The Last Suppers

by Diane Mott Davidson

  “Why did you leave the service early?” she demanded shrilly. Behind her, Mitchell Hartley pushed through the church door and walked swiftly over to Boyd and Lucille. Boyd released himself from Lucille’s hold and stowed his notebook in his pocket. Lucille’s voice rose. “What have you found out?”

  Boyd began, “The police are in charge—”

  “Oh, don’t mind Lucille,” Mitchell interjected, half-joking, half-snide. “She doesn’t care who’s supposed to be in charge of something, because eventually she’s going to be running the show. Isn’t that right?”

  Slowly, Lucille Boatwright turned toward Mitchell Hartley. I could feel the lava rising. Since the service was over, other parishioners were coming outside. Some held lopsided paper plates, each one heavy with a cinnamon roll I had brought. The crowd eyed Boyd, Lucille, Mitchell, and me while pretending to pick at the rolls with tiny plastic forks. Canon Montgomery, last out the church doors, strode importantly toward us.

  “You may wonder, Mitchell Hartley,” Lucille began in a tone so icy I felt sweat prickle my arms, “why you have failed to become a priest, but your failure is precisely because of the way you are acting at this moment. Who would want you for their priest? Certainly not me.”

  Mitchell Hartley leaned over Lucille. His face was bone-white and his vivid eyes shone ominously. Loudly, he said, “You wouldn’t want Jesus for your priest.”

  Lucille Boatwright’s mouth fell open. In a commanding tone, Canon Montgomery inquired: “Mitchell, don’t you have some studying to do?”

  It was then that I noticed Officer Boyd ripping cellophane off a new pack of cigarettes. While Lucille Boatwright, Canon Montgomery, and Mitchell Hartley glared fiercely at one another, Boyd lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. Beside him, a newly arrived Bob Preston coughed lightly. In typical Aspen Meadow fashion, tall, roosterlike Bob wore a fringed leather jacket, plaid flannel shirt with Navajo bolo tie, jeans, and hand-stitched custom-made cowboy boots. Wearing a long black coat, Agatha stood mutely beside him.

  Mitchell Hartley spat his words at Lucille. “Jesus is in charge of this parish, Lucille, not you.” To Canon Montgomery, Mitchell snarled, “The Lord is going to get me through these exams, George.”

  “Father Montgomery to you, young man, if you don’t mind.” Montgomery’s skin had an unhealthy flush.

  “Oops,” said Marla from my side, where she had suddenly appeared. “Are we having a bit of a confrontation in the Episcopal church parking lot? The Frozen Chosen at war, for all the world to see?”

  “Why don’t you go break it up?” I said desperately to her. The hostility level among Lucille, Montgomery, and Hartley had risen to nuclear fission level. “I need to talk to Boyd.”

  “Are you kidding?” she cried in mock horror. “Lucille’s already asked me to make five hundred cookies for Olson’s funeral tomorrow. I said no, so now I’m on her shit list.”

  “Marla!”

  “I forgot. We’re at church.”

  A Furman County Sheriff’s Department car pulled up to the entrance of the parking lot behind the rows of other cars and sat idling. Boyd took a last drag of his cigarette and dropped it at his feet.

  “I’m going to need to talk to you,” he said to Bob Preston, “as soon as I finish some other work. Don’t leave the church.”

  Bob Preston, uncomprehending, opened his eyes wide as Boyd walked quickly toward the car. I scrambled after him.

  “Please,” I begged when I caught up to him, “tell me more about where they found Tom. Did it look as if he’d been hurt badly? What are they thinking could have happened?”

  Boyd kept his eyes on the squad car as he hurried along. “They told me there was a small amount of blood in the car, some dents and tearing of the vinyl seats, maybe signs of a struggle. I’m going to look at it now. From the looks of things, we figure Schulz is still alive. We just don’t know why.”

  “Tell me what you mean,” I pleaded.

  Boyd threaded through the first row of cars; I followed. He said, “Here’s someone who’s killed a priest. Before the priest died, he gave a dying declaration to a police officer. If the victim identifies his killer in a such a declaration, it’ll hold up in court. Then Schulz is kidnapped by the killer. Why? Why wouldn’t the killer just kill Schulz, too? He’s the only living person who can identify him.”

