The Last Suppers

by Diane Mott Davidson

  “The heck you are, buster.”

  “If you don’t take me with you, I’ll ride over there on my bike. Then maybe the killer can get you and me together.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, then, let me call the police.”

  I put in a call to Boyd and identified myself to the person who answered. I asked that the Sheriff’s Department send a car over to the Aspen Meadow Conference Center, that I had a good idea Tom Schulz might be there.

  “They were already there,” the policeman said. “But if you have another idea about Schulz, they’ll go back. Twenty-five minutes, tops,” he said and then hung up.

  “Okay, Arch, the police are on their way.”

  He gave me a baleful look. “I miss Tom, too, you know.”

  “All right, all right, we’ll go over and meet the police there. But I have to go find some tools and my Mace, just in case …” I didn’t finish the thought. “Get your coat, hon. It’s cold.”

  He raced up the stairs and announced sonorously over his shoulder, “Mom—we’re going to need at least two flashlights.”

  13

  Within minutes my van was whining up Meadow Drive toward Hymnal House. The air was unusually chilly for an early Colorado afternoon in April, and a bleak sky threatened snow. No law-enforcement types had arrived by the time the van crunched over the gravel of the long conference driveway. Silently I castigated myself for agreeing to bring Arch into a potentially dangerous situation. I wavered about going back. I saw a jogger in my rearview mirror, backed up, and rolled down my window. Yes, the police had been here, he informed me, panting. It was a while ago, maybe half an hour.

  I would not go into any of the buildings until they got back, I vowed. I would not put Arch in danger.

  I pulled the van up to the split-rail fence by Brio Barn. We jumped out onto ice-slickened grass at the edge of the cliff overlooking Main Street, Cottonwood Creek, and St. Luke’s. Across the creek, the church lot held two cars. But it was empty of people. No signs of activity animated the conference center, either. The two ninety-year-old conference buildings were distinguished by dark cedar shake shingle siding, stone entryways, red roofs, and an air of benign neglect. Red paint curled off the window frames and dead pine needles lay in a haphazard pattern across the window-sills. The place looked like a Victorian summer camp shuttered for the off-season.

  Up the hill from us, next to Hymnal House, stood the old garage. It was a one-story edifice originally built to accommodate three horse-drawn carriages. Now its door yawned widely. Arch and I walked up slowly. The notion of Tom being hidden somewhere in the center was an idea I found alternately brilliant and inane. I glanced around the empty conference garage with its ancient hedge clippers and rusted engines, its workbench cluttered with tools and leaning towers of snow tires. Had Tom been in here? The dusty surfaces revealed no signs of human presence.

  “When do you think the Sheriff’s Department will get here?” Arch asked impatiently when we returned to the van and I slid open its side door.

  “Any minute,” I assured him with more confidence than I felt.

  “Forgot to tell you,” Arch said as he snapped the buttons on the flashlights to test the batteries. “A guy named Canon Montgomery called. Wanted to apologize for his little outburst, he said. Wants to get together with you before the exams. What outburst? What exams?”

  So Canon Montgomery had called. If he truly was feeling contrite, maybe I could play off his guilt to get him to discuss the woman waiting for Ted Olson outside the Society of Chad meeting. “You know,” I replied, “the exams for the candidates for the priesthood. They start Tuesday night …”

  But Arch wasn’t listening. “What’s all this?” he asked. He shone his flashlights in the corner of the van that held the two thick files and books I had pilfered from Olson’s office.

  “Oh, that’s just—” Startled by the approaching whine of a car engine, I stopped talking. For a moment, we were transfixed by the sight of the small foreign automobile barreling down the conference drive.

  “Mom,” said Arch, “that looks an awful lot like—”

  “Don’t tell me. Quickly, hustle up to Hymnal House. We need to hide.”

  I slammed the van’s sliding door. And then we ran. But the steps were snowy, and Arch was unsure of which way to go. We were not fast enough to elude Frances Markasian. The Mountain Journal’s investigative reporter lunged out of her Fiat, hoisted up her voluminous bag, and bounded up the stone steps to Hymnal House in hot pursuit. Gasping for breath, she caught up with us on the old stone patio by the double-door entrance. We stood panting just feet from the window that hung, snaggle-toothed and cardboard-covered on the inside, after Julian’s breakage and Mitchell’s repair.

  Holding my side, I noted that the shoes enabling Frances to sprint up the steps were sneakers held together with duct tape. Above these hung her oversized black trench coat that was either a journalistic affectation or the only piece of outerwear available at the same garage sale where she’d unearthed the sneakers. The recession had obviously left its mark on Aspen Meadow. She dropped the big handbag on the flagstones and sent her dark stringy hair shaking wildly as she pounded her chest and coughed hard.

  “Gee, Goldy, where’re you going so fast? You’re going to give me a heart attack.” As if to remedy this situation, Frances leaned against a pile of metal deck chairs on the stone patio, leaned down to retrieve the bag, and groped inside. After a moment’s search, she pulled out a pack of cigarettes and book of matches. She shook out a smoke and looked us over. “Whatcha doin’ with the flashlights? Looking for something?”

