by Jane Haddam
Gregor got a little ahead of Reverend Mother General and went into the kitchen. It was much as he had expected, the picture of church basement kitchens everywhere, in spite of the fact that this was not the basement of a church. It was a little more elaborate than it might have been, but just as spare, with long plastic-topped counters and laminated shelves, mismatched as to color and material, as if whoever had put them in had consciously decided not to take trouble with what nobody in the public was ever supposed to see. Gregor noticed a tall door at the back with a heavy metal handle and asked the nun whose face was familiar from last night’s news broadcasts, “Is that the freezer?”
Sister Agnes Bernadette nodded.
Gregor went over to the freezer and peered inside. It was a standard commercial walk-in freezer, the kind of thing small-town hamburger joints put in as a matter of routine. The air inside was frigid. There were a pile of large boxes on the floor in one corner with Japanese characters written across them in red and black. Gregor nodded perfunctorily in their direction and then stepped back out of the cold. He closed the freezer door and turned to look at the people who were waiting for him.
“Well,” he said. “Let’s start from the beginning, shall we? I take it you’re Sister Agnes Bernadette.”
Sister Agnes Bernadette was near tears. Gregor had the feeling that Sister Agnes Bernadette had been near tears since she’d been arrested, and maybe before. Sister Agnes Bernadette was the kind of woman who was often near tears. “Oh, Mr. Demarkian,” she sniffled. “I’m so glad you’re here. I’m so glad you changed your mind—”
“Don’t be glad yet,” Gregor told her. “I haven’t done anything. I just want to get a few things straight. Is that all right?”
“Of course it’s all right,” Reverend Mother General said.
“Let’s start with how you and Sister Joan Esther ended up here putting chicken liver pâté into ice sculptures. Was Sister Joan Esther assigned to help you? Was it known in advance that she’d been doing this job? Was this an organized thing?”
“Oh, no.” Sister Agnes Bernadette shook her head. “I was supposed to do it all on my own—the pâté, that is, and the ice sculptures. I mean, the ice sculptures were already done. I did those last week when I had a spare minute from the other cooking, which wasn’t easy to find, you know. And then yesterday morning I was supposed to come down here and make chicken liver pâté in the food processor and use the ice cream scoop to fill the heads, but when I did one of my statues was broken—”
“Broken?” Gregor asked.
“With the head and the feet knocked off,” Mother Andrew Loretta said. “Mr. Yakimoto—oh, good, here comes Mr. Yakimoto now.”
Mr. Yakimoto was a small Oriental man with wild eyes. He had been angry on Sunday and he seemed to be angry still. He took up a position near Mother Andrew Loretta that suggested that he’d just as soon take off for Borneo, or go into a fit that would leave more than a statue in pieces on the ground. The door to the corridor opened behind him. Gregor and Reverend Mother General looked up at the same time, just catching Mother Mary Bellarmine as she slipped in behind Mr. Yakimoto. Reverend Mother General started to say something sharp, but Gregor stopped her.
“It’s just as well Mother Mary Bellarmine is here,” he said. “We can get to phase two without having to wait for her to come. Now. For phase one. Let me go over this carefully. Sister Agnes Bernadette, you came down here to work on the chicken liver pâté when?”
“About an hour before the reception,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said. “I went to a late Mass, you see, and then I had other things to do, and really, this thing with the chicken liver pâté isn’t supposed to be very complicated. And then I came down here and opened the freezer and there it was. There they were. Mr. Yakimoto and the statue. Broken.”
“Mr. Yakimoto didn’t mean to break the statue,” Mother Andrew Loretta said. “It was an accident.”
Mr. Yakimoto began to speak very rapidly in Japanese. Mother Andrew Loretta nodded at him vexedly. “I’m sorry, Mr. Demarkian, I know we talked about this yesterday and I didn’t know anything, but we have all been asking around. We really are trying. According to Mr. Yakimoto, what happened was that he came downstairs yesterday afternoon to get the fugu out to prepare it for serving. It had to be defrosted. The first thing he noticed was that the top box in the stack had been cut into—slit open is the way he’s been putting it—”
Mr. Yakimoto jumped in with another cascade of Japanese.