  “I don’t have any idea,” I said helplessly.

  “My guess is Schulz knows something,” Boyd said as he held in his stomach to squeeze past a parked Volvo. “Or has access to something. Something the killer wants. It could be just that notebook of his. It could be the whereabouts of those missing pearls. The ditch where we found the car is near a hidden turnout in Deer Creek Canyon. It looks as if whoever shot Olson planned it well. Except for Schulz showing up, of course. Maybe the killer used the church car because he was afraid his own car would be recognized. Because the car belongs to the diocese, we have to assume the person we’re looking for is someone associated with the church. Okay. Given Schulz’s unexpected appearance at Olson’s yesterday, and given that the perp didn’t want to kill him at the priest’s place, why not kill Schulz and just dump him in the canyon? Why keep him alive?”

  “Why?” I echoed as I brushed past a Mercedes and smeared mud on my suit.

  “Well, whatever it is, you better pray Schulz knows how to keep the killer at bay. As soon as he gets what he wants, you, me, the department, Schulz—we’re all gonna run out of time.”

  We arrived at the police car. The engine was racing.

  “I gotta go,” Boyd said as he opened the door. He stopped and saluted me. “Be in touch.”

  This half-promise, half-command hung in the chilly air after the squad car pulled away. Boyd was my one link to Tom Schulz, and I hated to see him go. I wanted the intense, pear-shaped investigator to be completely absorbed searching for Tom rather than being driven to smoke by neurotic parishioners and their idiotic squabbles.

  I faced the rows of cars. The last thing I wanted was to go back to the church entrance and face all those people with their probing eyes and nosy questions. I whirled and headed around the back of the church, toward the St. Luke’s office. Within moments I was staring at the yellow ribbon the police had strung in front of the vandalized space. I ached to go into Olson’s office and look around, but I knew Boyd would have a fit. Plus, it was illegal.

  Oh, well, let him have a fit. I sprinted up the steps, ducked under the yellow ribbon, and pushed hard on the rotting door to get in. I passed quickly into Olson’s office. On the desk blotter was a skewed pile of correspondence and notes. I suppressed qualms of guilt and leafed through the bits of paper. Some bills and advertisements, some printed church circulars, a list of phone numbers, a couple of letters to Olson from friends. Would there be an appointment book here, something to tell who the priest was supposed to meet with on Saturday before the wedding? Then I remembered what Tom Schulz had told me when he was working a homicide investigation, that the investigators would come to a victim’s office to look around and gather evidence, primarily for the victim’s appointment book. So if the book had been here, it wasn’t here anymore. The police surely would have removed it.

  Wait. Had I heard something? I stood still and held my breath. The raccoons? No. Was someone coming? The moments clicked by as my anxiety went into overdrive. I peered out one of the windows. I saw no one.

  With clammy hands, I began to riffle through the pile of files that had been dumped on the floor by the vandal. There was no tab marked P.R.A.Y. I lifted out the folder marked Diocese.

  The priest who saved everything hadn’t felt the need to toss anything from his bulky, overstuffed files, this one included. It was chockful of newsletters from the bishop dating back three years. There were notices of upcoming conferences and meetings, announcements of priests who had renounced their orders, and other ecclesiastical communications that were meaningless to me at a cursory glance. I couldn’t tell if something had been removed, such as anything pertainin
g to the Halt the Hootenanny petition. And the cursory overview was all I could manage at the moment, since it wouldn’t be too cool to be caught sifting through the vandalized files of our murdered rector. Again I listened—for doors opening, someone approaching—but this time was greeted only with oppressive silence.

  I put the notes from the top of the desk into the file and laid the copious diocesan folder aside. I flipped through pile after pile and finally found Board of Theological Examiners, which I lifted out. Father Packrat Olson had been head of the committee, and the folder was predictably heavy. There were old exams, announcements of meetings with agendas, lists of examinees from previous years, Olson’s letter to the bishop telling about my appointment to the committee, and the last item, a brief notice from the diocese about the glitch in photocopying the exams last week. Olson would hear from the diocesan office, the note promised, as soon as the exams were ready.

