“Not the kind of check you’re talking about. I think it’s a good thing Henry Hare signed contracts when we started this project. I think he’s about ready to bolt. And I do mean bolt. From the project. From Nancy. From the Church. I’ll give you a bet that in less than a year from now, he’ll buy himself an apartment in the city and start being seen around town with a model barely out of diapers. Is it a sin to think so badly of a man who’s giving the Order so much money?”
“Yes. But not because he’s giving the Order so much money.”
“I know we’re supposed to see Christ in every man,” Martha Mary said, “and every woman, too, according to Father Monaghan, but those two remind me of a pair of rutting monkeys. Maybe Darwin was confused. Maybe only some people evolved from the apes. Maybe some other people only seemed to evolve from the apes, but instead—”
“Nobody evolved from the apes,” Domenica Anne said, “and you know it. You had Sister Wilhelmina for biology and she’s very good at explaining evolution.”
“Well, I refuse to believe that Henry Hare and I evolved from a common ancestor. What Nancy sees in him, I’ll never know.”
“What Nancy sees in him?”
Martha Mary shrugged. “Give me your razor pen and I’ll trim facsimile pictures for a while. If we need so much money, we ought to get started raising it.”
“It’s on the tool board. I put it away last thing before I left here last night.”
“Then you must have taken it out this morning,” Martha Mary told her, “because it isn’t in its slot.”
Domenica Anne had just made herself a sandwich that looked like something out of the “Blondie” comic strip. It had turkey, roast beef, ham, lettuce, tomatoes, and three kinds of cheese on it. She raised it to her mouth and took a bite. Of course the facsimile pictures were important. They were supposed to be assembled into a collage that would be photographed and reproduced for a mailing requesting funds for the new field house. The mailing might make the difference between comfort and debt.
“Look again,” Domenica Anne mumbled with her mouth full. “I haven’t used it for anything this morning. The last time I had it out was yesterday, like I told you. I was cutting one of the study blueprints along the load-bearing lines to explain why we couldn’t put one of the walls where Reverend Mother General wanted us to. I was getting reamed out by Mother Mary Bellarmine for not having anticipated all this when I talked to the architect in the first place. As if I were the one who made decisions about the floor plan with the architect.”
“If it had been Mother Mary Bellarmine’s project,” Martha Mary said, “she would have made decisions about the floor plan with the architect. Dom, really, it’s not here. You must have left it out.”
“I didn’t leave it out,” Domenica Anne insisted.
“Well, whatever you did, it’s not here now. And we can’t leave it lying around loose. It could be dangerous.”
“Right,” Domenica Anne said.
And, of course, Martha Mary was right. She was always right. Domenica Anne had never had such a responsible assistant. It was just that at the moment, she’d rather eat her sandwich.
She was starving. And she couldn’t imagine anything anyone could do with that razor pen that would cause anything like serious trouble.
Chapter 6
1
BENNIS HANNAFORD NEVER SMOKED cigarettes in crowded rooms unless she was very, very nervous—or unless the crowded room in question was a bar, where she was expected to smoke—but when Gregor Demarkian came downstairs after having his conversation with. Reverend Mother General, Bennis was sitting in a corner of the reception room, perched on a side table that wobbled under her every time she took a drag, sucking on a Benson & Hedges light the way mermaids in Florida underwater shows suck on their air hoses. At first glance, Gregor couldn’t see what for. The scene in the reception room was actually calmer than it had been upstairs, although it was also more chaotic. All pretense at a reception line had been abandoned. The Mothers Provincial had blended into the crowd. Since their habits were the same as everybody elses’, Gregor couldn’t pick out a single one of them. There did seem to be even more nuns around than there had been before, and even more baby blue ribbons. There were also a lot of novices Gregor knew had not been there before, because he would have noticed their white veils. He caught sight of Sister Mary Alice, whom he had met in Maryville, and waved. She waved back at him in a distracted sort of way that said she’d just as soon never have met him. Since Gregor didn’t blame her for that, he didn’t press the point.