Murder Superior(70)

If anything did.





3


IT WAS QUARTER TO twelve, and at St. Elizabeth’s Convent, almost everything was quiet. Compline had been sung. Final prayers had been said. A rosary had been started for the succor of Sister Joan Esther’s soul. If the habits had been longer and the Office sung in Latin, Sister Scholastica might have thought she had been transported to 1953—or 1553. That was part of what she loved best about being a Catholic and being a nun. She liked to think of all the women before her who would find her life utterly familiar and be able to live it themselves without hardly any adjustment at all. Even having a murder in the house might not have been too much of an adjustment Religious life in the Middle Ages and the High Renaissance was not the placid and well-regulated thing it became later. Sister Scholastica sometimes wondered if she would have found it more interesting than what she had now.

She went down the back hall of the visitors’ wing—visiting Sisters only, here; secular visitors got rooms in St. Francis of Assisi Hall—and let herself down through the door at the back there and then through the back door of the chapel. The light inside was very dim, but she could see Sister Agnes Bernadette nonetheless, kneeling close to the front with her back hunched over as if she’d acquired a bad case of osteoporosis in a matter of hours. Scholastica dipped her fingers in holy water, made the sign of the cross and went inside. When she reached the center aisle she genuflected in the general direction of the tabernacle and then hurried up to the front. If Sister Agnes Bernadette had been praying, Scholastica wouldn’t have interrupted her. Sister Agnes Bernadette wasn’t praying. Sister Agnes Bernadette was in tears.

Scholastica sat down on the pew and put an arm around Sister Agnes Bernadette’s broad shoulders.

“I thought this is where you’d be. I checked your cell to see that you were in bed, and you weren’t.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“Whatever you’re going to do, you can do it a lot better if you’ve had some rest.”

“But it’s all so impossible.” Sister Agnes Bernadette raised her teary face to Scholastica. “I didn’t kill Joan Esther. I didn’t kill anyone. I don’t even think I killed them by accident, Sister, because then a lot of people would have died, wouldn’t they? Mother Mary Deborah ate almost all her chicken liver pâté by herself and there was nothing wrong with that.”

“I know,” Scholastica said.

Sister Agnes Bernadette sat up a little straighter. “I don’t think that poisonous man cares what’s true or not,” she said. “That Lieutenant Androcetti. I think all he cares about is getting on the television news.”

“Well, I’ll agree to that.”

“I don’t think he thinks I killed her either. I heard that man, that Gregor Demarkian, say that they weren’t absolutely a hundred percent sure there had been a murder. There had to be lab tests and an autopsy—oh, dear—an autopsy on Sister Joan Esther—”

“Now, Sister—”

“But you must understand what I’m saying,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said. “Nothing matters to that man except making an arrest and making news because as long as there’s a trial he’ll look good. I was thinking all this out while I was sitting in jail. As long as there’s a trial he’ll be fine, because when the trial comes out not guilty it’s just the prosecutor who will look bad. Not him. Sister, I—”

“It’s all right.”

“I keep trying to offer it up,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said. “I keep telling myself there’s no help for it, I’ve been arrested and things will go along from here and there will be a trial, and because I’m not guilty of course I won’t be convicted, but in the meantime it will all be so awful, so awful, and so I keep trying to offer it up—”

Offer it up, Sister Scholastica thought. This was terrible. She hadn’t heard of anyone “offering it up” for years. Schoolchildren “offered up” the pains of scraped knees or the humiliation of not being chosen for the baseball team in a childish attempt to identify with the sufferings of Christ. Grown women were not supposed to “offer up” totally unfounded murder accusations and full-blown media-hype trials. At least, Scholastica didn’t think they were. Scholastica’s God was a good deal more sensible than the One worshiped by so many other people.

“Don’t you worry,” she told Sister Agnes Bernadette. “We’ll take care of it. We’ll get Gregor Demarkian to take care of it.”