Murder Superior(34)

He got to the bottom of the steps and the half-opened door and looked in. He had expected to see a pair of nuns, but what he saw instead was a single young nun and a woman with greying hair who seemed to be some kind of superannuated hippie. They were both working diligently at a line of the kind of paper cones florists used to put bouquets in, except that instead of being green the paper was baby blue, like everything else in this place. Norm peered harder through the door and saw that although the room beyond was strictly functional, with paint that looked like it belonged in a furnace room and bare wooden tables whose surfaces were as splintered as the surface on a cellar door, a certain amount of effort had been put into decorating here, too. On the far wall right in his line of vision was another one of those posters.

Norm moved toward the door, raised his hand, and knocked. He would have walked right in, but he had been noticing lately that women no longer took well to that kind of surprise. He’d walked in unannounced on one of the women in the office once last month and she’d very nearly belted him. He didn’t know what had gotten into women these days.

Nobody inside seemed to have heard him. He raised his hands and knocked again. “Yoo hoo,” he called, and instantly felt ridiculous. “Can I come in?”

The hippie woman dropped what she was doing and marched over to the door. “Oh,” she said, flustered. “It’s Mr. Kevic. What are you doing here?”

Since Norm was sure that if he’d met this woman before, he would have remembered it—the grotesque are as memorable as the beautiful—he assumed she knew who he was from his publicity. “I was looking for the—ah—the—”

“The toilet,” the young nun in the background piped up.

“Right,” Norm said. “I was looking for that. I seem to have gotten lost.”

“You’re in the basement of St. Teresa’s House,” the hippie woman said.

“I’m Sister Catherine Grace,” the young nun told him.

“I’m Sarabess Coltrane.”

Norm gave a little thought to it and decided that no, he had never heard of Sarabess Coltrane and there was no reason why he should have. The high administrators of the college were all nuns and there was no way Sarabess Coltrane was one of those. Norm had only met Reverend Mother General once, and that just half an hour or so ago, but he could just imagine what she thought of Sarabess Coltrane’s outfit. Saggy cotton Indian print dress. Plastic barrettes holding back hair that could have used a cut, a conditioner, and a curl. Birkenstock sandals. It was embarrassing.

Norm edged into the room and looked around. There were a pair of industrial sinks along one wall that he hadn’t been able to see from outside, and drains here and there in the floor. There was also a freezer whose door had been propped open and that seemed to be filled with flowers. Sarabess Coltrane had even more flowers in her hands. The flowers she had had originally were lying on the long wooden table, badly wrapped in a blue paper cone.

“Here,” Norm said. “Let me help with that. I’ll probably be faster.”

“You?” Sarabess Coltrane sounded doubtful.

Norm took the roses out of her hands and walked over to the table to get a cone. The young nun had been right, of course. They should never have made the cones first. Oh, well. It wasn’t that hard to fix if you knew how to fix it.

“I used to work for a florist when I was going to college,” Norm said. “That’s how I made my spending money before I found a station that would take me on. I used to wrap flowers all the time. Can I have one of those ribbons?”

“Of course,” Sister Catherine Grace said.

“The flowers are for the Mothers Provincial,” Sarabess Coltrane said. “We’re supposed to present them right after lunch.”

“Right after lunch may be tomorrow,” Sister Catherine Grace said, “because the kitchen is right down the hall from here and we’ve been listening to poor Sister Agnes Bernadette, having one problem with the food after another.”

“If nobody ever presents a bouquet to Mother Mary Bellarmine, nobody will care,” Sarabess Coltrane said.

Sister Catherine Grace sighed. “Sarabess had a run-in with Mother Mary Bellarmine the day before yesterday. It was very sticky. We’ve been standing around down here all afternoon plotting—” Sister Catherine Grace flashed a look of agony at Sarabess Coltrane and blushed.

“Never mind,” Sarabess said. “We haven’t made any secret of it. Anybody who walked by outside could have heard us.” She leaned over Norm’s shoulders and hissed in his ear: “We’ve been plotting murder.”