Murder Superior(78)
“Sister?” the young man at the curb said.
“It’s all right,” Sister Scholastica told him. “The Archbishop is with my Reverend Mother. You weren’t asked to bring Mr. Demarkian right to His Eminence himself?”
“Well, no,” the young man said. “We were just supposed to get him here.”
“He’s here,” Sister Scholastica said.
She put her arm through Gregor’s and began tugging him toward the convent’s front door.
“You won’t believe what’s been going on here,” she told him. “You’d think the police would have been crazy enough for anybody, but we had to get together and make it worse. What do you think about that?”
Gregor didn’t think anything about that. He was still a little surprised to be here on such short notice—and a little embarrassed, because it was a public indication of just how much he wanted to be involved in this case, and Gregor made a point of never admitting that he wanted to be involved in a case at all. He let Sister Scholastica lead him up the steps and through the convent door, saying as little as possible.
Scholastica was talking like a woman just released from a sixteen-year vow of silence. Her strong voice with its Upstate New York accent filled the tall-ceilinged foyer; she bounced up the stairs to the second floor.
“The nuns have been bad enough,” she told him, “but we’ve got more than nuns here this weekend, and the other people have been just plain impossible. I don’t care what you say about appreciating other people’s cultures, give me Americans every time.”
2
GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD NEVER been in a convent before Vatican II. He had no idea if convents had been structured differently then, or if a conservative order like the Sisters of Divine Grace still did things basically as they had always done. He was fairly sure that he would never have been allowed in the convent’s private rooms—which he had been in Maryville, when he had gone to the Motherhouse of the Sisters of Divine Grace to look into the death of a postulant named Brigit Ann Reilly—but that was something else again. Scholastica led him up one hall and down another, stopping every once in a while to make the sign of the cross with holy water and say a quick prayer near a statue or a picture. She came to a halt in front of a tall, antique wooden door with a crucifix covering it that started two inches above the floor and ended two inches below the ceiling. Gregor found the effect—an emaciated, suffering Christ as tall as Gregor was himself, a set of nail wounds that could have come out of a medical school textbook—distinctly disconcerting. Scholastica stepped in front of the door, opened it, and went inside.
“Your Eminence?” she said. “Reverend Mother? I have Mr. Demarkian.”
“Mr. Demarkian,” Reverend Mother General said. She slipped past Sister Scholastica and came out to meet Gregor, pushing the door back wide as she did so. Gregor noticed that she managed to make her habit look more conservative than it actually was. She took his arm and began tugging at him much as Sister Scholastica had done. Nobody in this Order seemed to think they had time for anything but hurrying this morning.
“Mr. Demarkian,” Reverend Mother General said again as she ushered him into what turned out to be a massive office, complete with a football-field-size desk, carved oak built-in bookcases, and a crucifix at least as large and well detailed as the one on the door. There was a tall man standing behind the desk, wearing a pair of clean blue jeans and a cotton sweater. He managed to make clean blue jeans and cotton sweaters look as if they ought to cost a hundred dollars apiece at Brooks Brothers. Reverend Mother General stopped in front of the desk and motioned to the man behind it. “Mr. Demarkian, this is David Kenneally, the new Archbishop of Philadelphia—new these last four months, I believe—and of course the de facto religious superior of the nuns in this house—”
“What Reverend Mother is trying to say,” David Cardinal Kenneally said drily, “is that I have no influence in this place at all. How do you do, Mr. Demarkian. I’ve heard a great deal about you from John O’Bannion.”
“I’m a little surprised I haven’t heard from John O’Bannion,” Gregor said. “Right at about this point in the proceedings, I usually get a phone call that starts, “I know you’re probably busy but—’ ”
“We tried,” Sister Scholastica said. “The Cardinal called you four times this morning. You were out.”
“I was eating my breakfast,” Gregor said. “In peace.”
David Kenneally cleared his throat “Yes. Well. I assume you must know why we’ve asked you here. It seems we’ve gotten ourselves in a great deal of trouble.”