Murder Superior

by Jane Haddam

  It was now two o’clock in the afternoon. Domenica Anne had been going over her blueprints for five hours, and she was tired. Her workroom was in St. Thomas’s Hall, in the attic, in a room that looked down on St. Teresa’s House and its garden. All afternoon, Domenica Anne had been able to watch the spillover of the party. When she’d first come over this morning, she’d had her assistant with her. Her assistant was a very young nun named Sister Martha Mary and much too excited by everything to do with the convention to miss the festivities this afternoon. Domenica Anne had sent her over as soon as people began climbing the steps of St. Teresa’s House. Now Domenica Anne looked out her window and saw Martha Mary coming back, holding a tray of something covered and seeming to skip.

  Martha Mary always seemed to skip.

  It made Domenica feel better just to watch her.

  Domenica Anne went to stand in the hall near the elevator door to wait. She heard the humming of the elevator machinery and then the humming of Sister Martha Mary. Martha Mary was humming the “M is…” parts of the song “Mother” in a kind of reggae beat.

  The elevator came to a stop and the doors groaned open. They groaned instead of hissed because the elevator was fifty years old. Martha Mary stepped out without the least sign of surprise to find Domenica Anne waiting for her. Domenica Anne thought Martha Mary might know a great deal about the view out the attic workroom window, since she had to spend so much time hanging around while Domenica Anne got her work done. Martha Mary held the large covered plate out to Domenica Anne and said, “Take it. It’s more precious than gold. Nobody over there’s gotten anything to eat yet.”

  “Are you serious?” Domenica Anne asked. She lifted off the paper that covered the platter and found inside more and better food than she’d had since the hordes began to descend on St. Elizabeth’s. Roast beef. Turkey breast. Four kinds of olives. A great big wedge of Stilton cheese. Half a loaf of bread. There was more, but Domenica Anne didn’t bother to inventory it. She started walking back into her workroom. “What went wrong?” she called back to Martha Mary, knowing that Martha Mary would follow. “Lunch was supposed to be no later than one thirty.”

  “I know it was supposed to be,” Martha Mary said, “but Reverend Mother General seems to have reckoned without the seculars. Or at least without this one particular secular. Nancy Hare had one of her public fits.”

  “Did she really?”

  Domenica Anne put the tray down on the edge of the long worktable where she usually went over the financial records and took the paper cover off for good. Then she made the sign of the cross and said a quick grace. Nuns might be driving her crazy for the moment, but she appreciated convent life. There was no way to forget God when you were in a convent. Even here in this workroom she had a crucifix on the wall, and posters of Mary with blue ribbon bows on them for the month of May.

  “Nancy usually has more sense than to have her fits in front of Henry,” she said. “I presume Henry was there.”

  “Oh, yes,” Martha Mary said. “He took her home. If you want my opinion, I think she had her fit because Henry was there.”

  “How did one of Nancy’s fits hold up lunch?”

  Martha Mary grinned slyly. “You remember that thing they were going to do with the ice sculptures, and having them presented to Reverend Mother General and the Mothers Provincial and then each of the Mothers is supposed to take the first bite out of their own chicken liver pâté and blah and blah and it’s just the kind of thing Agnes Bernadette would think up except we all put up with it because Aggie’s such a dear?”

  “Yes,” Domenica Anne said. “I know.”

  “Well, the little ceremony won’t work unless all the Mothers are there to take part in it, and the Mothers aren’t all there to take part in it right this second because Mother Mary Bellarmine is off somewhere getting changed and the reason Mother Mary Bellarmine is off somewhere getting changed is because what Nancy Hare did was dump a vase of roses on Mother Mary Bellarmine’s head and rip her habit somehow or other nobody knows. So you see—”

  “Good Heavens,” Domenica Anne said.

  “I thought it was something you’d want to hear. Anyway, I wanted to get out of there. Ever since Nancy pulled her stunt even the sane people have been tense, and the seculars don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing. It’s depressing. Have you made any progress with the budget yet?”

  Domenica Anne sighed. “There isn’t any progress to be made with the budget. We need more money. I don’t suppose anybody over there threw a fit and wrote us a check.”

  “Not the kind of check you’re talking about. I think it’s a good thing Henry Hare signed contracts when we started this project. I think he’s about ready to bolt. And I do mean bolt. From the project. From Nancy. From the Church. I’ll give you a bet that in less than a year from now, he’ll buy himself an apartment in the city and start being seen around town with a model barely out of diapers. Is it a sin to think so badly of a man who’s giving the Order so much money?”

  “Yes. But not because he’s giving the Order so much money.”

  “I know we’re supposed to see Christ in every man,” Martha Mary said, “and every woman, too, according to Father Monaghan, but those two remind me of a pair of rutting monkeys. Maybe Darwin was confused. Maybe only some people evolved from the apes. Maybe some other people only seemed to evolve from the apes, but instead—”

  “Nobody evolved from the apes,” Domenica Anne said, “and you know it. You had Sister Wilhelmina for biology and she’s very good at explaining evolution.”

  “Well, I refuse to believe that Henry Hare and I evolved from a common ancestor. What Nancy sees in him, I’ll never know.”

  “What Nancy sees in him?”

  Martha Mary shrugged. “Give me your razor pen and I’ll trim facsimile pictures for a while. If we need so much money, we ought to get started raising it.”

  “It’s on the tool board. I put it away last thing before I left here last night.”

  “Then you must have taken it out this morning,” Martha Mary told her, “because it isn’t in its slot.”

  Domenica Anne had just made herself a sandwich that looked like something out of the “Blondie” comic strip. It had turkey, roast beef, ham, lettuce, tomatoes, and three kinds of cheese on it. She raised it to her mouth and took a bite. Of course the facsimile pictures were important. They were supposed to be assembled into a collage that would be photographed and reproduced for a mailing requesting funds for the new field house. The mailing might make the difference between comfort and debt.

