Murder Superior

by Jane Haddam

  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.”

  “Maybe the money would have been better used for a soup kitchen or something.”

  Catherine Grace snorted. “If it was up to Mary Bellarmine, it would have been used to buy new napkins for the refectory. Honestly, I don’t know how that woman lasted in this Order. This is really a very sensible Order of nuns, you know. And nice, too.”

  “Oh, I know you’re nice,” Sarabess said.

  “It just goes to show you how important it is, having a skill nobody else has. My mother used to tell me that all the time. Lisa Marie, she’d say—that was my name, Lisa Marie, me and fifteen million other girls born in the same year, you don’t know how glad I was to get rid of it—anyway, on she’d go, about how in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king. Was your mother really into Elvis Presley when she was young? I think all the women of that generation were, and it’s made them warped.”

  “Mmmm,” Sarabess said. Actually, she’d been in to Elvis herself, when she was young, which all of a sudden seemed much too long ago to think about. She pitched the folder for St. Elizabeth’s Theater into the pile at the exact center of the desk and said: “So what is it that Mother Mary Bellarmine has? Does she sing plain chant or pray in Aramaic or what?”

  “She builds gymnasiums.”

  “What?”

  “She builds gymnasiums,” Catherine Grace repeated patiently. “She’s built four—except one was an auditorium, I think, but it all comes down to the same thing. She’s really good at figuring out financing and finding architects and scrutinizing budgets and all that sort of thing. I don’t think she would have been appointed a Mother Provincial if she hadn’t been. I mean, she’s no good at managing people, is she?”

  “I guess not,” Sarabess said.

  “She’s looking over the deal for the new field house here while she’s at the convention. I heard Sister Mary Rose and Sister Ann Robert talking about it at lunch yesterday.”

  “Did she build a gymnasium in California?”

  “She built the entire convent. Raised the money for it and everything. Which is part of what makes it all so strange, if you see what I mean, that she’d be so upset about Joan Esther. I mean, Joan Esther decided to leave and made a big point of telling Reverend Mother General that it was because Mother Mary Bellarmine was such a pill, but so what? Joan Esther can’t build gymnasiums. It didn’t get Mother Mary Bellarmine into any trouble.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “It didn’t get her into any real trouble,” Catherine Grace said. “She’s still in charge of the whole Southwestern Province. And it isn’t Joan Esther who’s being asked to sit in on discussions with the cardinal.”

  “Maybe it’s something personal,” Sarabess said.

  “Of course it’s something personal.” Catherine Grace held the folder in the air an
d tilted her head. Sarabess looked up and saw a picture of the Virgin standing on an oversize rose and the words May Is Mary’s Month. “One of the kids in the nursery school wanted the class to give presents to Mary on Mother’s Day,” Catherine Grace said, “but that’s Sister Bartholomew’s operation and you know what Bart’s like. Sensible to the death. I wonder why it is the only people who become nursery-school teachers are the ones who had their imaginations surgically removed at birth.”

  “Maybe you ought to become a nursery-school teacher and correct the problem.”

  “Maybe I ought to learn to stop procrastinating so my posters will come out better. Is this too awful?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “If the Church had had to rely on me, the Sistine ceiling would be full of stick figures.”

  If the Church had had to rely on me, the Sistine ceiling wouldn’t exist at all, Sarabess thought—and then stopped, because it suddenly all seemed so silly. The stacks of files on her desk were listing. She put out her hand and straightened the least stable one. She wondered what would happen if she told Catherine Grace that it was her birthday and just how old she’d become. Instead, she tucked the file folders from the stack she had mentally labeled “on-campus extracurricular organizations” under her. arm and headed for the file room.

  “You know what Sister Thomasina was saying the other day?” Catherine Grace called after her. “She was saying it was all a plot. Somebody’s rigged it so that Mother Mary Bellarmine and that detective from Philadelphia are here at the same time, and then they’re going to bump off Mary Bellarmine because she knows too much—”

  “Knows too much about what?”

  “About everything. I mean, she’s been around forever, hasn’t she? She’s not just a pill. She’s a pill with experience. Anyway, they’re going to bump her off and use that detective as a beard, because if he can’t solve it nobody can, and it will be the perfect murder.”

  Sarabess pulled out the file drawer for “Camp Orgs A-Ar” and said, “I think somebody tried that on him already. I think the guy got caught.”

  “Maybe the guy wasn’t a Catholic. What do you think? He is supposed to be an expert on murder.”

  “I think you’re bored to tears in this job,” Sarabess said.

  “Of course I am,” Catherine Grace said, “but it’s for the greater glory of God.”

  Sarabess was about to answer that it was more likely for the greater glory of the bunch of old white men who ran the richest and most repressive religious organization on earth—but she stopped herself again, just as she had with the comment about the Sistine ceiling. She still had a stack of folders in her arms. She went back to filing them, listening all the while to Catherine Grace bustling around in the main office, probably setting up to paint another poster. Sarabess tried and failed to remember herself ever being that uncomplicatedly happy, even as a tiny child.

  It’s just that I’m feeling very tired, she told herself, putting the folder for the Victorian Society between the ones for the Via Appia Eating Club and Vincent de Paul, Friends of in the drawer marked “Camp Orgs U-W.” It’s just that I’m feeling old and feeling old gets me a little confused.

