Murder Superior (3 page)

She counted up the suitcases—seventeen, two short—and then went back out the front door and down the steps to the convent station wagon that had picked her up at the airport. At the time, the station wagon had been driven by Sister Frances Charles, an impossibly cheerful young nun who talked nonstop about the wonderful spiritual healing that was going on in the battered women’s shelter where she worked. Joan Esther had to bite her tongue to keep herself from asking if any healing of the nonspiritual kind was going on, like job training or help with Pennsylvania’s notoriously convoluted human services system. Joan Esther had to bite her tongue a lot these days. It was a gift from God that Frances Charles hadn’t been able to hang around to help after they’d come back to the convent. Frances Charles had breakfast duty. She had parked the station wagon in front of the front door and disappeared.

Joan Esther got the last two suitcases out of the backseat—they’d been shoved down to the floor and partially covered with the car’s lap blanket; that was why she hadn’t seen them—and dragged them back inside where they belonged. Once she was sure she had the whole lot, she could start dragging them up the stairs.

When she got back to the pile, Mother Mary Bellarmine was there, right next to the suitcases, down from her perch. Mother Mary Bellarmine had gone to a modified habit with the rest of them, back in 1975, but she always gave the impression that she was still clothed head to toe in robes. She always gave the impression that she was about to pronounce the death sentence on someone who deserved it. You.

Joan Esther got the list out of her pocket and began to check off oaktag tag names against it. Mother Mary Bellarmine stepped back a little. She had always been a thin woman. Now she looked skeletal. And very, very old.

“Well,” she said, after a while. “You don’t look any different. I thought Alaska would have changed you.”

“Changed me into what?” Joan Esther said, to the suitcases, to the floor. She never looked at Mother Mary Bellarmine if she could help it. “I teach catechism to twelve-year-olds. I teach Catholic doctrine to potential converts. I teach the basics of prenatal nutrition to mothers who are interested. I’m not doing anything much different from what I was doing before I went to Alaska.”

“When you were with me, you were teaching in a seminary,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “And you were in California.”

“I know you like California.”

“You like California,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “You did it to spite me. You did it to make me look bad with Reverend Mother General.”

“I did it to get some peace and quiet.” One of the tags was marked “The Gingerbread Lady.” That would be old Sister Agnecita, who made gingerbread houses for the children’s ward of the hospital in Fairbanks. Joan Esther hoped that none of the Sisters from Canada went in for things like that, because she didn’t know any of the Sisters from Canada. She was just traveling with their luggage, which had turned out to be cheaper to send on ahead in bulk.

“The thing about Alaska,” she said slowly, is that everybody I meet up there knows what he’s doing. Nobody is wandering around looking confused and trying to figure out what she’s doing in a habit. And I like the bishop.”

Mother Mary Bellarmine sniffed. “You did it to get away from me. You told Reverend Mother General you did it to get away from me. Moving away in the middle of the term like that. Giving me less than three days’ notice.”

“Of course I wanted to get away from you,” Joan Esther said. “You were driving me crazy.”

“I was trying to turn you into a nun. A nun, Sister. Not—whatever it is you girls are these days.”

“I’m forty-two years old, Bellarmine. I’m hardly a girl.”

“You’re hardly a nun, either. You’re soft, just like all the rest of them. You have no stamina.”

“I had the stamina to put up with you for six years. Trust me, that was enough.”

The Canadians had all been polite enough to mark their suitcases clearly. Now all Joan Esther had to do was get them upstairs to the hall where these women had been assigned, parcel the suitcases out to the correct rooms, and unpack. She had to get the suitcases upstairs and parceled out fairly quickly, but she had more than a week to get them unpacked. That was good. She’d leave them where she dumped them for today. Then she’d go find herself a little food.

Somewhere up above, what sounded like a heavy iron bell rang five times.

“That’s the call to Mass,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “In the old days, you’d have dropped whatever you were doing and gone immediately to church.”

“These aren’t the old days,” Joan Esther said. “I can go to the twelve o’clock Mass.”

“I wonder you go to any Mass. I wonder you bother to wear the habit. You don’t believe in religious obedience anymore. I don’t even think you believe in God.”

