Rueful Death Page 18

  Maggie took the plate out of the microwave and put it in front of me. "Don't burn yourself," she said.

  The lasagna was bubbling and fragrant with basil and thyme. I picked up my fork. "Father Steven," I said. "What do you know about him?"

  Maggie leaned against the counter. "I don't really know anything," she said. "I've heard a few things, that's all."

  "What have you heard?"

  "Just gossip." She shifted uncomfortably. "You know how it is in a place like this. Sometimes I think you can never really get to the truth of anything. Everyone's got opinions, and no facts."

  "So what's the gossip?"

  Maggie hiked herself up on the counter. "That he's on probation with the diocese."

  "But he's been here three or four years."

  "Four."

  "That's a long time to be on probation."

  She gave me a straight look. "What I hear is that he's on probation for life. The bishop is supposed to be watching him. If he screws up again, he's-" She made a slitting motion across her throat.

  "No kidding?" I thought of Father Steven's bitter, sardonic face, his fire-and-brimstone sermons. "What did he do that was so bad?"

  "Choirboys," she said, and let me think about that while she swept the floor and wiped the stove.

  I finished the lasagna, ate my applesauce, and took my plate to the sink to rinse it, still considering whether someone who messed around with choirboys might turn to writing accusatory letters and setting fires. ' 'Are you busy this afternoon?" I asked, putting the plate in the drainer.

  "It depends," Maggie said. She hung up her apron, took a jacket from a hook, and shrugged into it. She glanced around the kitchen to make sure that everything was in order. "I need to be back here by three o'clock. I'm making apple strudel for dessert tonight. But I've got time to help you, if that's what you're asking."

  I gave her a grateful look. Maggie had lived in this place for a long time, and people trusted her. ' 'How about going to the infirmary with me to talk to Rowena?"

  ' 'You think she might be involved?'' Maggie asked, startled.

  "She's certainly a possibility," I said, and on the way to the infirmary, I filled Maggie in on what I'd discovered the day before. She listened soberly, until I got to the part about Anne hanging the ketchup-stained swimsuit from the cross.

  She smiled. "Anne would love to radicalize St. T's."

  I wanted to tell her that Anne was planning to leave, but I wasn't sure whether I should. "Do you think that could happen?''

  "It could. Reformers aren't isolated any longer. There's a network, and moral support. When you're under the gun, support counts for a lot. Anne could make a change."

  "What about you?" I asked. "Do you want to make changes?"

  She gave a little shrug. "Right now I just want to find my way again, be quiet and listen for a little guidance. Of course, if Reverend Mother General insists on building a retreat center here, I suppose I'll have to take a stand." She lifted her chin. "Somehow I feel that God's rooting for the garlic."

  And God had Sadie's help. But Maggie would hear all about that tomorrow, after the board meeting was over and the news leaked out. "What can you tell me about Row-ena?" I asked.

  "Not much, actually. She managed St. Agatha's infirmary for the last ten years or so. Somebody told me she used to be a registered nurse."

  "I wouldn't think there's much need for an infirmary in a place like this-not anymore, anyway."

  She nodded. "In some ways, it's a relic from the days when monastic communities were more closed off. Still, sisters need a place where they can be looked after when they have the flu or a bad cold. A lot of them aren't exactly young anymore. And then there are the little things-cuts, bruises, poison ivy, things like that." She gave me an oblique look. "It happens less often now, but nuns-especially novices-used to have quite a few psychosomatic ailments. The infirmarian was supposed to be able to tell whether a sister was really sick or suffering some sort of nervous complaint."

  I didn't ask what happened to the sisters with the nervous complaints. "Does Rowena have enough patients to keep her busy full-time?"

  "I doubt it. Word has it that if Olivia becomes abbess, Rowena will be her administrative assistant. The infirmary will be phased out."

  "That's interesting," I said. I remembered John Roberta's flurried, frightened whisper, and the panic on her pale

  face. Sister Olivia says we have to stick together. And Sister Rowena says if I tell, I'm being disloyal. They might-

  "Yes," Maggie said. "From what I hear, Rowena and Olivia make a good team. They think alike."