“Yes,” Mother Andrew Loretta said. “One of the fish was gone, missing, and Mr. Yakimoto was rightly very concerned about it. He hoped that it might be still stored somewhere in the freezer, and so he began to look through everything there, and after a while he began to get a little excited—”
“I know exactly what happened,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said. “I get that way all the time myself. You try to fix things and you try to fix things and after a while you just get crazy.”
“One of the statues dropped when he was looking behind it,” Mother Andrew Loretta said, “and at just that point Sister Agnes Bernadette came in, and he tried to get across to her how serious a thing had happened, but of course she doesn’t speak Japanese, so he decided to go out and try to find one of the Sisters here from Japan, but they were all in chapel—”
“And in the meantime, I was getting frantic,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said, “because it was getting late. So I went rushing out into the corridor and there was Joan Esther—”
“Did that make sense?” Gregor asked. “Was that someplace Sister Joan Esther should have been?”
“It made sense for anybody to be anyplace yesterday,” Sister Scholastica put in. “There was so much going on.”
“I think Joanie was doing a little hiding out,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said. “I think it had all begun to get to her, and I couldn’t blame her for that because it had all begun to get to me, too. Nuns, nuns, nuns. It’s all very strange.”
“It used to be normal,” Reverend Mother General said.
Agnes Bernadette ignored her. “Joanie was there so I got hold of her and dragged her in, and she was one of those take-charge people so it was all right. She saw what the problem was right away and started to help me—to put the statue back together, I mean. And she did, too. The statue did get put back together.”
“What about after that?” Gregor asked. “What about putting the balls of chicken liver pâté in the statues’ heads?”
“Joanie didn’t do that,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said. “I did that myself. Joanie got the trays set up for me instead.”
“All right,” Gregor said, “what about those trays? Who decided who was going to carry which one where?”
Sister Agnes Bernadette looked confused. “Nobody decided anything. We got the trays all set up, but there weren’t any differences in the sculptures. Then we needed people to carry them, so Joanie went up to the stairs and opened the door and called up, and eventually somebody answered and she got some Sisters to come down and help. Then we each of us took a tray and went trooping upstairs.”
“In no particular order,” Gregor said.
That’s right,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said.
“So it was just coincidence that Sister Joan Esther ended up carrying the ice sculpture that was destined to be placed on the table assigned to the one woman she disliked most in this Order.”
Sister Agnes Bernadette looked confused. “Mother Mary Deborah? Joanie didn’t dislike Mother Mary Deborah. Nobody dislikes Mother Mary Deborah.”
“It was Sister Mary Sebastian who brought the ice sculpture to Mother Mary Deborah,” Reverend Mother General said.
“But that can’t be right,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said. “I know I’m not a very organized person, Reverend Mother, but I can count.”
“She got called out of the line,” Sister Scholastica said suddenly. “I’d forgotten all about it. It was only for a second—”
“I called her out of the line,” Mothe
r Mary Bellarmine said. “Her veil was unfastened. It looked like a handkerchief stuck to her head.”
“What was she supposed to do about it with a tray in her hands?” Scholastica demanded.
“Oh, dear,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said. “I see what happened. I see where Joanie ended up.”
“Where Sister Joan Esther ended up was the grave,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said crisply. “She ended up there early and badly, as might have been expected. I came down to watch you, Mr. Demarkian. I came down to see how a great detective works.”
At the moment, Gregor didn’t feel much like a great detective. He felt like a small boy being scolded by an adult he has no respect for. He looked Mother Mary Bellarmine up and down and considered his possible moves.
“It occurs to me,” he said, “that you might have been in a position to see something nobody else did. You did come down here in the middle of the reception, didn’t you?”