  I slapped the file closed. Out the dusty window, I could see parishioners dispersing, reverently clutching pale green sheafs of palm. They’d finished with their coffee-hour treats and were heading toward their cars. The 8:00 service was over and I hadn’t discovered a thing.

  Someone associated with the church.

  I slipped the Diocese and Board of Theological Examiners files into two of Olson’s books: a thick Bible and an oversized tome on the church’s feast days. Hoisting the heavy volumes, I noiselessly closed the door to the little building and went back the way I’d come, around the rear of the church, toward the parking lot. With any luck I’d be able to stow the books in my van, unnoticed. My fingers ran over the worn leather covers. I wondered if I looked suspicious. After all, you didn’t usually see caterers walking around hefting overstuffed volumes on religion.

  Outside, the cool breeze and liquid rush of snow-swollen Cottonwood Creek blended with the hum of departing cars. Before I could reach my van, someone yelled from behind me, “Hoohoo! Gold-y? The woman in the pew?” At that moment, a huge roar erupted from the road. I flailed wildly and dropped the book on holy feasts. Papers scattered. In a fast, clumsy pirouette, I managed to hold on to the Bible, superstitious that it was like the flag and shouldn’t touch the ground. Mitchell Hartley leaped from where he’d been waiting and almost blocked my view of the approaching cavalcade of roaring motorcycles. I looked furiously at Hartley, whose pale face seemed to contrast starkly with his red pompadour. Then I glared at the papers and files lying everywhere in the mud at my feet. Damn Hartley. Furious, I knelt and awkwardly tried to pick them up.

  “Don’t help me,” I said angrily, although he’d made no effort to do so. “This is all confidential stuff.”

  I glanced up to make sure he wasn’t memorizing the papers I’d stolen from Father Olson’s office. But Mitchell Hartley was gazing at the loud parade on the road by the creek. The bikers were on their way to the Grizzly Saloon on Main Street. It was part of a spring ritual that shouldn’t have taken me offguard. It’s the migration of the Harley-Davidsons, Tom Schulz had noted enthusiastically. The weather grows warm, and Aspen Meadow becomes the gathering place for flocks of hefty folk in black leather, mirrored sunglasses, bandanas, ponytails, and single earrings. Makes so much noise you could shoot off firecrackers and nobody’d notice. The sole requirement for the motorcycles, unfortunately, seemed to be that all their mufflers were removed prior to setting out for Aspen Meadow.

  “Wow! I’m always amazed when we get that kind of racket in a mountain town! It’s like a jet runway!” shouted Mitchell Hartley from above me. I opened the feasts book and swiftly packed the last of the damp, dirty papers between loose dry ones, stuffed them in the book, and rose unsteadily. The sun emerged from behind the clouds. Mitchell Hartley’s startling orange hair shone in the sudden bright light; his dark blue eyes scanned first the books in my hands and then my face. “Any news?” he asked, too cheerily for my taste.

  I raised my voice over the roar of the motorcycles. “Excuse me. Mitchell, why did you call to me to stop?”

  When he smiled, his crooked, wide-gapped teeth reminded me of something Tom had told me while explaining how he sized up suspects. People who grow up poor have bad teeth, teeth that are either crooked from lack of orthodonture or worse, missing altogether from lack of proper care.

  “I came over to the conference center early to study,” Hartley replied, with more false cheer. “I live next to a kennel, and it is noisy like you would not believe. I’m staying in Hymnal House.” He waved vaguely upward in the direction of the Aspen Meadow Conference Center. “It’s quiet now, before everyone gets there.”

  His awkwardness in my presence translated alternately into arrogance or too-familiarity. The effort to be polite made him nervous. It was as if he were waiting for me to say that I liked him, that this time he was going to pass his exams because God was in charge, that everything was going to be okay. But his resentment of my purported power over his career seeped through every pore. I almost blurted out that I’d been appointed to the committee because of my culinary, as opposed to theological, expertise. But there was something else.

  The bikers continued to roar past us. “Mitchell, how could you possibly have gotten into Hymnal House? The place was locked yesterday morning when we were trying to get in for the reception and—” The motorcycles drowned me out. I fell silent.

