Murder Superior(5)

“Maybe somebody will get murdered,” Linda said mischievously. “Maybe one of the postulants will just get fed up, and then Mother Mary Bellarmine—”

“Linda.”

“You’d kill her yourself if you got half a chance,” Linda said. “I heard you say so to Sister Alice Marie.”

“I think in the old days, eavesdropping got you thrown in a dungeon.”

“I’d just rattle my chains and sing Madonna songs at the top of my lungs absolutely off-key until nobody could stand it anymore and they had to let me out.”

“Elvis Presley. Madonna hadn’t been invented yet. Get back to work.”

“Yes, Sister.”

For once, Linda seemed to mean that “Yes, Sister.” She bent over the box at her feet and began to take out tins of pâté de foie gras. Scholastica watched her for a moment, then went back to work herself.

It was odd, she thought again, what you minded and what you didn’t. Short habits. Dead postulants. Knowing a private detective well enough to call him by his first name. It was ridiculous to take anything Linda Bartolucci said seriously. Linda didn’t know how to be serious.

The pantry opened onto a small back hall. Scholastica drifted out there, to the window that overlooked the kitchen garden and the narrow stone path down to the Virgin’s grotto, erected by nuns of a different era to celebrate the piety of a different century. Sister Scholastica Burke was not one of those people who pined for the resurrection of the Tridentine Church. As annoying as the post-Vatican II Church might be in many of its particulars, she found it preferable to what the old Church had degenerated into in the years just before the change. Still, sometimes she wondered if it might have been better if nothing had changed at all. Postulants didn’t end up murdered in the old days, and nuns didn’t get entangled in murder investigations. That was an experience Sister Scholastica Burke would just as soon never have to repeat.

The path to the grotto was cracked. Thick shoots of bright green grass popped through it in unexpected places, making it look decorated. Scholastica told herself she had to stop being silly. Gregor Demarkian didn’t cause murders. He only investigated them. It was idiotic to feel that something awful was going to happen just because he was going to show up to give a talk.

In the old days, Sister Scholastica’s spiritual adviser would have called what she was thinking a form of superstition, and sent her off to meditate on the true nature of the risen Christ. If she went looking for a spiritual adviser now, he’d probably nod a lot and insist on helping her to explore her feelings. That was something else to be said in favor of the pre-Vatican II Church.

Scholastica turned around and went back into the pantry. Pre or post, it didn’t matter much.

These boxes still had to be unpacked.





3


SISTER JOAN ESTHER HAD a lot of unpacking to do herself, although not of boxes. What she had to unpack were suitcases, and right now, standing in the main foyer of St. Elizabeth’s Convent, she thought she might have all the suitcases on earth. St. Elizabeth’s Convent was the house that had been built to house the Sisters who ran this small college, the only one in the United States run by the Sisters of Divine Grace. It was a big old house, drafty and damp, erected when the supply of vocations had seemed endless and the supply of devout young Catholics looking for a liberal arts education had seemed even larger than that. Looking at places like this made Sister Joan Esther’s head ache. She wasn’t very old—she had been in Sister Scholastica’s formation class; she had entered the convent just out of college while Scholastica had entered out of high school—but she was old enough to remember not only flowing habits but Saturday afternoon confessional lines that extended all the way to the church foyer, parishes so dedicated to the Catholic way of life they provided parish school educations to every child of every member free of charge, devotion to Mary so strong that every young girl dreamed of becoming a nun. If Sister Joan Esther had been asked to name what had changed with Vatican II, she would have said “attitude.” Attitude. All the rest of it—the changes in the Mass; the new habits; the bishops who no longer wanted anyone to kiss their rings—seemed entirely superfluous to her. As far as Sister Joan Esther was concerned, the Church could decree that Mass should be said with the priest standing on his head. That wouldn’t matter. What did matter was how many people took it all seriously, from the Virgin Birth to the Resurrection to the establishment of Peter in Rome. What did matter was that, these days, nobody took it seriously at all.

That wasn’t fair. That was just the kind of sweeping generalization Joan Esther had been at such great pains to train her students out of, back when she had had students. Sister Joan Esther had a doctorate in theology from Notre Dame. For many years, she had been one of the shining lights in the theology department at this college. It had, been Aquinas College then, like a hundred other small Catholic colleges across the country. With feminism had come a name change, and it was now St. Teresa of Avila. Sister Joan Esther liked St. Teresa of Avila. She even credited St. Teresa with giving her her first small feminist insight, at the age of nine. Those were the days when Teresa of Avila and St. Catherine of Siena were described in the missal as having done work “equal to a Doctor of the Church,” which always made Joan Esther wonder why, if they were equal, they weren’t doctors. Apparently, it had made other people wonder too. One of the first things that had happened in the wake of Vatican II was that Teresa and Catherine were named Doctors of the Church. You couldn’t blame Vatican II for everything.