“Well, yes,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “I did. How did you know that?”
Gregor hadn’t known it. He’d known Mother Mary Bellarmine had had to go somewhere to change after her run-in with Nancy Hare, and he’d hoped it was down here, and God had smiled.
He said only, “I saw what happened, in the reception line, with Mrs. Hare. Do you know why she threw, a vase of roses on you?”
“I haven’t the least idea,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said.
“Neither does anybody else,” Gregor told her. “Well, we’ve got Mrs. Hare coming in to talk, maybe she’ll tell us. Let’s get back to you. It was a pretty violent attack.”
“Was it? I’ve known Nancy Hare for years. Since the days when she was Nancy Callahan and I was teaching at this college. She’s always been violent—emotionally.”
“She was being more than emotionally violent, yesterday.”
“I noticed.”
“She tore your habit.”
Mother Mary Bellarmine shrugged. “My habit got torn, yes. I don’t remember Nancy tearing it deliberately. I suppose she must have.”
“She had to have,” Gregor said. “It couldn’t have simply snagged on a stray nail. It was protected by your collar. Look.”
Gregor turned to Sister Scholastica—for some reason, she seemed a more likely candidate for this demonstration than Mother Mary Bellarmine or Reverend Mother General, and Gregor was terrified that Sister Agnes Bernadette would blush—and lifted up the long capelike collar until it exposed the top of the scapular. The scapular fit closely around the front of the neck and was fastened at the back with a small button. Gregor let Scholastica’s collar fall again.
“Your collar wasn’t torn,” he pointed out “Only your scapular was.”
“Yes,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “But what I really remember is being so wet.”
“So once you were wet what did you do?”
“I went downstairs and changed. We store habits in a room in this basement, I don’t remember why, it goes back to the days when St. Elizabeth’s was still building buildings or something of the sort. At any rate, there are supplies down here and I came to get them.”
“Did you go into the kitchen?” Gregor asked.
“I had no need to go into the kitchen.”
“Did you see Sister Joan Esther? Or Sister Agnes Bernadette?”
“No.”
“Did you see anybody else?”
Mother Mary Bellarmine considered this. “Sister Catherine Grace and that foul woman from the Registrar’s Office were in the plant room. The woman whose name I can never remember who’s still some kind of hippie—”
“Sarabess Coltrane,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said. “She’s really very nice, even if she is something of an anachronism.”
“She’s totally ridiculous,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “They were doing something with flowers, Ms. Coltrane and Sister Catherine Grace. That was on my way down. On my way up I saw that man. The one who makes all the racial jokes on the radio.”
“Norman Kevic?” Gregor was surprised.
“That’s it.” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “I remember wondering what he thought he was doing, wandering around like that. Of course, he’s got a tremendous financial interest in the field house—”
“I wouldn’t call it a financial interest,” Reverend Mother General said.
“Then let’s just say he’s got a lot of money invested,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said, “and he’s got stock in Henry Hare’s companies and I’ve been looking over those books and I don’t like them. You know I don’t like them, Reverend Mother. I’ve been saying so for a week.”
“Yes,” Reverend Mother General said. “You have been saying so for a week.”
“He was skulking around down there, looking into cupboards, doing I don’t know what. If I hadn’t been in a hurry, I would have demanded an explanation. As it is, you’re going to have to get an explanation directly from him.”
“I’ll go tell His Eminence,” Sister Scholastica said.
Gregor beat his finger against the scarred surface of one of the wooden tables. “Go get His Eminence,” he agreed, “but while we’re waiting for the delivery of Nancy Hare and Norman Kevic, I’d like to talk to—what are their names again? Sarah Elizabeth—”
“Sarabess Coltrane,” Reverend Mother General corrected. “And Sister Catherine Grace.”
“I’m on my way,” Sister Scholastica said.
“I don’t see that he’s doing anything we couldn’t have done ourselves,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said.
Gregor was glad to see that even Reverend Mother General herself ignored that.