  Chapter Twelve

  Wilde Rue is much more vehement both in smell and operation, and therefore the more virulent or pernitious; for sometimes it fumeth out a vapor or aire so hurtfull that it scorcheth the face of him that looketh upon it, raising up blisters, weales [welts], and other accidents…

  John Gerard The Herbal, 1633

  The infirmary was housed in two small connecting rooms at one end of Hannah's first floor. I thought the place was empty until I heard the thump of a metal pail in the other room.

  Maggie went through the connecting door and almost bumped into a heavyset, powerful-looking woman on her hands and knees, energetically scrubbing the floor with a soapy brush. The single bed had been stripped to the bare mattress and pushed against the wall, and the window was flung open. The smell of pine oil disinfectant was heavy on the chilly air.

  "Sister Rowena?" Maggie asked. "I'm Margaret Mary, and this is China Bayles. I hope we're not interrupting."

  Still on her knees, Sister Rowena straightened. Her face was flushed with exertion, her veil was askew, and the hem of her navy skirt was pinned up with a large safety pin, showing thick calves and navy stockings pulled up past her knees. Her pale thighs bulged out over the tight elastic tops of the stockings.

  "Interrupting?" she snapped. "Of course you're interrupting. Thank God. I am sick of scrubbing this floor." She dropped her scrub brush into the bucket with a splash. "Give me a hand, will you? These knees aren't as young as they used to be."

  Stepping forward to help her up, I recognized her. Sister Rowena was the woman who had taken charge of Sister Ruth the night before. She was a woman of sixty, perhaps, although it's hard to judge someone's age when you can't see her hair. Hers must have been dark, though. Her intimidating brows, almost a man's brows, were nearly black, and I could see faint traces of dark hair on her upper lip. The hard, square hands she held out, one to Maggie and one to me, were reddened by the hot water and detergent.

  We tugged and Rowena clambered heavily to her feet. She unpinned her skirt and adjusted her veil, muttering.

  "The next time we have a clothing vote, I'm voting no on the habit, regardless of what Olivia says. Really, in this day and age, we ought to be able to-"

  She broke off and looked at me with a scowl. There was a large dark mole to the right of her mouth and another beside her nose. Her shoulders were broad, her arms stout. Standing, she was the shape of a fireplug, with just about as much grace.

  "China Bayles, eh?" Her voice was rough, no-nonsense, and she barked her words like a cadet commander. "You're the one Mother Winifred brought in to get to the bottom of the fires."

  "That's right," I said. No wonder John Roberta had been in such a tizzy. Rowena's scowl alone was enough to send a nervous person into an immediate fright.

  She took a towel from the doorknob. "Well, I can tell you right off that I don't know anything about any fires. Haven't seen anything suspicious, haven't heard anything." She wiped her hands and slapped the towel back on the doorknob with a And-that's-all-there-is-to-it gesture.

  "You were at last night's fire."

  "I was there at every fire. I live here, like it or not." She glanced down her nose at Maggie. "I understand you're coming back."

  Maggie nodded.

  "I hope your vocation's stronger than it was last time," she said firmly, as if she were speaking to a young girl.
"And I hope you don't expect things to be the way they were before you left."

  I cleared my throat. "I'd also like to ask you about Per-petua and John Roberta."

  Rowena gave me a dark look. ' 'John Roberta has nothing to do with either the fires or the letters," she snapped. "She doesn't have the imagination to do anything sinful." She glanced at Maggie, then back at me. "Excuse me. I'm going to sit down." She walked heavily through the door, limping, one hand on her hip. ' 'Next time these floors need scrubbing, one of the younger sisters can do it."

  There was one bed in this room, two chairs, and a small desk. Above the desk was a built-in cabinet with a lock on the door, and above that, a shelf filled with medical reference books. Maggie sat on the bed, I took one of the chairs, and Sister Rowena sat at the desk, painfully stretching her leg out. She began to massage her right knee through the fabric of her navy serge skirt. After a moment, she looked up at me.

