Gregor revised his estimate of how many people had to be in the room. Publicity or no publicity, there was no way they could have gotten five thousand people in this room. Now that he could see its parameters, he would have guessed it could hold no more than fifteen hundred, and that fifteen hundred would be a squeeze. He trained his attention on the doors leading to the garden. Maybe it wasn’t a garden. Maybe it was a field that extended all the way to the Ohio border.
Gregor liked cheese puffs well enough, and he was hungry, but there would be food enough all afternoon. Now he was itching to find out how many people were really here and where they’d all been put. He edged through the crowd toward the sliding glass doors, listening here and there to the sharp-edged sounds of conversations going on just beside his ear.
“She was put in charge of St. Stanislaw’s in Cleveland,” an older nun said, “but everything just seemed to fall apart—”
“All the old ladies were all worked up because he wanted to change the rule about home visits,” a young nun said, “but what are we supposed to do? We don’t have sixteen brothers and sisters sitting at home with all the time in the world to take care of business—”
“We kept the Fatima Novena Society going as long as we could,” a third nun said, “but it got to the day when it was just old Mrs. Tetrarosa coming to it, and we had to stop.”
Gregor got to the sliding glass doors and looked out. What he saw made him feel like one of those Russian nesting dolls. There was a walled garden out there, but there was a gate in the far side of the wall and it was open. Nuns were drifting in and out of it from who knew where.
There was a tall statue of the Virgin standing in one corner of the garden. It had been decked out in roses and baby blue ribbons. There was a woman standing beside it who looked like she was kneeling in prayer. Then she stood up, and Gregor saw that she had neither been kneeling in prayer nor was ever likely to be. She was “Nancy” from the parking lot, complete with too much makeup, too frequent cosmetic surgery and too high heels, and she was clutching a thorny sprig of roses in her hand.
“That little bitch,” she said, in a voice that had been meant to carry, and did. “I’ll take care of her. You just watch me do it.”
She jammed the sprig of roses in her hair—Gregor winced. It must have hurt like hell—and headed for the sliding glass doors. Nuns turned to watch her progress and frowned. Even the ones who hadn’t heard what she’d said didn’t like the way she was walking. It was more of a stride than a glide, and it was distinctly un-feminine. She came barreling into the reception room, passing through the glass doors so close to Gregor she nearly knocked him over. If she had, she wouldn’t have noticed. She marched over to one of the long tables and picked up a large vase of flowers.
“This will do it,” she said.
Then she marched out of the room again, through the double doors into the foyer.
Gregor had to move fast to catch up. The room was crowded, even if not with as many people as he’d originally expected, and it was almost impossible to get anywhere without being held up four or five times every fifteen seconds. At one point he had to grab an elderly nun by the shoulders and move her bodily out of the way. At another, he had to wedge his hands between two nuns huddled in conference in such a strangely familiar way that he stopped himself just in time from announcing, “Make room for the Holy Ghost.”
He got to the double doors just as “Nancy” slid to a stop near the end of the receiving line. There were people actually negotiating the receiving line, but she wasn’t about to let them stop her. She grabbed at the back of a man’s suit jacket and yanked him out of line. Then she took his place and held the stoneware vase above her head.
“This will teach you,” she announced gleefully, in a grating screech that stopped all conversation in the foyer on the spot.
Then she upended the stoneware vase in the air above Mother Mary Bellarmine’s head and doused the older nun in plant water and thorns.
Chapter 3
1
SISTER JOAN ESTHER WAS not in the foyer when Mother Mary Bellarmine was soaked with water that smelled like chemicals and scratched on the face by a sharp little thorn. It was just as well, because if Sister Joan Esther had been in the foyer then, she would probably have laughed. It was Sister Joan Esther’s considered opinion that she had the right to laugh at any misfortune Mother Mary Bellarmine might have, but Reverend Mother General did not hold the same opinion, and Joan Esther had been in trouble once already this trip for what Reverend Mother General called her “attitude.” Sister Joan Esther hadn’t disputed the description. Lately, she had most definitely had an attitude. She had had an attitude about Mother Mary Bellarmine. She had had an attitude about the Sisters of Divine Grace. She had had an attitude about religion in general. The only thing she hadn’t had an attitude about was sleep, because she hadn’t been getting any.