A Demon Summer (28 page)

Those nuns had more marketing savvy in their little fingers than … well, than all the Queen's horses, thought Oona.

*   *   *

Dear God, don't let this be a complete disaster.

Thus prayed Dame Sibil Papelwyk, the cellaress of Monkbury Abbey. Just when things were going so well. Just when I had things under control. Such great plans.

Man proposes but God disposes.

Ain't it the truth.

Had she but known it, her thoughts about the finding of Lord Lislelivet's body strangely tracked the abbess's own. Such a silly man, to have come here. To have brought this disaster on us, trailing his messy life into ours. It was hardly a Christian train of thought but the cellaress's innate honesty wouldn't admit of any phony sentiment. The abbess had led them all in a special prayer this morning for the soul of the man, and that was that. In chapter, she had warned them not to discuss a single facet of the case amongst themselves. They could speak to the police, but only when asked and only under strictly controlled conditions. They could speak to Father Max, but only when the conversation had been cleared with her, the abbess, first. So firm was this injunction, they all completely understood that to defy this order would mean expulsion from the nunnery—a fate worse than death for many of them, who, after all, had nowhere to go. Not after this long time, not after being out of the job market so long, not with so many of their families long dead or estranged from them, baffled by the austerity of the life they had chosen for themselves.

Dame Sibil could not recall a time when such an edict had been handed down in chapter. Well, they'd had the food thief once. But that fell under the category of dormitory prank or one of the milder forms of mental illness. This was serious. Dead serious.

The cellaress looked at the stacks of invoices and bills on her desk, normally the fun part of her day—she loved making all the columns add up, when she could, and finding little economies or money-making opportunities for Monkbury, when she could not. In her heart, Dame Sibil was a
hausfrau
of the old school, a home economist, and folk who didn't understand what it took to run a house, especially one the size of Monkbury, were sadly underestimating both her and her sisters. It was a big position, the equivalent of today's CFO and COO positions rolled into one.

Big mistake, thought Dame Sibil, to do that. To underestimate the nuns. They didn't call her “The Owl” for nothing, and it had as much to do with her acumen as her looks. She happened to think owls were beautiful, those wise creatures, but she knew she herself had just missed being homely. Since childhood, her perfectly round face and eyes and small beaked nose were a source of amusement to others, and she had long accepted that it was so. It was how God had made her, and God loved all his creations.

Now she was in a position of authority, and somehow the demise of Lord Lislelivet made her feel, perhaps irrationally, that it was all slipping away. Her place of safety, slipping away.

“For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out,” she reminded herself. Dame Sibil's mind tended to be a repository of useful quotations, some in direct contradiction to one another. Still, she would rather all her hard work not come crashing around her head like a—well, like a ton of bricks in an earthquake.

She picked up a bill for the guesthouse insurance—the premiums had gone up again, although they'd never filed a claim. There were numerous bills for repairs and upgrades—that never seemed to end. But those repairmen from Temple Monkslip knew better than to overcharge the good sisters, for Dame Sibil was not above hinting that they might suffer eternal damnation if they tried to pull that one on her.

Many of the repairs had to do with the wall that had collapsed in the south transept of the church. It was not the sort of repair that could be patched up with a few bricks and a coat of paint. Oh, no, indeed. Thank God, thought Dame Sibil fervently, for Clement Gorey, who had guaranteed a seventy-five-thousand pound loan about that time, which had allowed reconstruction to begin immediately. This wall collapse was what had necessitated the various fund-raisers to retire the loan, most notably the one put together by Paloma Green and that ghastly gigolo of hers, that Piers What's-His-Name. God certainly worked in mysterious ways if the salvation of the nunnery had come in the form of this lot of unlikely saviors.

Still—and she shook her head, reproving herself—it is not for me to question why. It is but mine to do or die.

One of her sisters appeared just then at her door, her wimple askew. Dame Sibil crossed the office and, first asking her permission, straightened it for her. It was a little service they performed for each other several times a day. Life without mirrors was freeing but it could have some comic results.

