Catherine Grace giggled.
Norm went over to the freezer and contemplated the roses. “How many in a bouquet?” he asked. “Twelve?”
“Of course twelve,” Sarabess said.
“Roses are Mary’s flower,” Catherine Grace said.
“You shouldn’t be plotting murder with Gregor Demarkian upstairs,” Norm told them. “Don’t you know who he is? The Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.”
Sarabess drew a stool up to the table and sat down to watch Norm at work. “We know who Mr. Demarkian is,” she said, “but the point we’ve been harping on is that it would be perfect I mean, you could murder anybody you wanted to today—at least from down here—and you’d have to get away with it.”
“It’s because of the food,” Catherine Grace said.
“If you go through that door there,” Sarabess told Norm, “you get to the other part of the corridor. This room straddles it. Anyway, down there there’s the kitchen with all the food for the party just lying around, and in here there’s tons of poisonous stuff, lye, gasoline, cleaning fluids, all kinds of things.”
“And if you didn’t want to use something from this room,” Catherine Grace said, “you could use something from the boiler room, because it’s between here and the kitchen. There’s kerosene in there.”
“And it wouldn’t matter how bad the poison smelled, because there would always be some kind of food that smelled worse. Let me get you some more roses. You’re very good at that.”
“Thank you,” Norm said. He was very good at it. He was always very good at everything. Even when he hadn’t had much practice. Even—almost especially—when he was stewed to the gills. People did not get to where Norman Kevic had gotten to without being able to deliver at that level in that way. He considered the proposition the two women had put before him and found an objection.
“What about this room?” he asked them. “If anybody who wants to commit murder by putting poison in the food has to pass through this room to get to the food—”
“But they wouldn’t,” Catherine Grace said. “There’s two more sets of stairs on the other side. One from the first floor and one from the garden—you know, through an outside door.”
“Nobody ever comes the way you came,” Sarabess said, “except fire marshals when we have a fire drill. How did you ever get into that corridor?”
“I took a door in the foyer and kept on going,” Norm said. “But wait a minute. What about your victim? If you poison the food you can’t possibly know who’ll eat what you poison. Unless you take a very little of it and put it on a cracker and hand it right over, and then somebody might see you and there you’d be. Behind bars.”
“We could kill any of the Mothers Provincial,” Catherine Grace said.
“Like Mother Mary Bellarmine,” Sarabess elaborated. “Because of the ice sculptures.”
“What?”
“Sister Agnes Bernadette has ice sculptures made in the shape of nuns, one for each of the Mothers, and there’s going to be chicken liver pâté in each one and when they come out each of the Mothers Provincial and Reverend Mother General too, of course, are supposed to eat first from their particular sculpture. It’s going to be a big fuss. So you see, all you have to do is poison the right chicken liver pâté—”
“And the sculptures are all going to be marked,” Catherine Grace said.
“—and use something that acts quickly so nobody else takes a bite,” Sarabess concluded.
“And there you’ll be!” Catherine Grace was triumphant “It’s really absolutely perfect, Mr. Kevic. It’s like something out of Agatha Christie.”
In Norman Kevic’s mind, it was something out of Edgar Allan Poe, but he wasn’t going to say so.
It just confirmed the feeling he’d had all along that nuns were dangerous, and added to it the conviction that their friends were dangerous, too.
Chapter 4
1
GREGOR DEMARKIAN WAS NOT a religious man. He had been brought up in the Armenian Christian Church—which he described to people as “like the Greek Orthodox, but not really,” because it was too complicated to go into the history of millennial Church politics and heresies that might not have been heresies depending on whose side you were on, and he didn’t know it all anyway—but once he had become an adult he had given it up. While he had been married to Elizabeth, he had done all the obligatory things. Weddings and funerals, christenings with the infant in antique lace and the godmother in tears: Elizabeth had determined which of those they were obliged to go to, what present they were obliged to bring, and what did or did not constitute an acceptable excuse on Gregor’s part. According to Elizabeth’s system, Gregor had been forgivably absent from his niece Hedya’s christening because he was on kidnapping detail in Los Angeles. His niece Hedya had been christened in Boston, where Elizabeth’s older sister lived with her husband, and Gregor couldn’t be two places at once. With his niece Maria’s christening, though, he had been in trouble. That had taken place in Washington, where he and Elizabeth were living at the time. It had been Elizabeth’s opinion that he could have found a way to make time on a Sunday morning, no matter what had him tied up in Quantico and the District of Columbia. As it turned out later, what had him tied up was the beginnings of what would become both the definitive case against Theodore Robert Bundy and the establishment of the Behavioral Sciences Department, but Elizabeth didn’t care. Work was never as important as family, even if “work” meant saving the world. The world had been in need of saving for several thousand years. Missing a niece’s christening wasn’t going to help him save it.