Murder Superior

by Jane Haddam

  “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.”

  “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.”

  2

  GREGOR 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 awkwa
rd 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.”