Murder Superior(81)

“About an hour before the reception,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said. “I went to a late Mass, you see, and then I had other things to do, and really, this thing with the chicken liver pâté isn’t supposed to be very complicated. And then I came down here and opened the freezer and there it was. There they were. Mr. Yakimoto and the statue. Broken.”

“Mr. Yakimoto didn’t mean to break the statue,” Mother Andrew Loretta said. “It was an accident.”

Mr. Yakimoto began to speak very rapidly in Japanese. Mother Andrew Loretta nodded at him vexedly. “I’m sorry, Mr. Demarkian, I know we talked about this yesterday and I didn’t know anything, but we have all been asking around. We really are trying. According to Mr. Yakimoto, what happened was that he came downstairs yesterday afternoon to get the fugu out to prepare it for serving. It had to be defrosted. The first thing he noticed was that the top box in the stack had been cut into—slit open is the way he’s been putting it—”

Mr. Yakimoto jumped in with another cascade of Japanese.

“Yes,” Mother Andrew Loretta said. “One of the fish was gone, missing, and Mr. Yakimoto was rightly very concerned about it. He hoped that it might be still stored somewhere in the freezer, and so he began to look through everything there, and after a while he began to get a little excited—”

“I know exactly what happened,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said. “I get that way all the time myself. You try to fix things and you try to fix things and after a while you just get crazy.”

“One of the statues dropped when he was looking behind it,” Mother Andrew Loretta said, “and at just that point Sister Agnes Bernadette came in, and he tried to get across to her how serious a thing had happened, but of course she doesn’t speak Japanese, so he decided to go out and try to find one of the Sisters here from Japan, but they were all in chapel—”

“And in the meantime, I was getting frantic,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said, “because it was getting late. So I went rushing out into the corridor and there was Joan Esther—”

“Did that make sense?” Gregor asked. “Was that someplace Sister Joan Esther should have been?”

“It made sense for anybody to be anyplace yesterday,” Sister Scholastica put in. “There was so much going on.”

“I think Joanie was doing a little hiding out,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said. “I think it had all begun to get to her, and I couldn’t blame her for that because it had all begun to get to me, too. Nuns, nuns, nuns. It’s all very strange.”

“It used to be normal,” Reverend Mother General said.

Agnes Bernadette ignored her. “Joanie was there so I got hold of her and dragged her in, and she was one of those take-charge people so it was all right. She saw what the problem was right away and started to help me—to put the statue back together, I mean. And she did, too. The statue did get put back together.”

“What about after that?” Gregor asked. “What about putting the balls of chicken liver pâté in the statues’ heads?”

“Joanie didn’t do that,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said. “I did that myself. Joanie got the trays set up for me instead.”

“All right,” Gregor said, “what about those trays? Who decided who was going to carry which one where?”

Sister Agnes Bernadette looked confused. “Nobody decided anything. We got the trays all set up, but there weren’t any differences in the sculptures. Then we needed people to carry them, so Joanie went up to the stairs and opened the door and called up, and eventually somebody answered and she got some Sisters to come down and help. Then we each of us took a tray and went trooping upstairs.”

“In no particular order,” Gregor said.

That’s right,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said.

“So it was just coincidence that Sister Joan Esther ended up carrying the ice sculpture that was destined to be placed on the table assigned to the one woman she disliked most in this Order.”

Sister Agnes Bernadette looked confused. “Mother Mary Deborah? Joanie didn’t dislike Mother Mary Deborah. Nobody dislikes Mother Mary Deborah.”

“It was Sister Mary Sebastian who brought the ice sculpture to Mother Mary Deborah,” Reverend Mother General said.

“But that can’t be right,” Sister Agnes Bernadette said. “I know I’m not a very organized person, Reverend Mother, but I can count.”

“She got called out of the line,” Sister Scholastica said suddenly. “I’d forgotten all about it. It was only for a second—”