Murder Superior(31)

While Mother Mary Bellarmine was getting doused in the foyer, Sister Joan Esther was downstairs in the basement kitchen of St. Teresa’s House, trying to straighten out what she thought of as “the disaster of the moment.” The disaster of this particular moment was actually rather serious, since it involved something that had been announced to the media. Worse, it involved something that the media had decided it liked. The something in question was a series of ice sculptures in the shape of nuns in the old-fashioned, original habit of the Sisters of Divine Grace, one for Reverend Mother General and one for each of the Mothers Provincial, ten in all. Each of these ice sculptures was supposed to have a little hollow dug out in the back of its head, and each of these hollows was supposed to contain an ice cream scoop of chicken liver pate. Joan Esther, like everyone else, was aware of the fact that what the hollowed-out spaces in ice sculptures were supposed to contain was beluga caviar. It didn’t bother her that the Order had neither the money nor the bad taste to go that far. What did bother her was that the ice sculptures had ever existed in the first place and that their existence had been mentioned in a press release. The ice sculptures had been the brainchild of Sister Agnes Bernadette, the Sister Cook for the convent at St. Elizabeth’s College, and she was very proud of them. She was also as protective of them as mother bears were supposed to be of their cubs.

Unfortunately, protectiveness had not in this case gotten Sister Agnes Bernadette very far. She had made the ice sculptures. She had put them in the freezer here in the basement of St. Teresa’s House. She had gone away expecting everything to be fine. Along had come the little man their benefactor in Tokyo had sent along to deal with the serving of the crates of fugu—and after that, neither Joan Esther nor Agnes Bernadette was entirely sure what had happened. All they were sure of was that one of the statues was smashed.

“He’s a very nice little man,” Sister Agnes Bernadette was saying, as Joan Esther tried to patch the statue’s head back onto its body. “I’m sure he wouldn’t do anything like this just to be malicious….”

“He doesn’t speak any English?”

Agnes Bernadette sighed. “He says Hello and thank you. I tried to find one of the Sisters from Japan to translate, but you know what it’s been like today. Crazy. You can’t find anyone anywhere. And he was so upset.”

“And you’ve got no idea what he was upset about?”

“Not a clue. It seemed to have something to do with the freezer, though. Maybe his fish, his what do you call them—”

“Fugu.”

“Yes. Well, maybe the fugu got freezer burn. I don’t know, Joanie. He kept pointing to the freezer and getting all agitated. And there was my statue. Maybe I left the statue lying on his fish.”

“His fish were in crates,” Joan Esther said firmly. “They were packed in dry ice. I’m sure you didn’t do anything to harm them. Mother Andrew Loretta is in the receiving line. Maybe we can haul her down here and get her to translate.”

“Well, we couldn’t do that,” Agnes Bernadette said. “He’s gone, isn’t he? Took off just after I found him here with the statue and hasn’t been back since. Oh, I hope he hasn’t gone to commit ritual suicide or something. They do that in Japan, dear, don’t they? My little statue isn’t worth anything at all like that.”

“I think the matter has to be somewhat more serious before it leads to hari-kiri,” Joan Esther said drily, “and besides, I think he’s a Catholic. Even in Japan, Catholics consider suicide a mortal sin. There. Will this work?”

Agnes Bernadette looked dubiously at the sculpture and sighed again. “She looks like she’s wearing a dog collar. Oh, it’s terrible. It’s really terrible. What are we going to do?”

“We aren’t going to be able to do anything if she melts,” Joan Esther said. “Here, well take one of those knife things and smooth this out. It won’t be perfect but it’ll be better than it is. Then all we’ll have to do is fill in at the shoulder and reattach the feet.”

“Oh, dear,” Agnes Bernadette said. “Joanie, you just wouldn’t have believed it. It really was the strangest thing.”

Joan Esther, who lived in Alaska and taught classes she had to get to for half the year by dogsled, would probably have believed anything, but she’d known Sister Agnes Bernadette for years and liked her. The only problem with Agnes Bernadette was that she was no earthly use in a crisis. Joan Esther pulled a pastry knife out of a drawer and tried it along the now bulging neckline of the ice nun. It worked well enough. There was probably some specialized tool that would have worked better. Joan Esther didn’t know what that was, so she didn’t have to feel guilty for not using it.