by Jane Haddam
2
“…DO YOU KNOW HOW to save a Japanese from fugu poisoning? No? Well, gooooood.”
Sister Scholastica Burke looked vaguely at the radio she had pushed up on the top shelf of the pantry when she’d first come in and frowned. Fugu poisoning. Masturbation. Pantry. Socks? She knew something about fugu, anyway, because they had several pounds of it down in the cold pantry, frozen solid and shipped from Japan, the gift of a friend of the Order’s Tokyo house. Sister Scholastica wasn’t worried about poisoning, though, because along with the fugu—which, if she understood it correctly, was an extremely poisonous fish people wanted to eat anyway—the friend of the Order was sending along his own personal fugu chef. That was supposed to help. Sister Scholastica had decided that the safest course was to skip the fugu altogether, which she intended to do by saying she didn’t like fish. She was a tall, red-haired, solidly middle-class product of traditional Irish-American, Irish-Catholic parents, still a couple of years shy of forty. In the old Church, she would have been a mere foot soldier for many more years to come. This being the new one, she was Mistress of Postulants at the Order’s Motherhouse in Maryville, New York, and one of the two or three women expected to end up Mother General in the long run, as a matter of course. In the short run, Reverend Mother General was just who she had been for the last seven years, and Scholastica had no interest in stepping into her shoes. Sister Scholastica didn’t have much use for anything at the moment. It was just after six o’clock in the morning. She’d been up long enough to chant office with her postulants and unpack seven cases of glazed fruit from Fortnum & Mason, gift of a friend of the Order’s in London. She had three more cases of glazed fruit to go, and then a big pile of something or the other that had been sent from Sydney, Australia. She was dead tired.
She was also feeling a little queasy. There was something about that joke about the fugu that she hadn’t liked, something about the way the man had said it, as if he meant it—but she had to be exaggerating, or exhausted, or something. Overreacting, most likely. Her best friend had been murdered a few years ago, and by someone she would never have expected. It preyed on her mind sometimes. She would have felt better if she’d been in Maryville. It had been Reverend Mother General’s idea to send her down here with her postulants to “help set up.” What Reverend Mother General really wanted her to do was spy. Scholastica wasn’t sure who she was supposed to spy on, or for what Reverend Mother was never that direct unless she was talking to Cardinal Archbishops.
When Fortnum & Mason glazed fruit, they did it right. They glazed entire pears and flawless apricots. Scholastica checked out the apricots, shook her head, and put the box on the nearest clear shelf space she could find. Then she looked across the pantry at Linda Bartolucci. Linda Bartolucci was a postulant, complete with black dress and little short veil. She was supposed to be unloading a large crate full of pâté de foie gras from France. Instead, she was sitting on the crate, reading something. Linda Bartolucci was always reading something. If she’d stayed in the world, she would have turned into one of those thick-ankled women who buried themselves in romance novels on the bus.
Stayed in the world. Where had that phrase come from? How long ago was Vatican II?
Scholastica wiped her hands on the sides of her habit skirt and said, “Linda, for heaven’s sake, at least pretend to get some work done.”
“Work?” Linda looked confused. Then she flushed. “Oh. Sister. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Scholastica told her, “just unload. We’ve got Mass at seven thirty.”
“I know. I just—I found this, you see. It’s a schedule.”
“Schedule?”
“For the convention. You know. Somebody was talking about it at dinner last night—I don’t remember who. But they’re putting a schedule together and they’re going to have it printed up and it’s going to be just like a real convention.”
“But they haven’t printed it up,” Scholastica pointed out “That’s not until next week.”
“Well this isn’t printed. It’s typed and this is a photocopy anyway. I mean, it wouldn’t be a secret, would it? The schedule?”
“I suppose not.” Actually, although Scholastica had heard about the printed schedule, she hadn’t given it much thought, because thinking about it made her uncomfortable. It was odd the way that worked. Scholastica had joined the Order just far enough back to have gone through formation under the old dispensation—long habits, long silences and all. She remembered the days when a meeting, no matter how large, would have had to depend on daily announcements in refectory for a schedule. It made her very nervous to think that the Order was now modern enough to go to the expense of getting schedules printed in advance. And yet, there were dozens of more substantive changes, even a handful of drastic reversals, that didn’t bother her at all. Big clunky shoes replaced by these cute little tie things from Hush Puppies. A little Office exchanged for a revamped Divine Office that was chanted in English instead of Latin. Sisters who carried money and wandered around by themselves without supervision or companions. Sister Alice Marie said the only thing she couldn’t get used to in the changes in the Order since Vatican II was the withdrawal of the rule that every Sister had to take at least one spoonful of every food served at every meal, personal taste notwithstanding. Sister Alice Marie loathed macaroni and cheese. Under the new rules, she didn’t have to eat it. She ate it anyway, because she couldn’t make herself stop.
Linda was holding out the photocopied schedule. Scholastica took it and looked down the long list of items meant to span more than a week. Opening reception, Friday, May 16. “Spirituality and the African Cultural Tradition,” a seminar, given by Sister Francis Mary, Mistress of Novices, St. Mary’s Provincial House, Nairobi, Monday, May 19. Picnic, Wednesday, May 21. Scholastica handed the schedule back.
“Too much to do,” she said, “and I won’t get to do much of it anyway, because I’ll be too busy chasing your lot around this campus. Will you please get back to the pate? If you make me unload it, I won’t let you eat it.”
“Virginia Richards said that stuff was made out of goose livers,” Linda said. “I don’t want to eat it.”
“Work,” Scholastica told her.
Linda held the schedule out again. “It’s the one under Friday I’m interested in. The one at the bottom, for the evening session. See? ‘Gregor Demarkian: Investigating the Catholic Murder.’ See?”
“What?”
“ ‘Gregor Demarkian: Investigating the Catholic Murder.’ It’s right here. Didn’t you know about it?”
“Of course I knew about it,” Scholastica said. That was half true. She had known Gregor Demarkian was to speak. She had suggested it to Reverend Mother General in the first place, and she had telephoned Gregor herself to extend the invitation. She had not, however, suggested the title, “Investigating the Catholic Murder.” She couldn’t imagine who had. She couldn’t imagine what Gregor Demarkian was going to think about it when he heard about it, either. The best she could hope for was that he’d be polite. She took the schedule out of Linda’s hand again, read the offending line, and sighed. “Incredible,” she said.
“I was thinking,” Linda said.
Scholastica bit back the urge to tell her it was a bad idea. “About what?”
“Well, about this Gregor Demarkian. He’s the private detective, isn’t he? The one the Inquirer calls The Armenian-American Hercule Poirot’?”
“Yes, he’s the one. But I don’t think he likes to be called that, Linda.”
“I won’t call him that to his face. I was just saying, he’s the one who solved the murder of that postulant that Shelley Corrigan’s got the room of now, isn’t he?”
“You’ve figured out which room Bridget Ann Reilly was in? What do you do, hold séances?”
“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 Minu
tes. 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 Doctor 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 o
f 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.