“If you stand that close to the stairway, I’ll knock you over going upstairs.”

“You’ll probably find some way to blame it on me, too. Going to Alaska. Leaving my house—my house—with less notice than I’d have a right to expect from a cleaning lady. Telling Reverend Mother General—”

“I told Reverend Mother General the truth,” Joan Esther said. “I told her you were an evil old woman who was impossible to work for. Does that make you happy? It was three years ago, Mary Bellarmine. God didn’t strike me dead and Reverend Mother General didn’t relieve you from your post It’s over and done with. Let me by.”

“If you really wanted to get by, you could go around me.”

“So I could.”

“You don’t really want to get by me. You want to assassinate me. That’s been your plan from the beginning.”

The Gingerbread Lady’s suitcase was heavier than the one in Joan Esther’s other hand. Maybe the Gingerbread Lady had had the good grace to pack something interesting. Joan Esther backed up a little, the only way to get around Mother Mary Bellarmine without doing a complete circle of the suitcase pile. Assassination, for heaven’s sake. Mother Mary Bellarmine had always been fond of self-dramatization.

From the bottom, the stairs looked endless, steep, and unforgiving. Joan Esther got a better grip on the suitcases she was carrying and started up.

“You’d better go to Mass,” she said to Mother Mary Bellarmine. “It’s halfway across campus, from what I saw on the map. You’re going to be late.”

“Maybe I ought to offer to help you with the bags.”

Mother Mary Bellarmine had never offered to help anyone with anything, as far as Joan Esther knew. She didn’t think there was any danger that Mother Mary Bellarmine would take up philanthropy now. Carrying the suitcases, she walked steadily up the steps to the landing, turned the corner and walked up some more. When she got to the second floor and out of sight of anyone in the foyer, she put the suitcases down and leaned against the wall.

It had been such a small incident, really, such a nothing, over before it had really begun—and three years ago on top of that. She had taken her stand and won. What more could she possibly want?

It was just that it seemed like a bad omen really, that the second person she should see at this convention would be Mother Mary Bellarmine.

She picked up the suitcases again and headed for the east-wing hall.

S
ARABESS COLTRANE HAD COME
to that point in her life where she no longer trusted anyone who didn’t snap to attention at the mere mention of the name of John Beresford Tipton. It was a very good point to come to, with advantages she would not have dreamed of at twenty, because it limited the number of men she had to talk to for longer than twenty minutes. Sarabess Coltrane didn’t hate men. In Sarabess’s metaphysically reconstructed universe, hatred was the inevitable waste product of late capitalism run amok. Sex was the perversion of love, what the market did to the deeply felt human need for a socialist reality. Love was the outpouring of the cosmic unconscious. Greed was a neurosis that would disappear with the abolition of property. It went on and on. Sarabess had gone to visit the revolution in Cuba just after Castro had come to power. She had been visiting revolutions ever since, from Chile to Nicaragua to Angola to El Salvador and back again. She had evolved—she was always evolving—from an unthinking species chauvinist in cow leather sandals to a friend of the earth in cotton espadrilles that always seemed to be unraveling into threads and leaving red dye stains on the bony tops of her feet. She had had a vision in the reeking communal kitchen of a Franciscan mission in San Luis Alazar that showed her the face and the magnificence of God. She had had the good luck to find this job in the Registrar’s Office of St. Elizabeth’s College. Her life was working out perfectly, really, in spite of the fact that the world didn’t seem to make sense anymore. That was her Catholicism. Sarabess Coltrane believed that God was the engine of history that was driving the world inexorably in the direction of an international communitarian Utopia. She was sure the gates of Hell would not prevail against it.

Sister Catherine Grace believed that God was a big white man with a beard who sat on clouds and looked after people’s pet kittens—but Sarabess liked her anyway. Sister Catherine Grace couldn’t be more than twenty-two years old—the one time Sarabess had mentioned it, Sister had guessed that John Beresford Tipton was a kind of tea—but she had enthusiasm and energy and, best of all, a big mouth. It was the one thing Sarabess didn’t like about working at St. Elizabeth’s, that the place was so well stocked with nuns. Most of the Orders Sarabess had come into contact with in South America had been hemorrhaging. It figured that this one, where the Sisters still wore habits and everything was so conservative, would have more nuns than they knew what to do with. The problem with conservative nuns was that they didn’t talk, and if they didn’t talk you never found out anything. With Sister Catherine Grace you found out everything, because she hadn’t shut up since she opened her mouth and let out a wail in the delivery room.

