Murder Superior

by Jane Haddam

  “Of course not. That wouldn’t be Christian. But we know, Sister. I mean, we’d have to. It was in all the papers.”

  It had also been in People magazine and on 60 Minutes. Scholastica supposed the girl had a point. Murders in convents did not happen every day, never mind right before St. Patrick’s Day, and the country had a certain amount of interest. Excessive, morbid, and totally out of line, according to Reverend Mother General, but interest nonetheless.

  Scholastica stowed away a box of glazed chestnuts. “If you want to know if you can go to hear his speech, you can. It’s being set up so that everyone can hear him. In the main auditorium. The one they use for convocation.”

  “Oh, I know about that. It says so right here. What I want to know is…”

  “What?”

  “Well.”

  “Well, what?”

  “Well,” Linda said, “I thought, I mean, since he is in the business of investigating murders, not giving talks, and the Order had all that trouble before, you know, I thought maybe he was coming out here because, you know, because something was wrong.”

  “Wrong? Linda, what are you talking about?”

  “Wrong,” Linda said doggedly. “You know. Maybe there have been threats, or someone’s been acting funny, or you—”

  “Don’t. Don’t say ‘you know’ even one more time.”

  “I didn’t mean to get you angry, Sister. I just—I mean, there was his name, and there were all the things they said about him when Bridget Ann Reilly died, and now here we all are together like this, like sitting ducks if some nut out there wanted to, ah, you—um—”

  “Never mind,” Scholastics said. The next box had glazed pineapples in it. “Look,” she said. “Nothing is wrong, except for the title they’re giving his speech, which he isn’t going to like. But there isn’t anything wrong. That’s the point.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “All that happened last year at the Motherhouse,” Scholastica said slowly, “and we tried to get the information out to as many people as possible, about what happened, and how it happened, and how it was cleared up, but it isn’t always that easy. And so we thought—since Gregor is right here in Philadelphia anyway—we thought that we’d ask him to come and tell the Sisters everything they could possibly want to know, and then everybody would calm down a little. At last, if you ask me.”

  “You called him ‘Gregor,’ ” Linda said. “Is he a friend of yours?”

  “Not really. He asked me to call him Gregor.”

  “Will he have slides with pictures of blood?”

  Scholastica stood. “Go back to work,” she said. “Sometimes I wish we still maintained the old discipline. I’d have you begging your soup at dinner for a week on the strength of that. What kind of a question—”

  “Maybe somebody will get murdered,” Linda said mischievously. “Maybe one of the postulants will just get fed up, and then Mother Mary Bellarmine—”

  “Linda.”

  “You’d kill her yourself if you got half a chance,” Linda said. “I heard you say so to Sister Alice Marie.”

  “I think in the old days, eavesdropping got you thrown in a dungeon.”

  “I’d just rattle my chains and sing Madonna songs at the top of my lungs absolutely off-key until nobody could stand it anymore and they had to let me out.”

  “Elvis Presley. Madonna hadn’t been invented yet. Get back to work.”

  “Yes, Sister.”

  For once, Linda seemed to mean that “Yes, Sister.” She bent over the box at her feet and began to take out tins of pâté de foie gras. Scholastica watched her for a moment, then went back to work herself.

  It was odd, she thought again, what you minded and what you didn’t. Short habits. Dead postulants. Knowing a private detective well enough to call him by his first name. It was ridiculous to take anything Linda Bartolucci said seriously. Linda didn’t know how to be serious.

  The pantry opened onto a small back hall. Scholastica drifted out there, to the window that overlooked the kitchen garden and the narrow stone path down to the Virgin’s grotto, erected by nuns of a different era to celebrate the piety of a different century. Sister Scholastica Burke was not one of those people who pined for the resurrection of the Tridentine Church. As annoying as the post-Vatican II Church might be in many of its particulars, she found it preferable to what the old Church had degenerated into in the years just before the change. Still, sometimes she wondered if it might have been better if nothing had changed at all. Postulants didn’t end up murdered in the old days, and nuns didn’t get entangled in murder investigations. That was an experience Sister Scholastica Burke would just as soon never have to repeat.

  The path to the grotto was cracked. Thick shoots of bright green grass popped through it in unexpected places, making it look decorated. Scholastica told herself she had to stop being silly. Gregor Demarkian didn’t cause murders. He only investigated them. It was idiotic to feel that something awful was going to happen just because he was going to show up to give a talk.