  "Maybe I can save us some time if I tell you exactly what I know," she said brusquely. "Number one, I've never received a poison-pen letter. Number two, I've never written one. So you can scratch me off your list." She snapped her mouth shut as if she had said the last word on die subject.

  "I'm not suggesting that you have a direct knowledge of the letters, Sister," I said quietly. "I thought perhaps someone else might have spoken about them to you, or in your hearing. John Roberta, for instance. She stopped me yesterday morning, shortly before she fell ill. She was ur-

  gent about wanting to see me. We agreed to a time later in the day, but she didn't come."

  "She didn't come because she was in the hospital." She began to knead the other leg, working her powerful fingers into the muscle. "John Roberta doesn't have any more idea about those letters than I do." Her fingers stopped moving for an instant. "Of course, she may have convinced herself that she does." She began kneading again. "In my opinion, John Roberta is a very sick woman."

  "I'm told she suffers from asthma," I said.

  "Her asthma is real enough. But it's her emotional excitability that's making her sick. She's paranoid, to put it bluntly." She straightened. "She's hysterical."

  "I see," I said. An alarm was buzzing in my head. It would be very easy for this woman, a registered nurse and the monastery's resident expert on nervous complaints, to brand a sister hysterical. Once that happened, the hysterical sister would be completely discredited. Nobody would believe a thing she said. It was a pernicious strategy.

  Sister Rowena folded her heavy arms. "So what was John Roberta's story this time?"

  "I don't know," I said. "We didn't get that far."

  A look of relief ghosted across Rowena's face, and she turned away. "Well, don't bank on her to solve your mysteries for you. You can't trust a thing she says. She's totally unreliable."

  Maggie spoke up. "I heard she might be moving. Is it true?"

  Rowena made a clucking noise with her tongue. "Why sisters waste energy gossiping about other sisters, I'll never know."

  "Is it true?" I asked, more sharply.

  Rowena straightened. "Sister Olivia and I have located a house where John Roberta can get counseling, in a desert climate that will relieve her asthma. If Reverend Mother General would give her permission-" She paused. "But that's another story."

  The buzzing was louder. Render the troublemaker untrustworthy, her story unbelievable, and send her away. It was an ancient trick, much used to silence difficult women. Was that what was going on here? Or was John Roberta really a paranoid hysteric suffering delusions of persecution?

  Rowena was continuing. "At the moment, John Roberta is on her way to St. Louis to attend her mother's funeral. By the time she returns, I hope Reverend Mother General will have agreed to reassign her." She paused, putting an emphatic period to this part of the conversation. "Now, what else would you like to know?"

  I took a deep breath. Talking to this woman was like questioning a hostile witness. I was out of practice, and not doing a very good job. ' T understand that you were with Sister Perpetua when she died. She received one of the letters, perhaps the very first one. Did she say anything that-"

  Rowena smoothed her skirt over her knees. "Perpetua said a lot of tilings, Ms. Bayles, none of them very sensible. Even when she had her wits about her, she was a babbler. Toward the end, she babbled a good deal. Quite senile."

  "Did she babble about anyone in particular?"

  Rowena pulled her dark brows together. "I don't think I could report, in good conscience, what Perpetua said. She wasn't in control of her faculties."

  Same song, second verse. John Roberta was paranoid, Perpetua was senile. There was nothing I could do to force this woman to give me information, just as I could not force Father Steven to tell me what I suspected he knew. I changed my tack. "Do you know why Dr. Townsend has ordered an autopsy?"

  "Of course I know." She was scornful. "He wants people to think that Perpetua did not die a natural death. He'd like to discover that somebody brewed up some of Mother Winifred's foxglove and dosed her with it."

  "Is that what happened?"

  She gave me an acid smile. "I have told Mother Winifred repeatedly that it is dangerous to maintain that still-room. It is entirely possible that one of the younger sisters-they're not at all supervised, you know, no matter what Mother Winifred says-made some sort of terrible mistake."

  "Did anyone other than you administer medications to Perpetua?"

  Her chin snapped up. "No, of course not. And all my medicines are in that cabinet right there, locked up."

