Murder Superior(16)

The new habits weren’t as good as the old ones for instilling fear into the hearts of silly women, but they were better than no habits at all. Mother Mary Bellarmine stood at her straightest, made her right hand into a fist and pounded on the countertop. If this had been her operation, there would have been a bell for supplicants to ring. The pounding got the attention of a youngish-looking woman at the one desk set apart from the others, and she frowned. Mother Mary Bellarmine was glad to see her. Every once in a while, Mother ran into an office manager of the old school, grey-haired, steely-eyed, single-minded, and packaged into an armored bra and a suit that had emerged into usefulness when Worth was still a boy. There was no telling how encounters with people like that would go. This woman, though, with her fussiness and her slightly desperate air of wanting to be taken for less than forty—this woman would be a piece of cake. Mother Mary Bellarmine planted the palms of her hands on the counter and waited.

The youngish woman stood up, hesitated, shifted back and forth on her feet, looked at the papers on her desk, looked up at Mother Mary Bellarmine, and seemed to shudder. Mother Mary Bellarmine went on staring at her, as if she were the offending statue of St. Catherine in front of the Sisters’ Chapel. The youngish woman took a deep breath and tried to compromise.

“Yes?” she said. “Sister? Can I help you?”

“You can come over here,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “Where I can hear you without straining my ears and talk to you without shouting. What is your name?”

The youngish woman looked back at the papers on her desk again, seemed to sigh, and then began moving toward the counter. “I’m Mrs. Hobart,” she said, hesitating a little on the “Mrs.,” as if she’d wanted to use “Ms.” and thought better of it Mother Mary Bellarmine shot a quick look at the fourth finger of her left hand and found no ring there. Mrs. Hobart saw Mother Mary Bellarmine look and hastily shoved the hand into the pocket of her skirt.

“I’m Mother Mary Bellarmine,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “I’ve come for the records of Elizabeth Johns. She may be listed as Sister Joan Esther. She joined the Order about twenty years ago.”

“Twenty years ago?”

“Eighteen. Sixteen.” Mother Mary Bellarmine waved this away. “She finished her college education and came up to Maryville. While she was here she was still Elizabeth Johns. That would have been twenty years ago. You do keep records for twenty years?”

“Of course we do.”

Mother Mary Bellarmine knew they did. She knew that St. Elizabeth’s kept records for longer than that. There were boxes in the basement of the college convent with paper going back to 1896. Every once in a while, the Order’s newsletter did a piece on it, as if anyone really cared what happened to a lot of silly college girls at the end of the nineteenth century. The Order’s newsletter was called Friends in Divine Grace. It drove Mother Mary Bellarmine to distraction.

“Records,” Mother Mary Bellarmine repeated, refusing to let her mind be sidetracked by trivialities. “Academic records and social records. For Elizabeth Johns. Class of—I don’t know what she was the class of. You’ll have to run that through the computer.”

“I don’t know if we have that on the computer,” Mrs. Hobart protested. “And even if we have it, I don’t know that we can give it to you—”

“Of course you can give it to me. I’m Mother Superior of the entire Southwestern Province.”

“Well, yes, Mother, but you see—”

“And Elizabeth Johns is a Sister now, as I told you. Sister Joan Esther.”

“Yes, Mother, I understand that, but—”

“And I don’t really have a lot of time to waste. I’ve wasted far more of it than I should have already. I want those records and I want them immediately. I need to look over them when I go back to the convent.”

“But Mother—”

“You shouldn’t wear that particular shade of lavender,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “It makes you seem as if you’re trying to look young. You’re not young. You’re a middle-aged woman and you look it.”

Mother Mary Bellarmine had made an art form of creating moments like this, moments when the sudden absoluteness of silence made it clear that people who had not been supposed to be listening had in fact been listening, moments when the psychic electricity went so high it was impossible to ignore the fact that a humiliation had just taken place in public. Mrs. Hobart’s neck went as red as frozen carrots and the redness began to spread. It washed up over her chin and into her cheeks. Her eyes seemed to get twice as large and very wet Mother Mary Bellarmine actually thought she was going to cry.