Murder Superior

by Jane Haddam

  At the moment none of them were doing it at all. No one was even coughing. Gregor looked around for some kind of disturbance and could find none. A second later, the sound began to come back. It came back hesitantly, as it always does when flukes of silence make speakers self-conscious about being overheard.

  Gregor revised his estimate of how many people had to be in the room. Publicity or no publicity, there was no way they could have gotten five thousand people in this room. Now that he could see its parameters, he would have guessed it could hold no more than fifteen hundred, and that fifteen hundred would be a squeeze. He trained his attention on the doors leading to the garden. Maybe it wasn’t a garden. Maybe it was a field that extended all the way to the Ohio border.

  Gregor liked cheese puffs well enough, and he was hungry, but there would be food enough all afternoon. Now he was itching to find out how many people were really here and where they’d all been put. He edged through the crowd toward the sliding glass doors, listening here and there to the sharp-edged sounds of conversations going on just beside his ear.

  “She was put in charge of St. Stanislaw’s in Cleveland,” an older nun said, “but everything just seemed to fall apart—”

  “All the old ladies were all worked up because he wanted to change the rule about home visits,” a young nun said, “but what are we supposed to do? We don’t have sixteen brothers and sisters sitting at home with all the time in the world to take care of business—”

  “We kept the Fatima Novena Society going as long as we could,” a third nun said, “but it got to the day when it was just old Mrs. Tetrarosa coming to it, and we had to stop.”

  Gregor got to the sliding glass doors and looked out. What he saw made him feel like one of those Russian nesting dolls. There was a walled garden out there, but there was a gate in the far side of the wall and it was open. Nuns were drifting in and out of it from who knew where.

  There was a tall statue of the Virgin standing in one corner of the garden. It had been decked out in roses and baby blue ribbons. There was a woman standing beside it who looked like she was kneeling in prayer. Then she stood up, and Gregor saw that she had neither been kneeling in prayer nor was ever likely to be. She was “Nancy” from the parking lot, complete with too much makeup, too frequent cosmetic surgery and too high heels, and she was clutching a thorny sprig of roses in her hand.

  “That little bitch,” she said, in a voice that had been meant to carry, and did. “I’ll take care of her. You just watch me do it.”

  She jammed the sprig of roses in her hair—Gregor winced. It must have hurt like hell—and headed for the sliding glass doors. Nuns turned to watch her progress and frowned. Even the ones who hadn’t heard what she’d said didn’t like the way she was walking. It was more of a stride than a glide, and it was distinctly un-feminine. She came barreling into the reception room, passing through the glass doors so close to Gregor she nearly knocked him over. If she had, she wouldn’t have noticed. She marched over to one of the long tables and picked up a large vase of flowers.

  “This will do it,” she said.

  Then she marched out of the room again, through the double doors into the foyer.

  Gregor had to move fast to catch up. The room was crowded, even if not with as many people as he’d originally expected, and it was almost impossible to get anywhere without being held up four or five times every fifteen seconds. At one point he had to grab an elderly nun by the shoulders and move her bodily out of the way. At another, he had to wedge his hands between two nuns huddled in conference in such a strangely familiar way that he stopped himself just in time from announcing, “Make room for the Holy Ghost.”

  He got to the double doors just as “Nancy” slid to a stop near the end of the receiving line. There were people actually negotiating the receiving line, but she wasn’t about to let them stop her. She grabbed at the back of a man’s suit jacket and yanked him out of line. Then she took his place and held the stoneware vase above her head.

  “This will teach you,” she announced gleefully, in a grating screech that stopped all conversation in the foyer on the spot.

  Then she upended the stoneware vase in the air above Mother Mary Bellarmine’s head and doused the older nun in plant water and thorns.

