Murder Superior Read Online Free Page B

on. Sarabess had gone to visit the revolution in Cuba just after Castro had come to power. She had been visiting revolutions ever since, from Chile to Nicaragua to Angola to El Salvador and back again. She had evolved—she was always evolving—from an unthinking species chauvinist in cow leather sandals to a friend of the earth in cotton espadrilles that always seemed to be unraveling into threads and leaving red dye stains on the bony tops of her feet. She had had a vision in the reeking communal kitchen of a Franciscan mission in San Luis Alazar that showed her the face and the magnificence of God. She had had the good luck to find this job in the Registrar’s Office of St. Elizabeth’s College. Her life was working out perfectly, really, in spite of the fact that the world didn’t seem to make sense anymore. That was her Catholicism. Sarabess Coltrane believed that God was the engine of history that was driving the world inexorably in the direction of an international communitarian Utopia. She was sure the gates of Hell would not prevail against it.
    Sister Catherine Grace believed that God was a big white man with a beard who sat on clouds and looked after people’s pet kittens—but Sarabess liked her anyway. Sister Catherine Grace couldn’t be more than twenty-two years old—the one time Sarabess had mentioned it, Sister had guessed that John Beresford Tipton was a kind of tea—but she had enthusiasm and energy and, best of all, a big mouth. It was the one thing Sarabess didn’t like about working at St. Elizabeth’s, that the place was so well stocked with nuns. Most of the Orders Sarabess had come into contact with in South America had been hemorrhaging. It figured that this one, where the Sisters still wore habits and everything was so conservative, would have more nuns than they knew what to do with. The problem with conservative nuns was that they didn’t talk, and if they didn’t talk you never found out anything. With Sister Catherine Grace you found out everything, because she hadn’t shut up since she opened her mouth and let out a wail in the delivery room.
    Sister Catherine Grace was lettering a poster she was supposed to have finished the night before. Her veil was hoisted behind her shoulders so that it fell over the back of her chair. Sarabess was pretending to go through the files that had been taken out the day before but not put back where they belonged. The first thing she did every morning was return errant paper to its proper bureaucratic place. What Sarabess was really doing was trying not to look in the small wall mirror that sat above the grey metal file cabinet marked “Student Volunteers/Local Missions.” It was ten minutes to nine on the morning of Monday, May 5, and Sarabess Coltrane had just become fifty years old.
    The file on the top of the stack said “CCSW/AHCWR,” which meant it had to do with the Catholic Commission on the Status of Women and their Ad Hoc Committee on Women Religious. Sarabess tucked a long lock of greying hair behind her ear and pushed the file to the upper right hand corner of the desk. That was another reason she didn’t want to look into the mirror. She had always worn her hair long, in spite of the fact that it had never looked the way it was supposed to. It lay flat against her skull instead of springing out. Now she wondered if it just looked wrong on a woman as old as she was. Maybe women of fifty looked ludicrous in waist-length hair no matter what their politics. Sarabess shifted in her seat and bit her lip.
    “Go back to the beginning,” she said to Catherine Grace. “Now, Joan Esther was in the same convent as Sister Mary Bellarmine—”
    “ Mother Mary Bellarmine,” Catherine Grace said automatically. “And you don’t say they were in the same convent. You say Joan Esther was a Sister in Mother Mary Bellarmine’s house. Anyway, Mother Mary. Bellarmine has a great house, in California on the water with beach all around it and not a