  In the old days, Sister Scholastica’s spiritual adviser would have called what she was thinking a form of superstition, and sent her off to meditate on the true nature of the risen Christ. If she went looking for a spiritual adviser now, he’d probably nod a lot and insist on helping her to explore her feelings. That was something else to be said in favor of the pre-Vatican II Church.

  Scholastica turned around and went back into the pantry. Pre or post, it didn’t matter much.

  These boxes still had to be unpacked.

  3

  SISTER JOAN ESTHER HAD a lot of unpacking to do herself, although not of boxes. What she had to unpack were suitcases, and right now, standing in the main foyer of St. Elizabeth’s Convent, she thought she might have all the suitcases on earth. St. Elizabeth’s Convent was the house that had been built to house the Sisters who ran this small college, the only one in the United States run by the Sisters of Divine Grace. It was a big old house, drafty and damp, erected when the supply of vocations had seemed endless and the supply of devout young Catholics looking for a liberal arts education had seemed even larger than that. Looking at places like this made Sister Joan Esther’s head ache. She wasn’t very old—she had been in Sister Scholastica’s formation class; she had entered the convent just out of college while Scholastica had entered out of high school—but she was old enough to remember not only flowing habits but Saturday afternoon confessional lines that extended all the way to the church foyer, parishes so dedicated to the Catholic way of life they provided parish school educations to every child of every member free of charge, devotion to Mary so strong that every young girl dreamed of becoming a nun. If Sister Joan Esther had been asked to name what had changed with Vatican II, she would have said “attitude.” Attitude. All the rest of it—the changes in the Mass; the new habits; the bishops who no longer wanted anyone to kiss their rings—seemed entirely superfluous to her. As far as Sister Joan Esther was concerned, the Church could decree that Mass should be said with the priest standing on his head. That wouldn’t matter. What did matter was how many people took it all seriously, from the Virgin Birth to the Resurrection to the establishment of Peter in Rome. What did matter was that, these days, nobody took it seriously at all.

  That wasn’t fair. That was just the kind of sweeping generalization Joan Esther had been at such great pains to train her students out of, back when she had had students. Sister Joan Esther had a doctorate in theology from Notre Dame. For many years, she had been one of the shining lights in the theology department at this college. It had, been Aquinas College then, like a hundred other small Catholic colleges across the country. With feminism had come a name change, and it was now St. Teresa of Avila. Sister Joan Esther liked St. Teresa of Avila. She even credited St. Teresa with giving her her first small feminist insight, at the age of nine. Those were the days when Teresa of Avila and St. Catherine of Siena were described in the missal as having done work “equal to a Doct
or of the Church,” which always made Joan Esther wonder why, if they were equal, they weren’t doctors. Apparently, it had made other people wonder too. One of the first things that had happened in the wake of Vatican II was that Teresa and Catherine were named Doctors of the Church. You couldn’t blame Vatican II for everything.

  You couldn’t blame Vatican II for a radical loss of—what?

  Every one of the suitcases on the floor was black. Every one had an oaktag tag tied to its handle with a name printed on it with black felt pen. Every one contained five sets of clean underwear, five pairs of clean black panty hose, two plain white clean cotton nightgowns, one terry-cloth bathrobe, two terry-cloth bath towels, a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, a scentless stick deodorant, and a spare habit. Sisters these days could have other sorts of personal items—Stephen King novels and miniature cassette players with Beach Boys tapes were big—but no Sister would pack any such thing in a suitcase meant to be unpacked by another Sister. Sister Joan Esther had asked to be in charge of the unpacking. It was a good job for someone who wanted to be left strictly alone. Unfortunately, it was also going to be unutterably boring.

  At one side of the foyer was a wide staircase, leading first to a landing and then to the second floor. Mother Mary Bellarmine was standing on the landing with her arms folded across her chest, looking down in disapproval. She had been there since just after Joan Esther had come in—it had to have been coincidence, in spite of the fact that Joan Esther kept feeling that it had been meant—and she was standing there still, not saying hello, not saying anything, just giving off a miasma of poison fog that filled the foyer and made Joan Esther’s lungs feel ready to crack. Of course, Mother Mary Bellarmine didn’t really give off a miasma of poison fog. Only the Devil could do that, assuming he existed. Joan Esther no longer found it easy to assume that he existed. She wondered if she ever had.

  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, s
teep, 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.

  4

  SARABESS 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.