  Chapter 3

  1

  SISTER JOAN ESTHER WAS not in the foyer when Mother Mary Bellarmine was soaked with water that smelled like chemicals and scratched on the face by a sharp little thorn. It was just as well, because if Sister Joan Esther had been in the foyer then, she would probably have laughed. It was Sister Joan Esther’s considered opinion that she had the right to laugh at any misfortune Mother Mary Bellarmine might have, but Reverend Mother General did not hold the same opinion, and Joan Esther had been in trouble once already this trip for what Reverend Mother General called her “attitude.” Sister Joan Esther hadn’t disputed the description. Lately, she had most definitely had an attitude. She had had an attitude about Mother Mary Bellarmine. She had had an attitude about the Sisters of Divine Grace. She had had an attitude about religion in general. The only thing she hadn’t had an attitude about was sleep, because she hadn’t been getting any.

  While Mother Mary Bellarmine was getting doused in the foyer, Sister Joan Esther was downstairs in the basement kitchen of St. Teresa’s House, trying to straighten out what she thought of as “the disaster of the moment.” The disaster of this particular moment was actually rather serious, since it involved something that had been announced to the media. Worse, it involved something that the media had decided it liked. The something in question was a series of ice sculptures in the shape of nuns in the old-fashioned, original habit of the Sisters of Divine Grace, one for Reverend Mother General and one for each of the Mothers Provincial, ten in all. Each of these ice sculptures was supposed to have a little hollow dug out in the back of its head, and each of these hollows was supposed to contain an ice cream scoop of chicken liver pate. Joan Esther, like everyone else, was aware of the fact that what the hollowed-out spaces in ice sculptures were supposed to contain was beluga caviar. It didn’t bother her that the Order had neither the money nor the bad taste to go that far. What did bother her was that the ice sculptures had ever existed in the first place and that their existence had been mentioned in a press release. The ice sculptures had been the brainchild of Sister Agnes Bernadette, the Sister Cook for the convent at St. Elizabeth’s College, and she was very proud of them. She was also as protective of them as mother bears were supposed to be of their cubs.

  Unfortunately, protectiveness had not in this case gotten Sister Agnes Bernadette very far. She had made the ice sculptures. She had put them in the freezer here in the basement of St. Teresa’s House. She had gone away expecting everything to be fine. Along had come the little man their benefactor in Tokyo had sent along to deal with the serving of the crates of fugu—and after that, neither Joan Esther nor Agnes Bernadette was entirely sure what had happened. All they were sure of was that one of the statues was smashed.

  “He’s a very nice little man,” Sister Agnes Bernadette was saying, as Joan Esther tried to patch the statue’s head back onto its body. “I’m sure he wouldn’t do anything like this just to be malicious….”

  “He doesn’t speak any English?”

  Agnes Bernadette sighed. “He says Hello and thank you. I tried to find one of the Sisters from Japan to translate, but you know what it’s been like today. Crazy. You can’t find anyone anywhere. And he was so upset.”

  “And you’ve got no idea what he was upset about?”

  “Not a clue. It seemed to have something to do with the freezer, though. Maybe his fish, his what do you call them—”

  “Fugu.”

  “Yes. Well, maybe the fugu got freezer burn. I don’t know, Joanie. He kept pointing to the freezer and getting all agitated. And there was my statue. Maybe I left the statue lying on his fish.”

  “His fish were in crates,” Joan Esther said firmly. “They were packed
in dry ice. I’m sure you didn’t do anything to harm them. Mother Andrew Loretta is in the receiving line. Maybe we can haul her down here and get her to translate.”

  “Well, we couldn’t do that,” Agnes Bernadette said. “He’s gone, isn’t he? Took off just after I found him here with the statue and hasn’t been back since. Oh, I hope he hasn’t gone to commit ritual suicide or something. They do that in Japan, dear, don’t they? My little statue isn’t worth anything at all like that.”

  “I think the matter has to be somewhat more serious before it leads to hari-kiri,” Joan Esther said drily, “and besides, I think he’s a Catholic. Even in Japan, Catholics consider suicide a mortal sin. There. Will this work?”