  “We’re going in to find some pans of mine,” I said laconically. “I know by order of the Aspen Meadow Fire Department that there’s no smoking within ten feet of any of the conference buildings.”

  “That’s too bad,” said Frances. She lit the cigarette and inhaled greedily. With the hand holding the cigarette, she pulled a curtain of her hair off her face so she could see what she was doing. With the other hand, she brushed snow off one of the deck chairs, a rusted green contraption that looked as if it had been salvaged from the Titanic. Blowing smoke out in a thin stream, she dragged the chair over to the short stone wall that edged the deck. Fifty feet below, cars passed along Main Street. Without giving the view even a cursory glance, she plopped on the wet chair and put her feet up on the wall. “If I don’t sit close to the building for a smoke, then I won’t be able to tell you what I’ve learned about your parish.”

  Arch raised one thin straw-brown eyebrow above the frame of his glasses. I cursed inwardly. But the flesh is weak. I brushed snow and ice off two more chairs.

  “Is this something Arch can hear?” I demanded as I scraped our chairs across the flagstones to the wall.

  “You don’t need to protect me, Mom,” my son said grittily. “I am a week away from being thirteen, in case you forgot.”

  Frances waved this off and carefully balanced her cigarette on the edge of the stone wall before again reaching down into her bag. She brought out a Jolt cola, shook it lightly, then popped the top and sucked fizz.

  Arch watched in open-mouthed awe. He said, “That is so cool!”

  Frances retrieved the smoke and smiled beatifically. “What, the drink or the cigarette?”

  “The pop! I’m not allowed to have that stuff. Triple the caffeine of regular cola? Are you kidding? Man! You must be cruisin’!”

  “Uh, excuse me?” I interjected mildly. “What happened to your Diet Pepsi and Vivarin?”

  “That’s only for morning.” She set the can on the stone wall and sucked on the cigarette as if it were an oxygen machine. “This is for afternoon. Listen. Bob Preston is b-r-o-k-e.”

  “No kidding?” I looked off the deck at the tops of pine trees that grew along the steep slope. An evenly spaced line of antique cars passed sedately on the road below. The Model-T Club of Denver often brought their point-to-point rallies through our little burg. It was better than the motorcycles. Beyo
nd the chugging cars, the A-shaped roof of St. Luke’s resembled an enormous tent top.

  “Flat broke,” added Frances. “Busted. And in hock up to his sanctimonious ears.”

  “I thought he had oil well royalties or something.”

  She chugged more Jolt and made a satisfied lip-smacking noise. “That’s why I’m the reporter and you’re the caterer.”

  “Cut the chorizo, Frances. What are you saying? And who’d you get this financial information from?”

  I tried to stare her down. Unfortunately, her eyes were mostly concealed by that dark stringy hair that looked as if it’d just been released from dreadlocks. “Bob’s well,” Frances intoned with a swipe at the hair, “is dry. Literally and figuratively. But then there are forty thousand dollars worth of pearls floating around somewhere.” She rubbed the cigarette between her fingers and smirked. “Forty thousand clams—or is it oysters?—might not be enough to kill for, but it would give somebody a nice little stake. Now about Agatha and your priest, Olson—” Frances studied my face avidly. Since I didn’t have any dreadlocks to hide behind, I kept my expression resolutely blank. She went on. “—I heard she wanted him a whole lot more than he wanted her.”

  “Really? Who told you that? Please, Frances, I need to get into the conference center to look for my stuff. The police were here, and they’ll be back soon.”

  “What’s the hurry?” She glanced over her shoulder at the broken window. “What’d you leave over here, pans? They’re probably stolen by now, if anybody would think to look up here.”

  If anybody would think to look up here. This woman was driving me crazy. I shrugged. If I let her know I was waiting for the police so we could look for Tom Schulz, I’d never get rid of her.

  Frances chugged more Jolt. “How are you feeling about the kidnapping of your fiancé?”

  “One more personal question and I’m driving home.”

  “Okay, try this. Think your bishop would have put up with a priest having an affair?”

  My parish, my priest, my bishop. Pretty soon she’d have me owning the Anglican church worldwide. “No, Frances, of course I don’t.” All across the country, female parishioners had been suing dioceses, claiming psychological damage when their priests were their lovers. All it took was a few million dollars lost when the women won their suits for the church to take notice.

  I said, “You think we’re looking at a lawsuit? Or that we were?”

  She blew smoke rings to Arch’s rapt admiration. “I think we might have been looking at blackmail.” Arch raised his eyebrows dramatically.

  “Blackmail from whom?” I demanded. “From Agatha Preston? And where would Olson figure in that?”

  “Say the priest is having a little illicit tickle between the sheets, or he’s scared people will think he is.” Arch’s brow wrinkled, and I could imagine his mind working: Who is getting tickled? Frances continued, “Don’t you think that Bob Preston could use this knowledge to blackmail Olson? Maybe to find out where those pearls were?”

  “And then shoot him? Why not just sue and recover a couple mil?”

  Frances inhaled noisily and warmed to her subject. “Say the priest refuses to give him information he wants, about his wife or the pearls or something. