“What’s that?”
“Stand by this table over here and make sure nobody touches anything.”
“This table over here?” Bennis looked at the table curiously and then walked up to it. She looked at the melting ice sculpture and the tablecloth and the single basket of rolls that had made it here on the first wave of food service. She looked at the candle, still lit, and at the small picture of the Virgin framed in ruffled blue ribbon near the candle’s base. Then she walked around to the other side of the table and looked some more.
“Gregor?” she asked. “What is it I’m supposed to be guarding?”
“Everything,” Gregor said.
“Every what?” Bennis insisted. “I mean, what have I got here? A picture framed in a ribbon. A lot of rolls I don’t think have been touched. At least, they’re still wrapped up in a napkin and the napkin is all tucked in. A candle. And an oddly shaped ice cube.”
“The oddly shaped ice cube has chicken liver pâté in it,” Gregor said.
“No it doesn’t.”
Bennis lifted up the ice sculpture and held it out for Gregor to see.
And she was right, of course.
There was a deep hollow in the back of the ice sculpture’s head, but there was no chicken liver pâté in it.
There wasn’t anything in it.
The hollow was so clean, it was hard to believe there had ever been anything in it ever.
2
HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN prepared for it, of course. If he’d been out to commit a murder under the circumstances under which this one had been committed—assuming one had been committed here at all—his window of opportunity to cover his tracks would have come while Joan Esther was keeling over, or in the long minutes immediately following, when everybody would be so intent on looking after the dying nun that a bull elephant could sweep through on roller skates without anyone noticing a thing.
Of course, Gregor thought, he did know a murder had been committed here. A murder had to have been. He didn’t know a single poison that could have produced the effects he’d seen in Sister Joan Esther that could also be mistaken for something benign. He didn’t know a single form of natural death that could mimic those effects, either. He supposed there had to be something out there. A rare tropical disease. A highly unusual genetic abnormality. There was always something. He preferred to go for the commonplace. The commonplace was so often the truth.
Bennis leaned back against a wall with her arms crossed over her chest. Reverend Mother General stood at the end of the table, looking strained. Gregor paced back and forth in front of the ice sculpture, wondering what he was supposed to do next. Finally, Reverend Mother General said, “Mr. Demarkian, I don’t want to intrude on your thoughts, but this doesn’t make any sense to me. Why would anyone want to take the chicken liver pâté out of the sculpture’s head?”
To get rid of it,” Bennis said from her place at the wall. “That’s where the poison was. Presumably.”
“Well, that’s simply not possible,” Reverend Mother General said. “The poison couldn’t have been in the chicken liver pâté, because if it had been Mother Mary Bellarmine would have been poisoned first.”
“Ah,” Gregor said, straightening up a little.
“She wasn’t poisoned first,” Bennis said, “unless she was and it’s taking the Devil’s own time to take effect I saw her going out to the garden just before I came over here.”
“No,” Gregor said.
“No what?” Bennis asked him.
“No, it isn’t taking a long time to take effect. Not if it’s what I think it is. I have to go out to the garden.”
“If you want Mother Mary Bellarmine, I can call her in here,” Reverend Mother General said. “It’s going to take you an age to find her out in that crowd of Sisters.”
I’m not going to find Mother Mary Bellarmine,” Gregor said. Then he turned to Bennis. “You stay here and guard just the way I told you. We don’t want something else to go missing.”
Bennis made a face at him, but Gregor ignored it. In a way, she had a right. He really didn’t need her to guard the table anymore. Reverend Mother General could have guarded it herself, or—if she had something else to do, which she probably did—she could have detailed one of the Sisters from Japan or the Philippines to do it. There had to be hundreds of nuns in this crowd who didn’t know either Mother Mary Bellarmine or Sister Joan Esther. Gregor simply wanted to make sure Bennis was out of his hair until he was ready to deal with her, which wouldn’t be for a while yet. There was a lot he needed to find out