The sister thanked her, and said, “Dame Cellaress, I am worried. May I talk with you?”

It was a violation of the Rule, this sort of sidebar conversation, which from her sister's expression could only be about the murder.

She knew it was forbidden, and Dame Sibil knew it was forbidden. Private conversations, special friendships, excluding others: they'd have to confess to the sin in the chapter meeting.

“Sure,” said Dame Sibil. “Go ahead.”

 

Chapter 24

…
AND SUSPECTS

Idle hands are the devil's workshop.

—The Rule of the Order of the Handmaids of St. Lucy

Xanda Gorey felt she might just die if she couldn't get out of here. Die, die, curl up and
die
. Leaning over the fence, staring at the stupid cows, who stared stupidly back in that totally brain-dead way of theirs. She might have been a tree for all they knew. That moronic exchange was the highlight of her morning so far. Soon there would be lunch, which always involved lentils, some sort of vegetarian pâté, cheese, and salad. All of it homemade and fresh, but a greasy hamburger with fries would be so totally welcome right about now. The desserts were nice, though—Dame Fruitcake knew what she was doing.

The thought of Dame Fruitcake brought her up short. If anyone had killed Lord Lislelivet, Dame Ingrid Fruitcake had to be the main suspect. She was the right size for it, too. She looked like she had bodybuilder's arms under all those layers of cloth. And she had to have been the one who tried to poison him. Stood to reason.

Whatev
. Xanda found she didn't care, so long as they wrapped up this investigation and let her
gooooo
.

After lunch began the long slide of the day toward dinner and then bed—bed at a time when she was usually just getting the night started.

No TV. No Twitter feed. No Facebook page to update. No Etsy or Pinterest—
total
shock to the system, that.

No one to talk to.
And
she was running out of nail polish. She'd read the one magazine she'd brought with her, like, a
thousand
times. It was no longer news, if it had ever been news, that Brad Pitt was hot, even if he was middle-aged and had all those kids hanging off him. The library was stuffed with books, but all of it was uplifting crap. She had tried to convince her mother to let her go into the village and she'd agreed, and then,
wham!
The police practically lock us all inside, just because that creepy perv finally went to his reward.

The investigation into his murder, which might at least have been diverting, was another closed door. They, the suspects, had all been told to stay out of the crime scene and to speak when spoken to. There were a lot of officious-looking people huffing about the place, taking samples of this and that, and dusting the already dusty place. Xanda had yet to be interviewed in any meaningful way except by a humorless young constable her own age, who offered zero romantic prospects.

All this because her father, in a throwback to the dark ages, wanted his soul prayed for. He also wanted to dictate the terms of the new guesthouse. It was just how he did business. Cash on the barrelhead. She wondered, and not for the first time, how he reconciled his religious leanings with all the people put out of jobs when he folded up their companies—the faceless people who were just, to her father, numbers on a spreadsheet.

Xanda made a face at the one cow who kept staring at her, pulling her lips wide in a clown mask. No reaction. Big duh.

In a distant field, one of the nuns was walking, maybe gathering something—probably nettles or weeds for another wholesome lunch. The cows ate better around here. No, wait, the nun seemed to be reading from that little black book they all carried with them. From the back Xanda couldn't see who it was. The nun walked with a swift unbroken movement, her legs and feet hidden by the long draperies of her woolen skirt, which dragged unheeded over the grass. She might have been on a conveyer belt, or a carved wooden figure gliding in and out of the face of a cuckoo clock. What a life.

Xanda realized, not for the first time, that they were sort of interchangeable figures, these nuns. They always walked with their heads bowed, concealing their faces in church behind their cowl-like headdresses. It must be like wearing blinders. They couldn't really see. They couldn't really be seen.