  Agnes Bernadette looked dubiously at the sculpture and sighed again. “She looks like she’s wearing a dog collar. Oh, it’s terrible. It’s really terrible. What are we going to do?”

  “We aren’t going to be able to do anything if she melts,” Joan Esther said. “Here, well take one of those knife things and smooth this out. It won’t be perfect but it’ll be better than it is. Then all we’ll have to do is fill in at the shoulder and reattach the feet.”

  “Oh, dear,” Agnes Bernadette said. “Joanie, you just wouldn’t have believed it. It really was the strangest thing.”

  Joan Esther, who lived in Alaska and taught classes she had to get to for half the year by dogsled, would probably have believed anything, but she’d known Sister Agnes Bernadette for years and liked her. The only problem with Agnes Bernadette was that she was no earthly use in a crisis. Joan Esther pulled a pastry knife out of a drawer and tried it along the now bulging neckline of the ice nun. It worked well enough. There was probably some specialized tool that would have worked better. Joan Esther didn’t know what that was, so she didn’t have to feel guilty for not using it.

  The neckline looked all right. Joan Esther went back into the freezer and got a handful of shaved ice from the bucket of it kept for drinks. She thrust this handful at the gash in the sculpture’s right shoulder and stood back to see if she needed any more.

  “Fine,” she declared. “That’s wonderful. What about the rest of the statues? No other damage?”

  “Not a thing,” Agnes Bernadette said, “but they weren’t in the same place.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I had room for all but one of them on a single shelf. The shelf above the dairy shelf. Usually it’s full of frozen cookies because I always make enough cookies so I have extras to thaw for when the girls want them, you know what college girls are like, they spend all their time eating. But I didn’t have anything on that shelf this time because I’ve been keeping the freezer deliberately clear. You know. For things we’d need for the convention.”

  “But we’re keeping the things we need for the convention over at the convent,” Joan Esther said.

  “I know, Joanie, I know, but I was trying to be prepared. And then I made the statues and, you see, I was right I did need the space. So I put nine of the statues on that shelf and then I ran out of room.”

  “And you put the other one where?”

  “On the other side of the freezer on the bottom shelf next to the green beans.”

  “And the fish were there, too?”

  “Well, no,” Agnes Bernadette said. “They weren’t. They were stacked up in boxes in the far corner.”

  “Then why do you think this had anything to do with the fish?”

  “Well,” Agnes Bernadette said, “the little man has to do with the fish.”

  “How do you know this has to do with the little man? Did you see him break the statue?”

  “Well, no, Joanie, but he must have, mustn’t he? I mean, I walked in and he was standing right next to it and it was smashed. And it was out If it had been just lying out, it would have melted.”

  “Right,” Joan Esther said.

  “Is this like a detective story, Joanie? Do we have to figure it out and catch who did it? Maybe we could ask that Mr. Demarkian who’s supposed to be coming and he could do it for us.”

  “That’s all right,” Joan Esther said. “I don’t suppose it matters. I just didn’t want to go saying anything to Reverend Mother General and getting that little man in trouble when we don’t even know if he’s responsible. Give me a paper towel, will you please? My hands are frozen.”

  “Are we going to be able to use it?”

  “I think so,” Joan Esther, said.

  “Oh, good,” Agnes Bernadette said.

  Joan Esther took the paper towel Agnes Bernadette handed her and started to rub against the statue’s shoulder. At the rate they were going, this thing was going to melt just as they carried it up the stairs.

  Melted or not, Joan Esther thought she’d be covered.

  Reverend Mother General had sent her down here to fix this thing.

  She was fixing it.

