Murder Superior by Jane Haddam Read Free Book Online Page B

how wonderful it was to be a perpetual virgin.
    In spite of the fact that sex hadn’t turned out to be anything like what she’d expected, Nancy Hare still thought nuns were nothing but trouble.

7
    T HERE WAS A STATUE of St. Catherine of Siena at the bottom of the rose marble steps leading to the Sisters’ Chapel. St. Catherine had a book in her hand and the cap of a Doctor of the Church on her head, perched above the veil of her habit. Mother Mary Bellarmine didn’t remember which Order St. Catherine had belonged to—she kept thinking it was the Carmelites and then changing her mind, because Teresa of Avila had been a Carmelite—but she did know that this Catherine was not her kind of saint, and never would be. Mother Mary Bellarmine didn’t like intellectual women, or hysterical ones either, and Catherine had been both. Mother Mary Bellarmine also didn’t like the Spanish. Sometimes she wondered if there was something in the air over there that made women join orders to have visions and live on nothing but the Eucharist. Sometimes she wondered if there was something in the air over there that made people stupid in a more general way. The Good Lord only knew, she had never met a Spaniard with an ounce of sense.
    She stopped at the statue of St. Catherine, looked up into its face, and shook her head. The doctor’s cap looked pasted on—as it probably had been, in the 1960s or the 1970s when Catherine had been granted her honor. It was five minutes after ten in the morning and Mother Mary Bellarmine was at loose ends. It annoyed her. In the old days, ends were never loose. There were strict schedules governing every moment of life from rising at four for office to going to sleep at ten after Compline. In the house she ran in California, life was almost as well regulated. She couldn’t get away with four in the morning or ten at night—the new young nuns would have staged a mutiny; they were impossible these days; they had no sense of religious obedience—but she made it a point to require all her Sisters to be present at prayers and meals, to walk in lines when they were all together, to be accompanied by another Sister any time they left the convent grounds. There were complaints, and Mother Mary Bellarmine knew it. Reverend Mother General wrote her a letter at least once a year suggesting that she relax a little. Mother Mary Bellarmine had never relaxed for a minute in her adult life. She didn’t intend to start now.
    The Sisters’ chapel was right next door to the Administration Building, exhibiting the kind of simile in stone that made Mother Mary Bellarmine feel pleased that the world was such a logical and well-ordered place. The Sisters’ Chapel was old, college gothic complete with battlements, as if the good Sisters of Divine Grace would someday be forced to defend themselves by pouring boiling oil on the heads of rampaging peasants. The Administration Building was made of brick and as modern as one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s nightmares. Mother Mary Bellarmine could see through the broad front windows on the first floor to a room of women working at computer stations. Unlike a lot of older nuns in the Order, Mother Mary Bellarmine knew a great deal about computers. She had made herself know. As soon as the first one arrived in her house she had seen that it would change the balance of power forever.
    Years ago, when Mother Mary Bellarmine was still a small child named Lucy Deegan growing up in Fresno, California, her mother had told her the story of Fatima, when the Virgin came down on a cloud and spoke to three small children in a field in Portugal. She had gone out into her backyard and waited there for a vision, waited and waited, for weeks while nothing came. When she finally got around to entering the convent, she told that story as anecdotal proof of the reality of her vocation, but she left out the ending, which she knew would disqualify her forever. When the Virgin had failed to appear to Lucy