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Murder Superior(22)

By:Jane Haddam


“Get married again,” Father Tibor Kasparian would have told him. “Marry Bennis,” the women said—including Donna Moradanyan, Lida Arkmanian, Hannah Krekorian, Sheila Kashinian, Mary and Deborah Ohanian, Linda and Sylvia Melajian, Christie and Melissa Oumoudian…

“Get a private detective’s license,” Bennis Hannaford said.

Bennis’s door had a single chiffon heart on it, meaning she had come out early this morning and taken off whatever else Donna had decided to put up. Gregor pressed the buzzer on the door frame and waited.

“Come right in,” a voice called from inside. “I’ve got goddamned plaster of paris in my goddamned hair.”

Of course she had goddamned plaster of paris in her goddamned hair, Gregor thought. She’s always got something going on that makes no sense and interferes fatally with whatever she’s supposed to do next What Bennis was supposed to do next was to accompany him to this party at St. Elizabeth’s College, where the Sisters of Divine Grace would open their first-ever nuns’ convention. When Gregor had originally been told about the nuns’ convention, he’d thought it was the first ever, but that had turned out not to be the case. The Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondolet had held one in St. Louis back in 1988.

Bennis Hannaford’s foyer was taken up in large part by a plaster of pans model of Queen Zahvea’s castle from Sorcerers of Zed, Witches of Zedalia. What Bennis Hannaford did for a living was write sword and sorcery fantasy novels, of which Sorcerers of Zed, Witches of Zedalia was the seventh or eighth, Gregor couldn’t remember which. He wasn’t disturbed by the castle because it had been where it was now for quite a while. Bennis had constructed it and then stashed it in the foyer, meaning to throw it out or donate it to one of the fan organizations. That she had never gotten around to either was entirely typical. One of the scale-model knights had fallen off his horse. Gregor put him back on and called out.

“Where are you? Why are you making plaster of paris?”

There was a clank of pots and pans from the kitchen and a not-so-muffled curse. Bennis’s language was appalling, and it didn’t help any when she told Gregor it was the result of all those expensive girls’ boarding schools she’d been sent to. The pots stopped clanging and the door to the kitchen swung open, revealing Bennis in her spring and summer uniform of jeans that had seen better days in 1966, T-shirt that had last been clean for Richard Nixon’s first inaugural, and hair that had started out tied into a knot at the top of her head but was now someplace else. Bennis Hannaford was a beautiful woman when she wanted to be, but Gregor had noticed that she very rarely wanted to be.

“Well,” he said when he saw her, “you don’t look ready to go to a party.”

She made a face at him. “I don’t have to look ready to go to a party. We don’t have to be there until quarter to one and it’s not even eleven thirty. Oh, by the way. Sister Scholastica called. She wanted to make sure we knew where we were going.”

“Do we?”

“I gave a talk at St. Elizabeth’s once. ‘The Woman Writer in Fantasy and Science Fiction.’ I got a lot of people upset. Come into the kitchen. I’ve got to finish this idiotic model today or it won’t be ready on time.”

Gregor was about to ask finished on time for what—when Bennis made models to help her with her books, they didn’t have any on time to be finished for—but he didn’t. He merely followed Bennis’s slight five-foot-four-inch frame into the kitchen and dusted off a chair to sit down on. Bennis’s apartment was always an unholy mess. The cleaning lady who came in twice a week couldn’t seem to get it straightened out, and neither could the cadres of older women who periodically showed up to “help Bennis out.” Stack Bennis’s belongings neatly away in closets and drawers and they came right back out again, springing into the air as soon as one’s back was turned, as if all the storage spaces in the apartment were inhabited by evil genies with ambitions to be the spirits of jack-in-the-box toys. The same held true for dust. It didn’t matter how diligently one wiped and polished. It didn’t matter how many expensive sprays one used to put a shine on the woodwork. The shine would be gone and the dust would be back in less time than it took to put water on to boil for a celebratory cup of coffee.

The plaster of paris model Bennis was making seemed to be some kind of pockmarked planetary surface. It looked like the moon, but Gregor couldn’t think of anyone who might want a model of the moon. Bennis put a cup down in front of him and turned on the gas under her kettle. Then she set out a spoon and the sugar bowl and a jar of instant coffee. Bennis’s instant coffee wasn’t bad. It wasn’t Lida Arkmanian’s percolated variety, but it wasn’t bad. It beat what Gregor and Tibor got when they attacked supermarket sacks of specially ground coffee beans and put them in a coffeepot.