Sister Mary Alice came to with a start “Oh,” she said. “Oh. Mr. Demarkian. I’m sorry. I was thinking of something else.”
“I could tell.”
“I could hardly believe what a really terrible man he was,” she said. “That policeman, I mean, that Androcetti. And stupid, too, if you want to know what I think. Was Joan Esther murdered?”
“My guess is yes,” Gregor said carefully. “But it is a guess. They’ll have to do an autopsy.”
“If she was murdered, I’ll bet she wasn’t murdered on purpose,” Mary Alice said. “No one would murder Joan Esther on purpose. I bet the poison or whatever it was was intended for somebody else.”
This was interesting, Gregor thought He never got over his surprise at how much nuns were willing to tell him. Maybe he reminded them of a priest. “Intended for whom?” he asked Sister Mary Alice.
“Intended for Mother Mary Bellarmine.” Sister Mary Alice was prompt. “I know half a dozen people who would like to murder Mother Mary Bellarmine, religious and lay. She’s an equal opportunity annoyance. Anyway, from what I heard, it must have been intended for her. The poison. It was poison?”
“I think so,” Gregor said carefully.
“Well, what I got from Scholastica was that there was poison in the chicken liver pâté—”
“Not exactly,” Gregor said hastily. “You really mustn’t do that, Sister. We don’t have proof of the sorts of things you’re assuming. That Sister Joan Esther was poisoned. That the poison was in the chicken liver pâté—”
“Where else could it have been?” Sister Mary Alice demanded.
“It could have been on something discrete—a canapé, for instance, that someone made up special and handed to Joan Esther in person. In fact, that’s a far better speculative explanation than that the poison was in the chicken liver pâté, because the chicken liver pâté would have been eaten by Mother Mary Bellarmine first, unless of course you’re assuming that Mother Mary Bellarmine is herself—”
“—no it wouldn’t have—”
“—Joan Esther’s killer, which would make this a far cruder murder than I think it is. What do you mean, she wouldn’t?”
“Mother Mary Bellarmine wouldn’t have eaten the chicken liver pâté,” Mary Alice said, “because she has gout. Do you know about gout?”
“Only what I’ve read in eighteenth-century novels,” Gregor said.
“Well, I don’t know much about it either,” Mary Alice said, “but I do know it’s very painful and Mother Mary Bellarmine has it in her foot. And the thing about gout is, if you’ve got it you can’t eat organ meats. They make it worse.”
“You can’t eat organ meats at all? Not even a bite from a cracker just to take part in a celebration?”
“Well, Mr. Demarkian, if it was anybody but Mother Mary Bellarmine we were talking about, I’d say you were right. She’d have taken a bite just to be polite to Agnes Bernadette. But this is Mother Mary Bellarmine we’re talking about here. She doesn’t bend for anybody.”
Gregor considered the possibilities. “Who else knows about this?” he asked.
“If you mean about the gout,” Sister Mary Alice said, “the answer is practically everybody. She complained about it very loudly and very clearly whenever it flared up. I’d say anybody who’s been around her for any time at all—say on and off for a couple of months—would have heard about it. About her not being able to eat organ meats, though, that’s a different thing.”
“You don’t think many people knew about that,” Gregor said.
“The only reason I knew about that is because one of my novices told me. Her father’s got gout in his legs. And I told her not to tell anyone in case it got back to Sister Agnes Bernadette, because Aggie had gone through so much trouble to set all this statue thing up. I don’t think it’s general knowledge.”
“I don’t think it’s general knowledge either.”
Mary Alice was warming up. “It really would make much more sense if somebody had been trying to kill Mother Mary Bellarmine and the plan had just gone wrong. I mean, why would anybody want to kill Joan Esther? Even Mother Mary Bellarmine wouldn’t want to kill Joan Esther, just put her in the stocks and humiliate her because of going to Alaska. I mean, you don’t kill somebody just because they didn’t like working for you and went to Alaska. But Mother Mary Bellarmine… Even if there wasn’t anything else, there would be all that about the money.”