“I threw it away,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “It wasn’t of any use to anybody anymore.”
“We recycle cloth,” one of the Sisters in the crowd said. “If one of the groundsmen found cloth in the trash he’d put it in one of the recycling bins.”
“Maybe we should send somebody out to look for it,” Gregor said. “We’d find two things, I think. One is that that tear was not a tear at all, but a cut—”
“With the X-Acto knife,” Sister Domenica said suddenly.
“And the other is that there’s a big green stain all across the front of the habit. I don’t know how that would show up against black—”
“It did show up,” Reverend Mother said. “I remember seeing it I remember thinking that someone had put too much plant food in with the flowers.”
“Someone had,” Gregor said.
Mother Mary Bellarmine was still not having any. She was a proud woman, Gregor thought, proud and furious, like the ancient queens and duchesses who had once run their husbands’ estates when their men had spent too much of their lives drinking. Catherine de Medici. Berenice. Medusa. Her spirit was too mean for the best of those, but she was crazy enough.
“Exactly what was it I was supposed to be after,” she demanded, “in all this nonsense and subterfuge? Why would I want to tear my habit to shreds?”
“So that you could go change it.”
“I did go change it,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said.
“I know you did. You took a long time doing it, too. The little ceremony with the ice sculptures was held up for half an hour. Nobody thought it was particularly odd, however, because everybody knew you had to clean up after Nancy Hare’s attack.”
“And I did.”
“I’m not denying that you did,” Gregor said. “I’m saying you gave yourself time. To get hold of the fugu—”
“Are you trying to tell me I ground up a fugu fish right there on the very afternoon—”
“You did it the day before, I’d guess. You know, this isn’t going to be that hard to put together. Once we know what we’re looking for, we will be able to find people who saw you—near the kitchen downstairs, near the ice sculptures, handing a cracker with chicken liver pâté smeared all over it to Sister Joan Esther—”
The corners of Mother Mary Bellarmine’s mouth twitched upward. Try it,” she said.
“I will,” Gregor told her.
“Try it,” she said again. “Try it all you like, Mr. Demarkian. You’ll never find a single thing.”
At that moment, the front door opened and a little phalanx of nuns came bustling in. One carried a doctor’s big black bag. That one looked at Nancy Hare on the floor and sighed out loud.
“Nancy, Nancy,” she said. “What kind of trouble have you gotten yourself into now?”
Nancy Hare had been fading all the while Gregor talked to Mother Mary Bellarmine. Already weak with shock, she was getting weaker with loss of blood. The nun with the black bag—whom Gregor assumed was Sister Mary Joseph—knelt down beside her and began to cut cloth away from her bloody side. Bloody but not bleeding. Sometime when Gregor wasn’t looking, somebody had stanched the flow of blood.
“Nancy went to college here,” a nun Gregor hadn’t seen before told him. “A lot of the Sisters have known her forever.”
Mother Mary Bellarmine had moved. Gregor picked her out of the crowd and saw that she was looking amused, grim and amused, as if she fully expected to lose every battle and still win the war. Gregor wondered if she was right.
She could be right.
It bothered him.
He was still enough of a policeman to hate the idea of guilty people who got away.
3
IN THE END, HE sidled over to Reverend Mother General, tapped her on the shoulder, and whispered in her ear.
“I’ve got to talk to you,” he said.
And she nodded.