  I let her think about the implications of that for a moment. "I see," I said.

  She regarded me narrowly. "Well," she said, with rather less truculence, ' 'the autopsy report will settle all this nonsense. Perpetua was an old woman. She died of natural causes."

  Rowena might be lying. And even if she were telling the truth as she saw it, she might be wrong. Somebody else might have helped the old woman along without Rowena knowing anything about it.

  I stood up. "Who visited Sister Perpetua toward the end?"

  "Several of her friends. Mother Winifred. Olivia, Ruth, Ramona. Father Steven, of course. He was here when she died. There may have been others." She shifted on her chair. "Now, if that's all you have to ask-"

  "Where is the hot plate?"

  The question caught her utterly off guard. Her eyes widened as she looked up at me. "The… hot plate?"

  "Sister Ruth says that the hot plate from Mother Hi-laria's cottage has disappeared from the storage room. Did you take it?"

  She squared her shoulders and managed a scoffing smile. "Did I take it? What in the world would I want with it? It's… it's dangerous."

  "You haven't answered my question, Sister."

  Her expression was half-defiant, half-apprehensive. 'Does Ruth say I took it?"

  "She says it was in the storage room from the time Mother Hilaria died until you spoke to her about it. When she went to look for it, it was gone." I stood over her, keeping my eyes fixed on hers. ' 'Did you take the hot plate, Sister?"

  Her lips thinned and pressed together. She seemed to be wrestling with something inside herself-the truth, perhaps. Her glance slid to Maggie, who was sitting very still. The silence stretched out. Finally, in a low, resigned voice, she said, "Very well, then. Yes, I took the hot plate."

  "Why?"

  She didn't look up. "Because… I was asked to take it."

  "Asked? By whom?"

  Her chin was trembling and her voice was scratchy. "Mother Winifred directed us to talk to you about the letters." She brought her chin under control with an effort. "She didn't say we had to talk to you about anything else. I don't want to answer any more-"

  I leaned down. "Who asked you to take that hot plate, Sister?"

  She pressed herself back in her chair. "What you're thinking is wrong, you know." She swallowed. "You really don't have any idea what you're-"

  "I need to see that hot plate, Sister Rowena. This is a very serious matter, you know. If the
sheriff's office gets involved…"

  "The sheriff? But why should-" She blinked rapidly. "Well, you can't see it. Not just now, anyway. Not this minute. Maybe later."

  "When?"

  Her head drooped. There was a long silence. "When Olivia gets back," she said at last.

  "Lord deliver us!" Maggie said as we left Hannah. "Amen," I said. "What do you think? Was she telling the truth?"

  She hesitated. "I wasn't sure, in the beginning, anyway. That business about John Roberta being paranoid and Per-petua babbling and so on-it's all very convenient, isn't it? But she did tell, after all. About the hot plate, I mean."

  Yes. It had taken an effort for Rowena to tell us who had the deadly hot plate, but she had told us. Which suggested that what she had said about John Roberta and Per-petua had also been the truth, at least in the narrow way she had framed her reply. People usually don't he about small things and then tell the incriminating truth about something much more significant.

  Maggie turned to me. "Who's next? Who else are we going to interrogate and intimidate?"

  "If that's what you think we did to Rowena," I replied tartly, "you're dead wrong. / was the one who was intimidated."

  "Oh, yeah? Didn't sound like it to me," Maggie said in a wry voice.

  I consulted my list. "Sister Rose is next, and after that, Ramona."

  Maggie's head tilted. "Rowena, Rose, Ramona-do I see a pattern?" She frowned thoughtfully. "And John Roberta too. What's going on?"

  "It's a long story. Let's find Rose and Ramona first. If there's time after we've talked to them, I'll tell you."

  There was plenty of time, because our conversations with Rose and Ramona were fairly short. We found Rose in Mother Winifred's herb garden, bundled up in a red wool jacket, pruning back an unruly horehound. She was a shy, fragile, fortyish woman who spoke in a feathery voice and kept her eyes cast modestly downward.