  It was the first time in forever she’d been able to feel she’d done something right

  2

  NORMAN KEVIC HAD BEEN standing just past the double doors into the reception room when Nancy Hare had dumped the contents of the flower vase on Mother Mary Bellarmine, and right after it happened he’d taken the prudent way out and headed for the garden. He’d been in the garden for less than a minute when he’d decided it was the wrong place for him to be. Norman Kevic had never been the kind of man who loved the great outdoors. The lesser outdoors was always intruding on him. As soon as he got near grass, he got to feeling as if he were crawling with bugs. He’d read once in the Reader’s Digest that “sexier” people were more assiduously plagued by mosquitoes than unsexy ones, but it hadn’t helped. Mosquitoes sucked blood. Ladybugs had tiny, tiny feet that tickled the hair on your arms. Cockroaches were unmentionable. He stood for a while watching a bee go from flower to flower on one of the bushes near the bare feet of the statue of the Virgin Mary, and then he decided he needed to use the John.

  Finding a men’s John in a building on the campus of a women’s college run by nuns is not as easy as it might be elsewhere. Norman Kevic didn’t even know who he would properly ask for directions. Nuns had always made him nervous even when they were not paying attention to him. When they were paying attention to him, they shot his anxiety levels into the stratosphere. Then there were all these posters and signs and displays dedicated to Motherhood, virgin and otherwise. Norm wouldn’t have guessed nuns could be so hyped on mother love. Several of the nuns he’d bumped into had been wearing little pins that said “On Mother’s Day, Remember the Mother of God” just the way, at Christmas, they wore little pins that said “Jesus is the Reason for the Season.” The pins were very tiny and very discreet. In all likelihood, Norm was the only one who’d noticed them. The problem was, mothers made Norm even more nervous than nuns did. Norm’s own personal mother had been a harridan of the first water. If he’d had the sort of mind susceptible to the recovery movement, he could have made a career out of going to support groups and listing the ways in which his mother had alternately terrorized and suffocated him, never mind the times she’d simply taken off her belt and let him have it. The idea of calling a nun “mother,” the way he had been supposed to do in the receiving line, made him physically ill.

  He passed into the reception room, looked around, and saw nothing in the way of doors except the set that let to the foyer. He approached these cautiously, in case Nancy’s bizarre action might be having a ripple effect He found he had nothing to fear. There was a fuss going on—being made more by the nuns than by anyone else, which figured—but it was self-contained at the tail end of the receiving line and not going anywhere soon. Norm peered into the crowd and decided that the nun Nancy had attacked had not been murdered. That would be Mother Mary Bellarmine, who was a consultant for the Order on the field house project and whom Norm had met a number of times over the past week, at publicity meetings or at discussions of the project, to which Norm had contributed one hundred thousand dollars. Norman Kevic was no fool. When he insulted an institution as lar
ge and as well positioned as the Roman Catholic Church, he made a point of buttering it up as soon as he had an excuse. He was glad Nancy had handed it to Mother Mary Bellarmine anyway. From what Norm had seen of Mother Mary Bellarmine, she made his mother look like an angel of light.

  Once into the foyer, Norm looked left and right and found two doors, set discreetly into corners and camouflaged with baby blue bunting. The doors had no signs on them and no signs near them. Norm had no way of knowing if they were gateways to passages or simply closets. He could have asked someone, but he didn’t want to do it. Norman Kevic had never really been an extrovert. In fact, he’d never really liked people much. They scared him, and—as his mother had told him repeatedly; the very worst thing about Norman Kevic’s mother was how often she was right—they weren’t interested in knowing him. He could get very convivial when he’d had a few snorts. He hadn’t had a few snorts in hours. If he could find the bathroom maybe he could take care of that kind of business there as well. Whatever. It was easier to explore on his own. If he blundered into a closet, he could always claim he was looking for his coat. Although who would wear a coat in this weather, he didn’t know. He had to get a grip on himself.

  The door to his right had on it not only baby blue bunting, but a large oval picture of the Virgin standing on a puffy cloud with her hands held out and a halo around her head. Norm decided to choose that one, because it was his favorite picture of the Virgin from parochial school. Norm hated on principle all pictures of the Madonna and Child, but he was fond of young Marys with dreamy blue eyes in flowing dresses that rippled in the wind. They reminded him of the kind of music video produced by earnest women singers who were serious about Art.