“Tell him what?” Sister Domenica Anne demanded in annoyance. “That I lost a razor?”
“An X-Acto knife,” Martha Mary said. “I bet it’s just the kind of thing he’s looking for. And you know what it’s going to be about, don’t you? It’s going to be about the field house. I heard him. It wasn’t Joan Esther who was supposed to be murdered at all. It was Mother Mary Bellarmine—”
“Well, there certainly would have been enough suspects if that had happened.” Domenica Anne shook her head.
Martha Mary sparkled. “And guess what,” she said. “Guess what it’s all going to come down to. The field house!”
“What do you mean?”
“The field house,” Martha Mary said. “I heard them, Dom, I really did. It’s all going to come down to some kind of financial hanky-panky Henry Hare has been pulling with the field house and Mother Mary Bellarmine found out about it and now—”
“Bullshit,” Sister Domenica Anne said.
Martha Mary was shocked. “Dom,” she said, “you said, you said—”
“I said shit,” Domenica Anne said, “and I meant shit. There isn’t a single thing wrong with the financing for that field house except that we don’t have enough of it and we never do so so what?”
“But Dom—”
“But Dom nothing,” Domenica Anne said. She looked at her regulation habit shawl thrown over the back of the director’s chair she used for drafting and decided the day was too hot for it. Heaven only knew why she had brought it over here to begin with. She grabbed her keys and hooked them onto her belt instead.
“I have,” she told Martha Mary, in as calm a tone as she wanted to manage, which was not calm at all, “put up with the intolerable, the impossible and the outrageous for over a week now in order to let that woman go over the plans for my field house project. My project, Martha, remember that, I’ve been working on it for two solid years. I know every dime we’ve spent or promised to spend. I know every foot of lumber we’ve bought or promised to buy. I think Henry Hare is a slug that belongs under a rock—and I dearly wish his own wife would put him there—but he hasn’t been cheating us because I’ve made sure he hasn’t been cheating us. I have taken all I am going to take. If that woman thinks she’s going to use Joan Esther’s dead body and my work as opportunities for self-aggrandizement, she’s got another think coming.”
“But Dom,” Martha Mary wailed. “It isn’t Mother Mary Bellarmine who was saying those things. It was Gregor Demarkian.”
“And who do you think put those things in Gregor Demarkian’s head?” Domenica Anne demanded. “Oh, I could just—well, I’m not going to tell you what I could just do. Let’s go.”
“Where?” Martha Mary looked frantically around the large attic room, panicked. “Where can we go?”
“To Gregor Demarkian, of course,” Domenica Anne said. “To get all this straightened out.”
“To get what straightened out? Are you going to tell him about the X-Acto knife?”
“Why not? Martha, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, will you please move it?”
“Dom.” Martha Mary was even more shocked than she had been before.
Outside there was the sound of squealing tires and the heavy bump that meant a pair of cars in slow collision. Domenica Anne strode to her window and looked out on the road in front of the sidewalk in front of St. Teresa’s House, where a pair of long black limousines had rammed into each other, front to front, just hard enough to cause broken headlights and minor crumples. Behind the white limousine a small Mercedes had pulled up and braked just in time not to be damaged. Nancy Hare was emerging from the undamaged car with a smile on her face that had a great deal in common with the smile on the Mona Lisa’s.
“Wonderful,” Domenica Anne said sourly. “Nancy Hare, Henry Hare, and Norman Kevic.”
“What?”
Martha Mary rushed to the window and looked out. The two men were standing face to face, raising their fists in the air. Nancy was standing off to one side, doubled up with laughter.
“Come on,” Domenica Anne said. “Let’s go join the war.”
Chapter 7
1
THERE WAS AN ALCOVE that jutted out over the front door from the second floor of St. Teresa’s House, and when Gregor Demarkian was finished looking through broom closets he stood in it. From the windows there he could see the cars pulling up to the curb outside and the people getting out. He noted the separate arrivals of Nancy and Henry Hare with some amusement. This whole situation made him feel a little uneasy, in spite of the fact that it was the way it was supposed to be. Maybe it was the fact that nothing before had ever been the way it was supposed to be that gave him pause. Reverend Mother General and the Archbishop had come out on the steps. Reverend Mother General paced back and forth the way school principals will when they have to think of something awful to do to someone and can’t. Gregor couldn’t remember how many lectures he had given about how murder cases had to be solved in the first forty-eight hours, about how physical evidence was much more important than the psychological kind, about how what must be true must be true no matter how strange it might seem. In his career, he could remember fewer than three men who had been convicted on physical evidence, and fewer than half a dozen whose guilt had been determined in the first forty-eight hours. As for the strangenesses, that was something else. Everything was strange. Just behind him, at the head of the narrow flight of steps leading down to the equally narrow corridor off the foyer, there was a gigantic poster, the one Gregor thought of as the granddaddy of all posters for Mother’s Day as Mary’s Day. Maybe he should have put that as the “grandmother” of all posters. It was at least as tall as he was, propped up against a wall with a rubber door stopper at its feet to keep it from falling over. It showed the Madonna standing on a cloud and holding the Child in the air. The Child had a crown and a scepter and a face that was at least fifty years old. Gregor wondered if women had once looked on their sons in this way, or if this was a male distortion of memory, what men thought their childhoods had been about. At the bottom of the poster were the words,