Again, what a life. Not for her. She wanted—not children, that was for sure, smelly, puking, clingy little things. But she wanted the freedom to go where she wanted and certainly to dress as she pleased. Coming here had been a mistake, and now here she was, good and stuck.

Xanda had enough self-knowledge to realize her predicament had been brought down on her own head by her own self. She had come along for this ride in the vain hope that Derek back home would notice her absence, a fact she had never shared with her parents. That continued a long tradition of never sharing anything with them. After years of the religious thing at home, she had as a teenager become adept at finding escape routes, and the easiest was pretending to go along with their hair-brained religious beliefs.

As.
If
. The trick was to pretend to volunteer for some do-gooder thing Mom would approve of, then ask to borrow the family car. For a few months she had pretended to work serving meals at a homeless shelter. This was less than satisfactory since the organizers of these meals tended to be adults, and adults tended to talk with one another. The chances were huge that some old dork would tell her mother how her daughter was leaving the soup kitchen almost as soon as she showed up to “work.”

Then Xanda had stumbled upon the youth group meetings at the local church, via a big poster at the church that was headed, no kidding, “Jokes ‘n' Jesus.” It went on to describe how the church hall was given over on Thursday nights to these naff events of an indescribable dullness, aimed at keeping the teens off the street and out of trouble. They had no idea. While all the
LOO
-sers congregated to pray and watch movies about mission work—
gack!
—she and her friends would take the car for a smoke and a whirl around town. It was harmless fun, but her mother would never see it that way. All right, she had to lie to her mother about her whereabouts, but lying was better than having no life at all whatso
ev
er. It had set the course of their relationship for life, both of them sailing in diametrically opposed directions.

Oh, God. Here comes Paloma. What do you call that color she's wearing? Spoiled asparagus? At least she's not with Piers, as per usual, but with that librarian nun. The pretty one. What an odd couple they made.

Xanda jumped off the fence and scuttled into the forested area, hoping to avoid detection. The cow watched her go.

*   *   *

“That was Xanda just now, wasn't it?” said Dame Olive to her companion as they approached the spot Xanda had just vacated.

“Had to be. No one else within a hundred miles has hair like that,” said Paloma.

“I need new glasses,” said Dame Olive. “You spend all day staring at a computer screen and then one day you realize your distance vision is going, too, along with your reading vision.”

“Try the laser surgery,” said Paloma. “Worked for me.”

Dame Olive was surprised, and realized she should not have been. Paloma's eyes would have been the only parts of her body that hadn't felt the surgeon's knife, from the look of her.

“I think it's just eyestrain,” Dame Olive replied. “All the planning for the guesthouse took a lot of research. And then to see it all snarled up like this. Even before the questions about money arose, there were difficulties. Building in stone is no longer practical.”

“I don't see why not,” said Paloma. “These old walls have stood for centuries.”

“I mean, it would be prohibitively expensive, even if you could find trained stonemasons, which you hardly can anymore. In Italy, maybe.”

“Was there anything in particular you wanted to talk about?” Paloma asked her. Paloma, away from Piers, was edgy, wondering what he was up to. Even though they were in a nunnery, still … leave it to Piers to find the action wherever you plunked him down. It was the downside to having a lover so much younger than yourself. You always knew in your heart he'd leave you the first chance he got. You just didn't know when. She'd made the appointment with the plastic surgeon for next week, so it was really important they get out of here before then.

“… think did it?” Dame Olive was saying. Her tone was conversational, but only someone as distracted as Paloma could miss the tension in her voice.

“Hmm?”

“Who do you think did it? Killed Lord Lislelivet?”

“Beats me. I just know it wasn't Piers,” she said, protectively. “Or me,” she added.

“How do you know that?”

“Because he was with me all night.”

In flagrant disregard of the nunnery's rules, thought Dame Olive. Well, if I'm meant to be shocked, I'm not as green as I'm cabbage-looking. These two weren't the first, if the guest-mistress were any guide. Still, it was a good enough alibi—and it worked both ways, for both of them.