Murder Superior Read Online Free

about the wonderful spiritual healing that was going on in the battered women’s shelter where she worked. Joan Esther had to bite her tongue to keep herself from asking if any healing of the nonspiritual kind was going on, like job training or help with Pennsylvania’s notoriously convoluted human services system. Joan Esther had to bite her tongue a lot these days. It was a gift from God that Frances Charles hadn’t been able to hang around to help after they’d come back to the convent. Frances Charles had breakfast duty. She had parked the station wagon in front of the front door and disappeared.
    Joan Esther got the last two suitcases out of the backseat—they’d been shoved down to the floor and partially covered with the car’s lap blanket; that was why she hadn’t seen them—and dragged them back inside where they belonged. Once she was sure she had the whole lot, she could start dragging them up the stairs.
    When she got back to the pile, Mother Mary Bellarmine was there, right next to the suitcases, down from her perch. Mother Mary Bellarmine had gone to a modified habit with the rest of them, back in 1975, but she always gave the impression that she was still clothed head to toe in robes. She always gave the impression that she was about to pronounce the death sentence on someone who deserved it. You.
    Joan Esther got the list out of her pocket and began to check off oaktag tag names against it. Mother Mary Bellarmine stepped back a little. She had always been a thin woman. Now she looked skeletal. And very, very old.
    “Well,” she said, after a while. “You don’t look any different. I thought Alaska would have changed you.”
    “Changed me into what?” Joan Esther said, to the suitcases, to the floor. She never looked at Mother Mary Bellarmine if she could help it. “I teach catechism to twelve-year-olds. I teach Catholic doctrine to potential converts. I teach the basics of prenatal nutrition to mothers who are interested. I’m not doing anything much different from what I was doing before I went to Alaska.”
    “When you were with me, you were teaching in a seminary,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “And you were in California.”
    “I know you like California.”
    “You like California,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “You did it to spite me. You did it to make me look bad with Reverend Mother General.”
    “I did it to get some peace and quiet.” One of the tags was marked “The Gingerbread Lady.” That would be old Sister Agnecita, who made gingerbread houses for the children’s ward of the hospital in Fairbanks. Joan Esther hoped that none of the Sisters from Canada went in for things like that, because she didn’t know any of the Sisters from Canada. She was just traveling with their luggage, which had turned out to be cheaper to send on ahead in bulk.
    “The thing about Alaska,” she said slowly, is that everybody I meet up there knows what he’s doing. Nobody is wandering around looking confused and trying to figure out what she’s doing in a habit. And I like the bishop.”
    Mother Mary Bellarmine sniffed. “You did it to get away from me. You told Reverend Mother General you did it to get away from me. Moving away in the middle of the term like that. Giving me less than three days’ notice.”
    “Of course I wanted to get away from you,” Joan Esther said. “You were driving me crazy.”
    “I was trying to turn you into a nun. A nun, Sister. Not—whatever it is you girls are these days.”
    “I’m forty-two years old, Bellarmine. I’m hardly a girl.”
    “You’re hardly a nun, either. You’re soft, just like all the rest of them. You have no stamina.”
    “I had the stamina to put up with you for six years. Trust me, that was enough.”
    The Canadians had all been polite enough to mark their suitcases clearly. Now all Joan Esther had to do was get them upstairs to the hall where these women had been assigned, parcel the suitcases out to the correct rooms,