Murder Superior(15)

She stopped at the statue of St. Catherine, looked up into its face, and shook her head. The doctor’s cap looked pasted on—as it probably had been, in the 1960s or the 1970s when Catherine had been granted her honor. It was five minutes after ten in the morning and Mother Mary Bellarmine was at loose ends. It annoyed her. In the old days, ends were never loose. There were strict schedules governing every moment of life from rising at four for office to going to sleep at ten after Compline. In the house she ran in California, life was almost as well regulated. She couldn’t get away with four in the morning or ten at night—the new young nuns would have staged a mutiny; they were impossible these days; they had no sense of religious obedience—but she made it a point to require all her Sisters to be present at prayers and meals, to walk in lines when they were all together, to be accompanied by another Sister any time they left the convent grounds. There were complaints, and Mother Mary Bellarmine knew it. Reverend Mother General wrote her a letter at least once a year suggesting that she relax a little. Mother Mary Bellarmine had never relaxed for a minute in her adult life. She didn’t intend to start now.

The Sisters’ chapel was right next door to the Administration Building, exhibiting the kind of simile in stone that made Mother Mary Bellarmine feel pleased that the world was such a logical and well-ordered place. The Sisters’ Chapel was old, college gothic complete with battlements, as if the good Sisters of Divine Grace would someday be forced to defend themselves by pouring boiling oil on the heads of rampaging peasants. The Administration Building was made of brick and as modern as one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s nightmares. Mother Mary Bellarmine could see through the broad front windows on the first floor to a room of women working at computer stations. Unlike a lot of older nuns in the Order, Mother Mary Bellarmine knew a great deal about computers. She had made herself know. As soon as the first one arrived in her house she had seen that it would change the balance of power forever.

Years ago, when Mother Mary Bellarmine was still a small child named Lucy Deegan growing up in Fresno, California, her mother had told her the story of Fatima, when the Virgin came down on a cloud and spoke to three small children in a field in Portugal. She had gone out into her backyard and waited there for a vision, waited and waited, for weeks while nothing came. When she finally got around to entering the convent, she told that story as anecdotal proof of the reality of her vocation, but she left out the ending, which she knew would disqualify her forever. When the Virgin had failed to appear to Lucy Deegan, Lucy Deegan had decided that there was no Virgin to appear. Religion had never been what Lucy Deegan—or Mother Mary Bellarmine—entered the convent for. In these days of short habits and women astrophysicists, she might never have joined the Order at all. But she probably would have. She’d never been much of a feminist, and career advancement had never been the point.

Mother Mary Bellarmine stopped at the directory just inside the front door of the Administration Building and read: “Registrar’s Office, G42.” The Registrar’s Office would be on this floor, the ground floor, in room 42. Mother Mary Bellarmine looked around her and found rooms 4 and 6. She went farther down the central hall looking to her right and left at rooms 10, 12, and 14. She came to an elaborate intersection and read the directional signs, which seemed to indicate less than exemplary planning on the room numberer’s part. Rooms 24 to 66 and 91 to 95 could be reached by turning right Rooms 29 to 41 and 72 to 94 could be reached by turning left. Since there was nowhere else to go, Mother Mary Bellarmine went straight, watching the numbers on the doors she passed jump around in no discernable order.

Room 42 turned out to be the one at the very end of this hall. It took up what had been intended as three separate rooms and, therefore, sat behind three separate doors, only the last of which was marked. Since the doors on the other side of the corridor were not numbered in the forties, Mother Mary Bellarmine had almost turned around and headed back for the directory. If she had, she would have been in a thoroughly foul mood by the time she actually found the room she was looking for. She was in a thoroughly foul mood now. She let herself in the door at the end of the hall and walked up to the gate that separated the tiny waiting area from the row after row of women typing at desks. Some of them had actual typewriters, but most of them were working at the ubiquitous IBM Workstations, tapping keyboards and peering at screens. It was the sort of scene that annoyed Mother Mary Bellarmine no end, because it all looked so space age while being so firmly grounded in the era of quill pens. Mother Mary Bellarmine had no doubt whatsoever that these women went home and peered anxiously at the astrological charts in their newspapers, thinking the predictions made sense.