Murder Superior(53)

The Mothers Provincial raised their hands in the air. Gregor was fascinated to see that each hand held a cracker. He supposed that each cracker was smeared with chicken liver pâté. This was the oddest spectacle he had ever witnessed. He hadn’t the faintest idea what to think of it.

“Now,” Reverend Mother General said.

At the sound of “now” all the Mothers Provincial bit down on their crackers, and the crowd cheered. At that moment more nuns began to come through the double doors from the foyer, a long line of them, with each carrying a heavy silver tray. This was lunch for real coming on. The semimilitary precision of the scene at the tables broke up. Gregor looked at Bennis and found her just as astonished as he was.

“Wasn’t that strange?” she demanded.

But Sister Angelus barged in. “It was silly, but we had to do it. Sister Agnes Bernadette was so proud of her sculptures. And it’s not so wonderful being a convent cook, you know. You’re stuck in a kitchen all day. Reverend Mother General just wanted to make Agnes Bernadette feel good.”

“Well,” Bennis said, “I hope she managed.”

“That’s a pile of Italian sausages they just put out,” Gregor said. “I’m going to go eat.”

Of course, everybody else was going to go eat, too, so he had to wait. Norman Kevic’s strategy now seemed to be eminently sensible, since he was the first person in line and supplied with a plate and utensils almost before anyone else had collected himself enough to get started. Gregor took his place behind two giggling novices and in front of a pair of Sisters chattering away in German. The line inched forward slowly and he went with it, catching glimpses now and then of what looked like the world’s most complete collection of food.

“They’re putting all the really ethnic stuff out in the garden,” one of the novices ahead of him said. “Hello, Mr. Demarkian. You probably don’t remember me. I’m Sister Mary Stephen.”

“Mr. Demarkian?” the other novice said. “Really? Who came to Maryville and investigated Brigit?”

“He didn’t investigate Brigit,” Sister Mary Stephen said scornfully. “He investigated the murder.”

“I was sick that whole week and I never met him,” the other novice said.

“This is Sister Francesca,” Sister Mary Stephen said. “And I meant what I said about the ethnic food. If you like that kind of thing better you probably wouldn’t have to wait in so long a line. There’s a Japanese table out there with a chef from Japan. And a French one with a Sister who was a graduate of Cordon Bleu before she entered the Order. There are a couple of others out there, too.”

“Aren’t Italian sausages considered ethnic?” Gregor asked.

“These at the tables here are Italian-American sausages,” Sister Mary Stephen said.

Sister Francesca laughed.

“There’s some Polish-American kielbasa up there, too,” Sister Mary Stephen said, “and being a Polish-American myself you know how I feel about—what’s that?”

That was disturbance well far up the line, but not as far as it could have been. Gregor tried to get a handle on the position so he could concentrate on the incident and had a hard time doing it. There were so many nuns milling around and there was so much general confusion. Then somebody gasped and somebody else cried, “She’s turning blue!” and Gregor leaped out of the line into the relatively less choked area to the side of it to see what was going on.

What was going on was a death. He knew it as soon as he saw the woman’s face.

She was clutching her throat and staring straight ahead. Her eyes were bulged wide and her skin was a color that was halfway between blue and white. It seemed to be made out of glass.

“Something that affects the nervous system,” Gregor thought automatically.

Then he stepped forward and let the nun fall straight into his arms.

It was the one Sister Angelus had pointed out to him as Sister Joan Esther.





Part 2





Chapter 1


1


THE POLICE TOOK MOTHER Mary Bellarmine in for questioning. Gregor would have been willing to bet they were going to long before they arrived, just as he would have been willing to bet he knew what had poisoned Sister Joan Esther long before anyone had done the tests to confirm that she’d been poisoned at all. Gregor was good at poisons. In the Bureau, everybody had to specialize in something. What else there was to specialize in hadn’t interested him much. Back in the days when he’d joined, the Bureau demanded that each of its agents have a law or an accounting degree. Gregor had opted for accounting and become a CPA just to qualify for agent training. After that, he’d done his best to forget everything he knew about business and finance. Both bored him. He’d been offered a chance to specialize in firearms, but they made him nervous. He had driven his instructors at Quantico positively nuts. In the end, he had opted to become the resident—and only—expert on poisons, acquiring an encyclopedic knowledge of acid and alkali, lethal mushroom, and distilled chemical, that made him an object of curiosity from one end of the Bureau to another. When he was a young agent in the field, his station supervisor in Los Angeles would call him up at all hours of the night to find out if the poison in the latest Perry Mason or Ed McBain would “really work.”