  Actually, what feeling old really seemed to be doing was giving her one of her periodic beef cravings, so that all she could really think about was a Quarter Pounder with cheese. Sarabess Coltrane was not doctrinaire. If she wanted a Quarter Pounder with cheese, she had one.

  At the moment, she just wished that she could want a murder mystery instead.

  5

  FATHER STEPHEN MONAGHAN HAD always loved everything about being a priest, from the obligatory recitation of the Holy Office to the exaltation of celebrating Mass to the petty details of parish maintenance. He had loved it in the 1950s when he had entered the seminary and everybody seemed to be traveling in lockstep to a drummer pounding faintly against an ancient skin in Rome. He had loved it in the years since the Vatican Council seemed to have reduced everything to chaos and confusion. Father Stephen Monaghan had never been confused. Years ago, he had taken Holy Orders to serve God. He was still serving God. In the old days he had served God in a cassock. Lately he did it in Levi’s 501 jeans. In the old days, it was the better part of pastoral care to seem to be an autocrat—even if, like Father Stephen, you had no talent for it. He had pretended to be an autocrat and further pretended not to notice that his parishioners were pretending right along with him. In the new days it was the better part of pastoral care to pretend to be a democrat. Father Stephen did that a little better than he had played the autocrat, but not much, and his parishioners were still pretending right along with him. It helped that most of his parishioners these days were nuns. Father Stephen Monaghan liked nuns. He liked modern nuns and traditional nuns, tall nuns and short nuns, old nuns and young nuns. They liked him back. If there was one thing Father Stephen Monaghan came close to not liking, it was hearing confessions. Some priests didn’t like hearing confessions because they thought it was boring. Others didn’t like hearing confessions because it got them depressed. Father Stephen didn’t dislike it, exactly, because it was so central to the role of a Catholic priest and he loved being a Catholic priest. It just made him uncomfortable. Sometimes he told himself that this was humility. Too many priests fell victim to the superiority complex engendered by being put in a position where other people were obligated to reverence you, whether you deserved it or not. Father Stephen Monaghan was brought up short every time he had to listen to the earnest struggles of men and women far more dedicated to the search for perfection than he could ever be. This morning, he was listening to the struggles of Sister Domenica Anne, a tall, forceful woman in her late forties with a face like a Valkyrie and hands the size of china saucers. He had known Sister Domenica Anne for years, so he wasn’t afraid of her. He had known from the moment he met her that she was more intelligent than he was, so he was used to it. What he couldn’t get used to was all this pacing that went on now that most confessions took place outside the old confessional box. Father Stephen Monaghan hadn’t been particularly enamored of the old confessional box, but he had to admit now that it had had its advantages for the concentration. Sister Domenica Anne kept bopping back and forth, back and forth, with her arms wrapped across her chest and the veil of her habit whipping in the wind. It was enough to make a seasickness-susceptible man dizzy.

  It was nine thirty on the morning of Monday, May 5, and Father Stephen and Sister Domenica Anne had been out here in the rose garden for over half an hour. The rose garden always reminded Father Stephen of the little patch of flowers his mother had grown every spring in the fifteen-by-fifteen patch of green behind the triple-decker house in New Haven where they had rented the middle floor for all the years of his growing up. Sister Domenica Anne’s confession reminded him of the three other confessions he had heard since just after dinner last night. There are priests who belong to religious orders or who are assigned to orders of nuns on a regular basis. Father Stephen had only begun shepherding religious women when he was sent to St. Elizabeth’s two years ago. He knew very little about religious orders or how they were run. He knew less about the interior lives of nuns. He was, however, a man of great common sense, and he had a hunch. There was about to be a great deal of trouble on the campus of St. Elizabeth’s College.

  Sister Domenica Anne had stopped her pacing momentarily. She had her back to the wind, so that her veil was blowing up behind one shoulder and the long skirt of her modified habit pressed against the backs of her legs. Father Stephen rubbed the side of his bulbous nose and wished he wouldn’t think of her as a harbinger of the return of the Amazons. The Amazons would probably look like wimps next to Sister Domenica Anne.

  “So the thing is,” she was saying, “it’s not the effect on the Cardinal I mind, because I think the Cardinal could use a little shaking up, I think they all could. But we’re in the middle of an enormous project here, costing millions of dollars, and in spite of the fact that we’re not a diocesan instituti
on, we’ve had a lot of help from the Chancery. And I know I’m supposed to have patience, and charity—”

  “You keep talking about how it’s you who’re supposed to have patience and charity,” Father Stephen said. “You never mention Mother Mary Bellarmine. Isn’t she also supposed to have patience and charity?”

  “She isn’t my problem.”

  “What?”

  “Her patience and charity aren’t my problem,” Sister Domenica Anne said helplessly. Then she went back to pacing again. “Father, I know what you’re trying to tell me. I know the woman is impossible. Everybody says the woman is impossible. But it’s maddening. You think you have control of yourself—”

  “Do any of us really have control of ourselves?”

  “—you think you can at least be polite to people, and then, there it is, and you can’t even figure out what happened. I mean that. There I am, standing in a hallway in full view of I don’t know how many students, shouting at this woman, and I don’t even know why. I don’t know why. I don’t know what she did. I’m beginning to think I’m losing my mind.”