Chapter 6
1
WHEN NORMAN KEVIC GOT off the phone with Sarabess Coltrane, he spent a minute listening to Roger Miller singing “My Uncle Used to Love Me But She Died,” another minute contemplating the buying of a pack of Benson & Hedges Menthols, and a third minute deciding there was nothing for it but to go out to St. Elizabeth’s College. By then, Roger Miller had stopped singing and Steve was pacing back and forth outside the booth, absolutely furious, which was what Steve always was when Norm did the least little thing out of the ordinary. In this case, “out of the ordinary” meant playing music instead of talking for the last two and a half minutes of his show. Norm had done that because he’d wanted to talk to Sarabess and because, for God’s sake, he’d been talking on the air now for over a decade and you’d think the great American public would be sick of it by now. Steve was not sick of it, but Steve was not one of his most faithful listeners, either. Steve only turned on the radio when somebody warned him that the worst was about to happen. In Steve’s mind, “the worst” was anything that caused an advertiser to pick up the phone and call the station. In Norm’s mind, “the worst” was anything that might cause the Philadelphia Inquirer to say he was losing his edge.
But he was losing his edge. That was why the night with Sarabess had worked out the way it had, instead of ending up in bed, which was where Norman thought nights with women should always end up. He hadn’t stayed up talking until six o’clock in the morning since he was in college. He had never stayed up talking until six o’clock in the morning with a girl. He still wasn’t sure what it meant. He was just glad that Sarabess had felt perfectly comfortable calling him up in the middle of the morning. He wasn’t entirely sure why.
“Listen,” she had said, when he’d put Roger Miller on and signed himself off and guaranteed Steve’s bad mood for the rest of the day. Or maybe the rest of the week. “He’s here, that Demarkian man, and he’s asking the oddest questions. It’s like he’s psychic.”
“Psychic how?” Norm had asked her. “Did you tell him anything?”
“I didn’t tell him anything,” Sarabess said, “but Catherine Grace did. I’d forgotten all about Catherine Grace. She’s such an innocent.”
“She’s a child.”
“Well, maybe. But here he is, and he’s odd. Do you know what he did just a minute ago?”
“No.”
“He went down
to the potting room and asked me to show him how we put the flowers in the vases before we put the vases on the table—isn’t that odd? I mean, how many ways can you put flowers on the table?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then he put a little bunch of daisies in a vase just the way you’re supposed to, with a little water at the bottom and then he held the vase in the air, and then do you know what he did?”
“No.”
“He turned the vase over on the one tablecloth we have down there. I mean, it’s an awful tablecloth and really old and stained and everything, but of course now it’s completely ruined.”
“Why?”
“Because of the plant food they put in the water for it, or whatever it is. Don’t you know about that? At St. Elizabeth’s you never fill vases just with water. The flowers die too soon. You mix in a little plant food and put that in, and the only problem with that is that the plant food turns everything it touches green—”
“What?”
“Green,” Sarabess said impatiently. “Norm, are you all right? I heard Mr. Demarkian talking to the Archbishop—the Archbishop is here, as if things weren’t bad enough—and they were saying they were going to call you up and ask you to come here. To talk, you know. For questioning.”
“I was questioned by the police,” Norm said quickly.
“Well, now you’re going to be questioned by the Catholic Church. Norm, I’m beginning to get very, very—I don’t know. But I am. Are you going to go into hiding?”
“Of course I’m not going to go into hiding,” Norm said. “I’ll be there in less than half an hour.”
“You will?”
“Of course I will. I just have a couple of things I have to do first.”
“I’m glad you’re coming,” Sarabess said. “I want you to come. When he was asking questions like that, I didn’t know what to do.”
“Mmm,” Norm said.
“He’s a very strange man,” Sarabess said. “He keeps walking around muttering to himself that he needs a knife. Sometimes I wonder if he isn’t a little cracked. Crazy, I mean. Dangerous.”