  “Look again,” Domenica Anne mumbled with her mouth full. “I haven’t used it for anything this morning. The last time I had it out was yesterday, like I told you. I was cutting one of the study blueprints along the load-bearing lines to explain why we couldn’t put one of the walls where Reverend Mother General wanted us to. I was getting reamed out by Mother Mary Bellarmine for not having anticipated all this when I talked to the architect in the first place. As if I were the one who made decisions about the floor plan with the architect.”

  “If it had been Mother Mary Bellarmine’s project,” Martha Mary said, “she would have made decisions about the floor plan with the architect. Dom, really, it’s not here. You must have left it out.”

  “I didn’t leave it out,” Domenica Anne insisted.

  “Well, whatever you did, it’s not here now. And we can’t leave it lying around loose. It could be dangerous.”

  “Right,” Domenica Anne said.

  And, of course, Martha Mary was right. She was always right. Domenica Anne had never had such a responsible assistant. It was just that at the moment, she’d rather eat her sandwich.

  She was starving. And she couldn’t imagine anything anyone could do with that razor pen that would cause anything like serious trouble.

  Chapter 6

  1

  BENNIS HANNAFORD NEVER SMOKED cigarettes in crowded rooms unless she was very, very nervous—or unless t
he crowded room in question was a bar, where she was expected to smoke—but when Gregor Demarkian came downstairs after having his conversation with. Reverend Mother General, Bennis was sitting in a corner of the reception room, perched on a side table that wobbled under her every time she took a drag, sucking on a Benson & Hedges light the way mermaids in Florida underwater shows suck on their air hoses. At first glance, Gregor couldn’t see what for. The scene in the reception room was actually calmer than it had been upstairs, although it was also more chaotic. All pretense at a reception line had been abandoned. The Mothers Provincial had blended into the crowd. Since their habits were the same as everybody elses’, Gregor couldn’t pick out a single one of them. There did seem to be even more nuns around than there had been before, and even more baby blue ribbons. There were also a lot of novices Gregor knew had not been there before, because he would have noticed their white veils. He caught sight of Sister Mary Alice, whom he had met in Maryville, and waved. She waved back at him in a distracted sort of way that said she’d just as soon never have met him. Since Gregor didn’t blame her for that, he didn’t press the point.

  What he did do was to make his way through the crowd, deliberately and insistently, in Bennis Hannaford’s direction, weaving his way through clots of nuns who sometimes seemed to have been welded together. It was astonishing. None of the nuns was drinking, but all of them were behaving just the way men did at professional conventions, when the liquor flowed like water.

  “Listen,” one of the older nuns was saying as she jabbed a fingertip in the air in front of a younger nun’s face, “I’ve read everything that’s come out in these last few years about school discipline, and I still say nothing is going to get a five-year-old boy to sit in his seat better than putting the fear of God into him.”

  “But Sister,” the younger nun protested, “the problem is that these days you can’t put the fear of God into him. And when you try, his parents sue!”

  “We put up four AIDS hospices in Cleveland last winter,” a cheerfully roly-poly little Sister was saying to another group, “and of course it was a mess with the zoning board, but let me tell you how we got around it—”

  “We sent two of our Sisters to the Jesuit seminary to take courses in theology,” a Sister with a heavy Australian accent was saying, “and they came back talking about Joseph Campbell and the idea of the numinous. What in the name of all that’s holy is the idea of the numinous?”

  “I know who Joseph Campbell is,” one of the other Sisters said.

  “Maybe the idea of the numinous is God,” a third Sister said.

  The Australian Sister looked skeptical. “Maybe the Jesuits are just as crazy as I always thought they were. Honestly. Such intelligent men and always going to extremes. Do you suppose it’s hormonal?”

  “Did you hear the one about the Franciscan and the Dominican who were arguing about who was holier, Francis or Dominic?” This was the second nun, the one who had heard of Joseph Campbell. “They argued and argued and argued, and finally they decided to leave it in the hands of God. So they went to the church and they got down on their knees in front of the altar and they prayed and they prayed and they asked God, ‘Who was holier, Francis or Dominic?’ Suddenly there’s a puff of smoke that smacks into the altar cloth right at the front, and the fathers jump to their feet and run up to see what’s happened, and sure enough there’s a note there where there wasn’t any note before. So they pick it up and read it and it says, ‘All my saints are equally close to my heart. Stop bickering. Signed, God, S.J.’ ”

  Wonderful, Gregor thought. They even had in-jokes. He pushed by two Sisters who were talking away in French (about Quebec, he could pick up that much) and finally found himself within speaking distance of Bennis Hannaford. He gently removed a tiny nun from his path and went to Bennis’s side. The tiny nun—who had to have been ninety—went on lecturing her audience about the proper way to form a First Communion line without a break in her voice of any kind to mark the fact that she’d been lifted into the air and deposited on a different square of rug. There was a poster on a rickety tripod still in his path and Gregor moved that too, in the opposite direction of the tiny nun, so he didn’t hit her in the head with it. The poster showed the Virgin Mary on a cloud floating above the entire world in miniature and then the words:

  MOTHER OF GOD. MOTHER OF THE CHURCH. MOTHER OF US ALL.

  Gregor squinted at the miniature and found the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, and St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. He thought he might have found the Coliseum, but he wasn’t sure.

  “Well,” Bennis said in his ear, “did you come over to talk or to look at posters?”

  “I came to talk. This is a fascinating poster. I think that’s supposed to be the Great Wall of China.”

  “This person says she’s somebody you know. Sister Mary Angelus. She says her name used to be Neila Connelly.”

  “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’r
e 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.”