Murder Superior(49)
“Tell her to wait?” Bennis suggested.
Sister Angelus brushed this away. “Of course they didn’t. Mother Mary Bellarmine is just being—Excuse me. I was about to be uncharitable. Anyway, she comes to dinner every night and she has this lecture, so she came to dinner two nights ago and she had the lecture ready again, and most of us were just resigned to putting up with it. Especially the novices. You’re not allowed to complain about holes in your socks when you’re a novice.”
“Do you wear socks?” Bennis asked curiously. Gregor shot her a furious look and she shrugged. Her cigarette had been smoked to the filter. She made sure the fire was out and put the filter in her pocket. Then she lit up again.
“Dinner,” she said gamely. “The night before last.”
“You really shouldn’t smoke,” Sister Angelus said. “It can kill you.”
“I’m counting on it,” Bennis said.
Gregor cleared his throat
“Oh,” Sister Angelus said. “Yes. Well. Um. Dinner. So, Mother Mary Bellarmine always comes, Sister Joan Esther never comes, it works out. On purpose, I would say. But the night before last, Mother Mary Bellarmine wasn’t supposed to come. She was supposed to be at a meeting about the new field house—I don’t know if you’ve heard, but St. Elizabeth’s is in the middle of building a new field house—anyway, Mother Mary Bellarmine has expertise in that area, building things, and she was supposed to be at this meeting with Henry Hare and the Archbishop and I don’t know who else, and she wasn’t supposed to be back in time for dinner. So it gets to be dinnertime, and who should be in the front of the line waiting to get into the refectory but Joan Esther—”
“Who figured she could have a hot meal for once because her nemesis was going to be out of town,” Gregor put in.
“I wouldn’t call her a nemesis, Mr. Demarkian. I mean, that would imply that she was in the right, wouldn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor answered truthfully.
“Well, I don’t think she was in the right.” Sister Angelus shook her head. “And it’s not just because she’s nasty to everybody she meets, including me. So. Joan Esther is in the front of the line and she goes in and sits down with Scholastica and Mary Alice and all these other people she knew from formation, and they’re talking away about who knows what and letting the postulants and novices get away with murder, when who should walk in at the very end of the line but Mother Mary Bellarmine.”
“Did she get back from her meeting early?” Gregor asked.
“It turned out the meeting was canceled. Nobody had heard about it. We would have heard about it if Domenica Anne had come back—Domenica Anne is the Sister who’s handling things for St. Elizabeth’s College—but Domenica Anne had a lot of work to do and she went to her workroom instead of coming to the convent so nobody saw her. And Mother Mary Bellarmine wasn’t around either, but I don’t know where she was.”
“Maybe she was hiding,” Bennis suggested, slipping her extinguished match into her pocket too. “Maybe she was trying to catch this Sister Joan Esther unprepared.”
“Maybe she was,” Sister Angelus said. “She did catch Joan Esther unprepared, let me tell you that. When she walked in, I thought Joan Esther was going to rise from her place like she was sitting in an ejector seat. She went all red and absolutely furious. Mother Mary Bellarmine looked very smug. If you want my opinion. Which you probably don’t. Anyway. There wasn’t any room at the table where Joan Esther was sitting, and Mother Mary Bellarmine wouldn’t have sat there anyway, because it was a secondary table. There’s always one table in the refectory reserved for Sisters Superior and guests, that’s assuming there’s more than one table in the refectory at all, and besides, with all the new people in residence—oh, I should have told you.”
“Told me what?” Gregor asked.
“Well, Mr. Demarkian, with all the Sisters in attendance, the dinner I’m talking about isn’t the only dinner. We go in shifts. And not all in the same place, either. I mean, about twenty-one hundred of us go to the refectory here in three sittings, about seven hundred each, which is what the refectory can hold when the folding doors are opened up and they use the rooms on either side of it. We go at five thirty, six thirty, and seven thirty. Then the rest of everybody eats in the all-college dining hall. That seats about eleven hundred. They go at five thirty, six thirty, and seven thirty, too. You’re assigned a place and a time and you aren’t allowed to go in at any of the other places or times because it messes everything up. If you miss your seating you have to wait until eight thirty or eat out. They’re really strict about it.”