Murder Superior(9)

“But I thought that was true.” The next file on Sarabess’s stack was the one for the Future Homemakers of America, which she was always tempted to lose. “I thought nuns held everything in common and nobody owned any property…. I thought that was what the vow of poverty was all about.”

“It is. But even in the old days, Sisters sometimes received presents from their families and nobody screamed at them for not handing them over. And it isn’t as if Joan Esther went off and bought herself a mink coat. She just gave a poor old lady a birthday party.”

“Maybe the money would have been better used for a soup kitchen or something.”

Catherine Grace snorted. “If it was up to Mary Bellarmine, it would have been used to buy new napkins for the refectory. Honestly, I don’t know how that woman lasted in this Order. This is really a very sensible Order of nuns, you know. And nice, too.”

“Oh, I know you’re nice,” Sarabess said.

“It just goes to show you how important it is, having a skill nobody else has. My mother used to tell me that all the time. Lisa Marie, she’d say—that was my name, Lisa Marie, me and fifteen million other girls born in the same year, you don’t know how glad I was to get rid of it—anyway, on she’d go, about how in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king. Was your mother really into Elvis Presley when she was young? I think all the women of that generation were, and it’s made them warped.”

“Mmmm,” Sarabess said. Actually, she’d been in to Elvis herself, when she was young, which all of a sudden seemed much too long ago to think about. She pitched the folder for St. Elizabeth’s Theater into the pile at the exact center of the desk and said: “So what is it that Mother Mary Bellarmine has? Does she sing plain chant or pray in Aramaic or what?”

“She builds gymnasiums.”

“What?”

“She builds gymnasiums,” Catherine Grace repeated patiently. “She’s built four—except one was an auditorium, I think, but it all comes down to the same thing. She’s really good at figuring out financing and finding architects and scrutinizing budgets and all that sort of thing. I don’t think she would have been appointed a Mother Provincial if she hadn’t been. I mean, she’s no good at managing people, is she?”

“I guess not,” Sarabess said.

“She’s looking over the deal for the new field house here while she’s at the convention. I heard Sister Mary Rose and Sister Ann Robert talking about it at lunch yesterday.”

“Did she build a gymnasium in California?”

“She built the entire convent. Raised the money for it and everything. Which is part of what makes it all so strange, if you see what I mean, that she’d be so upset about Joan Esther. I mean, Joan Esther decided to leave and made a big point of telling Reverend Mother General that it was because Mother Mary Bellarmine was such a pill, but so what? Joan Esther can’t build gymnasiums. It didn’t get Mother Mary Bellarmine into any trouble.”

“Are you sure?”

“It didn’t get her into any real trouble,” Catherine Grace said. “She’s still in charge of the whole Southwestern Province. And it isn’t Joan Esther who’s being asked to sit in on discussions with the cardinal.”

“Maybe it’s something personal,” Sarabess said.

“Of course it’s something personal.” Catherine Grace held the folder in the air and tilted her head. Sarabess looked up and saw a picture of the Virgin standing on an oversize rose and the words May Is Mary’s Month. “One of the kids in the nursery school wanted the class to give presents to Mary on Mother’s Day,” Catherine Grace said, “but that’s Sister Bartholomew’s operation and you know what Bart’s like. Sensible to the death. I wonder why it is the only people who become nursery-school teachers are the ones who had their imaginations surgically removed at birth.”

“Maybe you ought to become a nursery-school teacher and correct the problem.”

“Maybe I ought to learn to stop procrastinating so my posters will come out better. Is this too awful?”

“It’s fine.”

“If the Church had had to rely on me, the Sistine ceiling would be full of stick figures.”

If the Church had had to rely on me, the Sistine ceiling wouldn’t exist at all, Sarabess thought—and then stopped, because it suddenly all seemed so silly. The stacks of files on her desk were listing. She put out her hand and straightened the least stable one. She wondered what would happen if she told Catherine Grace that it was her birthday and just how old she’d become. Instead, she tucked the file folders from the stack she had mentally labeled “on-campus extracurricular organizations” under her. arm and headed for the file room.