  “The place was open,” he cried back defensively. “What reception was that?”

  The last of the motorcycles growled past. I had invited Hartley to our wedding, as I had all the parishioners. But since he had responded that he wouldn’t be able to come, I gave a brief overview of the previous day’s postponement of the ceremony after Olson’s murder. And about Tom missing. Ah, but he knew all about that. Hartley informed me that someone had put the news about Schulz on both the parish and the diocesan prayer chain.

  He furrowed his brow; the red pompadour shook ominously. In a quickly assumed pastoral tone, he said, “Goldy, have you turned the search for your fiancé over to the Lord?”

  I replied evenly, “I’ve turned the search over to the Furman County Sheriff’s Department.” His flinch almost made me laugh. “Mitchell. Who made the arrangements for you to get into Hymnal House? Was it before or after you heard about Father Olson? It just seems so weird,” I added pensively, with an equally furrowed, equally pastoral brow.

  Mitchell Hartley backtracked to give his story of how he’d come to know about Olson’s murder. Last night, his calls to Olson to ask when the exams would start had gone unanswered. Frustrated, Hartley had then phoned Montgomery, the next most senior person on the Board of Theological Examiners. Montgomery had tearfully told him the news he’d heard from the bishop, that Olson had been shot by an intruder. Of course, Hartley informed me, he was dreadfully concerned about Father Olson’s tragic demise, although he was joyful that Olson was now with the Lord. But, Mitchell went on in a worried tone, as a candidate for Holy Orders, he was also frantic about whether the exams would still be held. So, as he’d planned—I could check with the diocesan office, if I wanted—Hartley had come to Hymnal House last night. Like my own experience with catering up there, he’d never given a thought to the building not being open, which it had been because someone had broken a window.

  “I put a piece of cardboard over the broken pane and locked the place up when I went to bed,” he said in his own defense. “But I left it unlocked today, since I didn’t have any keys.” He shrugged.

  “The police are on the way up,” I said. I didn’t mention the abandoned diocesan vehicle they had found. “Be sure to tell them about your arrangements.” I had every intention of filling Boyd in myself about Mitchell Hartley’s unorthodox residency across the street from the church. I’d also ask that the police check with the diocesan office on his reservation. When Hartley made no move to leave, I added, “Mitchell, I’m feeling really stressed out from all that’s happened, and I need to go home and check on my son and finish some cooking—”

  “I’ve been in this diocese for ten years.�
� He leaned toward me. His voice was suddenly raw with anger.

  “Well, I guess the ordination process takes a long time….”

  “A long time? A long time?” The blue eyes blazed. “Some people get through in three years. That’s what it is in other dioceses. But not Colorado. They seem to take a kind of … pleasure in making people wait. Making some people wait, anyway.”

  I wanted desperately to put the books with the stolen files in my van, wanted even more desperately to be out of this conversation. I tried to look dour, the grieving bride.

  I said, “Guess I need to shove off.” He didn’t get the hint. I added, “I don’t believe in making people wait.”

  He lifted his chin and shot me a suspicious look. “You don’t?”

  I edged backward toward my van. Mitchell Hartley, unrelenting, followed. I wanted to ask, Have you turned your waiting over to the Lord? But I didn’t want to hear the answer. Instead I sped up my retreat. Ever eager to impress, Hartley kept remorseless pace right beside me. “I know waiting is supposed to make you grow stronger,” I said noncommittally, “but that depends on who or what you’re waiting for, doesn’t it? How does that psalm go? ‘I waited patiently upon the Lord, he stooped to me and heard my cry.’ Like that.”

  Effortlessly keeping up with me, Hartley glanced down at the books in my hands. He shook his head almost imperceptibly: This woman doesn’t interpret the psalms correctly, and she hasn’t turned the search for her fiancé over to the Lord. In a sadly condescending tone, he said, “Of course, I know the psalm.” We’d reached my van. He leaned against the door so that I couldn’t open it.

  I took a deep breath. “I heard last year didn’t go so well for you. At the exams, I mean.”

  “Some of the questions were really off base,” he replied impassively. “In fact, I was wondering what kind of questions I could expect from you. If you’re coming, that is.”