Murder Superior(26)

“Oh for Christ’s sake,” she said, leaning over to take off a shoe and shake it in the air. “Gravel, gravel, and more gravel. Whatever made you think I liked gravel, I’ll never know.”

“I didn’t think you liked gravel.” The man spoke with some amusement. “I thought the members of the Heart Association Committee liked gravel. And I was right.”

“I don’t see why you think I’ll be impressed with the Heart Association Committee,” she replied. “If I’d wanted to be on the Heart Association Committee, I could have gotten there myself.”

“You didn’t get there.”

“I didn’t want to.”

“I think, Nancy, that at some point, you’re going to have to stop pretending that you don’t care what anybody else thinks of you. It’s all you do care about.”

Nancy had the shoe back on her foot. She spun around on her heel until her face was almost next to his and said: “I think, Henry, that I’m going to go in and tell the nuns what kind of a son of a bitch you really are, and then we’ll see what happens.”

At that she turned her back on him and stalked away, toward St. Cecelia’s Hall, across a drive so uneven and unpredictable it made her pitch and shudder with every step. The man watched her go for a second or two and then followed.

Gregor looked across the car at Bennis still smoking her cigarette and shook his head. Bennis took a deep drag, leaned closer over the car’s roof and said, “Do you suppose they didn’t notice we were here, or that they noticed but they just didn’t care?”

“B,” Gregor said.

“That’s what I think, too,” Bennis said. “New money. You can smell it all over them. New money fights in public. Old money fights in private. Very old money never fights at all. How’s that for social commentary?”

“Finish your cigarette,” Gregor said.

Bennis dropped her cigarette on the ground and stamped it out under her heel. Then she picked it up and put it in the flap pocket of her purse. She would throw it away as soon as she found a garbage can.

“I’m finished,” she said. “I can’t wait to see what those two are going to do when they have a whole order of nuns for an audience.”





2


IF THERE WAS ONE thing Gregor Demarkian had learned in his short—but very intense—acquaintance with the official branches of the Roman Catholic Church, it was never to anticipate the actions of a nun. He had once gone to Maryville, New York, expecting the Motherhouse of the Sisters of Divine Grace to be a quasi-medieval pile complete with bats in the belfry and ghosts in the downstairs back hall. Instead he found a functional building that reminded him of an elementary school. Now he was doing his best not to expect St. Teresa’s House to be other than what it was. The facade spoke softly of soaring ceilings and wide hallways inside. It would probably turn out to be a rabbit warren of tiny rooms partitioned with plasterboard. Now that they were this close, he could see all the other people he had expected to see in the parking lot and hadn’t. They were coming from somewhere behind the building, which meant Bennis had to be right. There was somewhere else to park. There seemed to be fewer people than he had expected, but he thought it made sense to revise his expectations. This was, after all, a nuns’ convention. It was the Sisters who were supposed to be here in force. Seculars could only be guests, not active participants.

The steps to the tall double doored entrance to St. Teresa’s House were wide and deep, but not steep. They were also made of marble. Gregor took Bennis by the arm in the old-fashioned way—it was testament to Bennis’s Main Line society upbringing that she neither protested nor stared at him in openmouthed disbelief—and led her up behind a diffident elderly couple in good tweeds who were tottering on ahead of them. Gregor thought the tweeds must have been stifling in this weather. As they got closer to the door he saw that it had been decorated. Whoever had done it had possessed enthusiasm to match Donna Moradanyan’s but more conventionality. There were large baby blue ribbon rosettes fastened to the door frames about shoulder height (for Gregor) on either side. In the middle of each rosette was an embroidered sign that read:

    MAY IS MARY’S MONTH.



“What do you suppose that means?” Bennis said, pointing to one of the signs.

“May is dedicated to the Virgin Mary,” Gregor told her, “except with Mother’s Day in the middle of it all they say that May is dedicated to the Mother of God. There it is.”

“There what is?”

“One of the other signs.”