Sister Catherine Grace was lettering a poster she was supposed to have finished the night before. Her veil was hoisted behind her shoulders so that it fell over the back of her chair. Sarabess was pretending to go through the files that had been taken out the day before but not put back where they belonged. The first thing she did every morning was return errant paper to its proper bureaucratic place. What Sarabess was really doing was trying not to look in the small wall mirror that sat above the grey metal file cabinet marked “Student Volunteers/Local Missions.” It was ten minutes to nine on the morning of Monday, May 5, and Sarabess Coltrane had just become fifty years old.

The file on the top of the stack said “CCSW/AHCWR,” which meant it had to do with the Catholic Commission on the Status of Women and their Ad Hoc Committee on Women Religious. Sarabess tucked a long lock of greying hair behind her ear and pushed the file to the upper right hand corner of the desk. That was another reason she didn’t want to look into the mirror. She had always worn her hair long, in spite of the fact that it had never looked the way it was supposed to. It lay flat against her skull instead of springing out. Now she wondered if it just looked wrong on a woman as old as she was. Maybe women of fifty looked ludicrous in waist-length hair no matter what their politics. Sarabess shifted in her seat and bit her lip.

“Go back to the beginning,” she said to Catherine Grace. “Now, Joan Esther was in the same convent as Sister Mary Bellarmine—”

“
Mother
Mary Bellarmine,” Catherine Grace said automatically. “And you don’t say they were in the same convent. You say Joan Esther was a Sister in Mother Mary Bellarmine’s house. Anyway, Mother Mary. Bellarmine has a great house, in California on the water with beach all around it and not a lot of hard work to do—I mean, they run a school but it’s no problem—”

“I thought nuns were supposed to like problems,” Sarabess said. “I thought of it for a while, you know. Becoming a nun. Although I probably would have gone to Maryknoll. I mean, the whole point seemed to be giving service to the poor.”

“Why didn’t you go to Maryknoll?”

“I couldn’t get past all this business of talking about God as ‘He.’ I mean, Maryknoll’s good, but even they can’t get rid of a Pope.”

Catherine Grace finished painting in a stencil of the letter
M
in red. “Sometimes I wonder why you want to be a Catholic at all,” she said. “You’d be so much more comfortable in a Wicca church or the Movement Internationale or something.”

“I’m reforming the Church from within,” Sarabess said virtuously.

“Whatever. Anyhow. Joan Esther got transferred out to California to teach in a program we have there for immigrants who want to learn English, and as soon as she got out there, Mother Mary Bellarmine started to drive her crazy.”

“How?”

“Well,” Catherine Grace said, “there was the business of the cold. Joan Esther caught cold on a weekend trip up into the hill country in northern California. So she called in sick and took to bed. And Mother Mary Bellarmine let her, but then she called every half hour to make sure Joan Esther was still in bed. Oh. There was the money for the birthday cake, too. Joan Esther has family out in Oregon or something and her brother came down to visit one Sunday and gave her fifty dollars. And she took the fifty dollars and had a birthday cake made for one of her students, this really old woman who had come out of Cambodia with one grandchild and everybody else in her family dead and Joan thought she needed to be cheered up—you see the kind of thing. Mother Mary Bellarmine had a conniption and a half, from what I’ve heard, ranting and raving about how that money rightfully belonged to the Order and it wasn’t Joan Esther’s place to decide what to do with it—”

“But I thought that was true.” The next file on Sarabess’s stack was the one for the Future Homemakers of America, which she was always tempted to lose. “I thought nuns held everything in common and nobody owned any property…. I thought that was what the vow of poverty was all about.”

“It is. But even in the old days, Sisters sometimes received presents from their families and nobody screamed at them for not handing them over. And it isn’t as if Joan Esther went off and bought herself a mink coat. She just gave a poor old lady a birthday party.”