Murder Superior(29)

“Sister,” Mother Mary Rosalie said. “You remember Mr. Demarkian. And this is his friend Bennis Hannaford.” Bennis winced at the word friend used in just that way by a woman in a habit. Mother Mary Rosalie went on. “Mr. Demarkian has just been talking to Mother Mary Bellarmine,” she said brightly, “and now he’s been passed along to me, but I’m sure he’s tired of this line. Don’t you think?”

There wasn’t much of the line left. Gregor watched as Scholastica looked back at Mother Mary Bellarmine and smiled slightly. It was not, Gregor was sure, with amusement. Then Scholastica turned her back on the open front doors and gestured to the open inner ones and the room beyond. In doing so, she turned her back on Mother Mary Bellarmine. Gregor wondered what it was Mother Mary Bellarmine had done.

“Mr. Demarkian,” Sister Scholastica said. “And I’m glad to meet Ms. Hannaford after all this time. We’d better get you both away from here.”

Gregor moved close and lowered his voice. “What is it Mother Mary Bellarmine doesn’t like?” he asked. “Armenian-Americans? Former FBI agents. Old men who show up at parties with much younger women?”

“Gregor,” Bennis said.

“Mother Mary Bellarmine,” Sister Scholastica said, in tones so well modulated she might have been leading the Lord’s Prayer at the beginning of a parochial-school day, “is quite simply a royal pain in the ass. And if you tell Reverend Mother General I said that, I’ll deny it. Why don’t I take you in and get you some food.”

“It sounds wonderful to me,” Bennis said. “I’m starving.”

“You’re always starving,” Gregor said.

Scholastica drew them away from the line and led them toward the inner doors, weaving through the small clots and collections of nuns dotted only infrequently by seculars. Seculars, Reverend Mother General had explained to Gregor once, was the proper term to distinguish people who were not in religious orders from people who were. Even diocesan priests were referred to as the “secular clergy.” Since nuns were not clergy, however, they were laypeople, which meant it made no sense to talk of “nuns and laypeople” as if there were a difference. Gregor did not remember having asked for this explanation. He hadn’t asked for most of the explanations Reverend Mother General had given him. Reverend Mother General was like that

He let Scholastica lead him into the inner room, going on ahead with Bennis and talking easily with bent head about he couldn’t imagine what. Bennis always seemed to have a lot to say to women he wouldn’t have expected her to have anything in common with at all.

Scholastica and Bennis slipped into the far room. Gregor followed them and stopped in the doorway to look around. Along one wall—the one toward which Scholastica and Bennis were heading—there was a collection of what looked like long, makeshift conference tables covered with white tablecloths. The tables were so long, no single cloths had been found to fit them. Instead, cloths were layered and dotted with flower arrangements in stoneware vases to hide the overlaps. The stoneware vases were tied with baby blue ribbons, more tribute to May as Mary’s month. The paper napkins in the three tall piles next to the plates and the silverware were baby blue, too. Gregor wondered if they were going to get a lot of baby blue food-colored food. There was meant to be a lot of food. There were no chairs anywhere near the tables, or anywhere else in the room. The tables had to have been set up for a buffet. At the moment, only one of them was in use. It had three long silver trays of what looked like cheese puffs on it and one large tureen that might have contained anything. Scholastica and Bennis were headed for the tureen. Gregor headed for them.

He was halfway to his goal, dodging between nuns in identical habits with unidentifiable accents and saying “Excuse me, Sister” almost as often as he drew breath, when he became aware of a very curious fact. The noise had stopped. When he’d first come into this room, the murmur of voices had been like a tidal wave. There were supposed to be more than five thousand nuns here. Some of them were undoubtedly outside. This room had a wall of sliding glass doors on one end that seemed to lead into a garden. Gregor thought most of them were still in this room, waiting for the food, just as he intended to wait for the food. They spoke softly because they were nuns, but even speaking softly could create a wall of sound if five thousand people were doing it together.

At the moment none of them were doing it at all. No one was even coughing. Gregor looked around for some kind of disturbance and could find none. A second later, the sound began to come back. It came back hesitantly, as it always does when flukes of silence make speakers self-conscious about being overheard.