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Murder Superior(2)

By:Jane Haddam


He could see Sherri through the glass door, down the hall in the small office where she sat typing letters with a radio on, monitoring the broadcast. When he said that about the chair, her hair snapped up and she leaned over to speak into her intercom. Now a young boy Norm had never seen before was scurrying in from the wings, dragging an armless side chair that was almost as tall as he was and twice as heavy. Norm kicked open the glass booth door and motioned him inside.

“Just a minute ladies and gentlemen, this is my chair, let me sit down in it. Sherri sweetie didn’t bring it, though. She sent a boy. What she thinks I want with a boy is beyond me. He doesn’t have anywhere near as nice a chest as she does. His is flat What’s your name, kid?”

The kid blushed. “Mike,” he said. “Mike Donnelly.”

“Right. I want Mike off my mike and out of my booth right now or I’ll ask him what he thinks of masturbation and whether he ever commits it. There he goes. Into the hall. Into the sunset. What the hey. Now for that religious news I promised you. The Sisters of Divine Grace—you know, the ones that have that big college and academic conference center out in Radnor—well, the good Sisters have decided to have a convention of their own. That’s what I said. A nun’s convention. The Sisters of Divine Grace is the largest active Order—that’s a Church term for you pagans out there, an active Order goes out and teaches or nurses or whatever instead of staying in a cloister and praying all the time—anyway, they’re the largest active Order in the United States, with three thousand nuns in the contiguous forty-eight and another fifteen hundred between Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. They also have a number of houses—religious houses now, convents to you bozos—in foreign countries, including what’s probably an obligatory one in Rome. Don’t quote me on that. I haven’t been to church since I peeked up Sister Bonaventure’s dress and found out she ran on wheels. Anyway, this convention is going to take place in our own fair ADI, right there in Radnor, for a week beginning the Friday before Mother’s Day and running through the Sunday afterward. The Sisters run Catholic schools for the most part, and this year they’ve coordinated their school schedules to get their vacations all at the same time. And here they’ll be. Little skirts. Little veils. Little prayer books. Thousands of them. Maybe I should have saved the masturbation program for them. What I’m trying to say here is that this is a major invasion, major, so major all the patent leather shoes in Philadelphia may disappear before our eyes in the next two weeks. We’ve got to be prepared. We’ve got to have a war plan. I don’t have one yet, but I’m working on it. Stay tuned. Or take on protective coloration. Anyone wearing a Miraculous Medal with a blue glass bead in it is probably safe. And now, just one more thing before we bring in our first guest.”

Down the hall, Sherri’s head rose slowly and swiveled in his direction. Norman Kevic smiled.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Norm said, “do you know how to save a Japanese from fugu poisoning? No? Well, gooooood.”

Down the hall, Sherri picked up a big glass paperweight and threw it on the floor.





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.