. Sister Agnes Bernadette was so proud of her sculptures. And it’s not so wonderful being a convent cook, you know. You’re stuck in a kitchen all day. Reverend Mother General just wanted to make Agnes Bernadette feel good.”

“Well,” Bennis said, “I hope she managed.”

“That’s a pile of Italian sausages they just put out,” Gregor said. “I’m going to go eat.”

Of course, everybody else was going to go eat, too, so he had to wait. Norman Kevic’s strategy now seemed to be eminently sensible, since he was the first person in line and supplied with a plate and utensils almost before anyone else had collected himself enough to get started. Gregor took his place behind two giggling novices and in front of a pair of Sisters chattering away in German. The line inched forward slowly and he went with it, catching glimpses now and then of what looked like the world’s most complete collection of food.

“They’re putting all the really ethnic stuff out in the garden,” one of the novices ahead of him said. “Hello, Mr. Demarkian. You probably don’t remember me. I’m Sister Mary Stephen.”

“Mr. Demarkian?” the other novice said. “Really? Who came to Maryville and investigated Brigit?”

“He didn’t investigate Brigit,” Sister Mary Stephen said scornfully. “He investigated the murder.”

“I was sick that whole week and I never met him,” the other novice said.

“This is Sister Francesca,” Sister Mary Stephen said. “And I meant what I said about the ethnic food. If you like that kind of thing better you probably wouldn’t have to wait in so long a line. There’s a Japanese table out there with a chef from Japan. And a French one with a Sister who was a graduate of Cordon Bleu before she entered the Order. There are a couple of others out there, too.”

“Aren’t Italian sausages considered ethnic?” Gregor asked.

“These at the tables here are Italian-
American
sausages,” Sister Mary Stephen said.

Sister Francesca laughed.

“There’s some Polish-American kielbasa up there, too,” Sister Mary Stephen said, “and being a Polish-American myself you know how I feel about—what’s that?”

That was disturbance well far up the line, but not as far as it could have been. Gregor tried to get a handle on the position so he could concentrate on the incident and had a hard time doing it. There were so many nuns milling around and there was so much general confusion. Then somebody gasped and somebody else cried, “She’s turning blue!” and Gregor leaped out of the line into the relatively less choked area to the side of it to see what was going on.

What was going on was a death. He knew it as soon as he saw the woman’s face.

She was clutching her throat and staring straight ahead. Her eyes were bulged wide and her skin was a color that was halfway between blue and white. It seemed to be made out of glass.

“Something that affects the nervous system,” Gregor thought automatically.

Then he stepped forward and let the nun fall straight into his arms.

It was the one Sister Angelus had pointed out to him as Sister Joan Esther.

T
HE POLICE TOOK MOTHER
Mary Bellarmine in for questioning. Gregor would have been willing to bet they were going to long before they arrived, just as he would have been willing to bet he knew what had poisoned Sister Joan Esther long before anyone had done the tests to confirm that she’d been poisoned at all. Gregor was good at poisons. In the Bureau, everybody had to specialize in something. What else there was to specialize in hadn’t interested him much. Back in the days when he’d joined, the Bureau demanded that each of its agents have a law or an accounting degree. Gregor had opted for accounting and become a CPA just to qualify for agent training. After that, he’d done his best to forget everything he knew about business and finance. Both bored him. He’d been offered a chance to specialize in firearms, but they made him nervous. He had driven his instructors at Quantico positively nuts. In the end, he had opted to become the resident—and only—expert on poisons, acquiring an encyclopedic knowledge of acid and alkali, lethal mushroom, and distilled chemical, that made him an object of curiosity from one end of the Bureau to another. When he was a young agent in the field, his station supervisor in Los Angeles would call him up at all hours of the night to find out if the poison in the latest Perry Mason or Ed McBain would “really work.”