“I suppose it will,” Reverend Mother said. “Do you mean you think they’ll treat me as a suspect? Because he was my brother, I mean, and he died in the barn.”
“There’s that, yes,” Beata said, “but it really isn’t the most difficult thing. I doubt if they’ll seriously consider you a suspect. You had no reason to murder him, not even in regard to the property, because the property will still be held in escrow even with your brother gone. I will say, though, that they’re going to have a fit—”
“—Sister.”
“Sorry, Reverend Mother, but there’s almost no other word for it. They’re going to be very upset when they find out about the property and your connection to Drew, and they’re going to want to know why I didn’t say anything about either last night. And we can’t very well say I didn’t know, because I saw Neil Savage on behalf of the convent just a couple of weeks ago.”
“They’ll think we’re hiding something,” Reverend Mother said.
“I doubt it, Reverend Mother, although they’ll say they do. The thing is, they’re going to want to search the monastery.”
“You mean search the barn?”
“No, Reverend Mother, I mean search the monastery. The whole thing. Including the enclosure.”
“But they can’t search the enclosure,” Reverend Mother said. “Lay people aren’t allowed in the enclosure.”
“I wouldn’t really want to be the one who tried to sell that to a judge in Philadelphia at the moment,” Beata said. “Reverend Mother, you’ve got to understand that everybody is going to be acting under constraint. There was just a huge priest pedophilia scandal in this city, not that long ago. The police department and the mayor’s office both got hit with accusations that they’d given the Catholic Church special treatment and that as a result of that, many more children were harmed than would have been otherwise. They can’t be seen to be giving us special treatment in this case.”
“But we’re not talking about special treatment,” Reverend Mother said.
“Drew wasn’t killed in the monastery, he was killed in the barn. The barn is out there. There’s a big wall around the monastery and the barn is on the other side of it.”
“So is the monastery’s front door,” Beata said. “You must realize that police procedure would demand they search the premises here, all of them, if this wasn’t a monastery. There’d be no question, and no trouble getting a judge to sign the warrant. And you have to understand that the Cardinal isn’t likely to be much help. He was brought in here to fix things after the scandal. He’s not going to want to cause another scandal by insisting that the monastery enclosure not be violated.”
“But the police make exceptions for religion all the time,” Reverend Mother said. “I mean, well, think of it—”
“Here’s a reason to watch the news more often, Reverend Mother. The last district attorney wanted to end the practice of excusing priests from testifying to what they’d heard in confession. It’s a new world out there. At the very least, they’re going to have to insist on searching your office and your cell, because you will be a suspect. In the end, they’re going to have to insist on searching everything. There’s no way around it. If you did kill your brother—”
“—Sister.”
“If you did, you could have hidden any number of things in this building, anywhere in it. You have free run of the place. You’ve got more than that. You’ve got control of the place. You could have concealed pills, poison, anything, anywhere around here.”
“Did they say where they thought I’d have gotten the poison in the first place?”
“They didn’t say anything about you and poison. I’m just telling you the way they’re going to think. And the poison they were talking about yesterday was arsenic. It’s easy enough to get. It’s what’s in rat poison. I think we have dozens of boxes of the stuff in the cellar.”
“I don’t think we have dozens of boxes of anything in the cellar,” Reverend Mother said, “but I take your point. You do realize what this means, don’t you? They’ll break the enclosure. The monastery will have to be reconsecrated.”
“It can be done.”
“Oh, of course it can,” Reverend Mother said, “but it’s an enormous problem. And then, what about the nuns? We’ll have to send them off someplace, or their own vows will—”
“No,” Beata said. “I don’t think so. It will look like—”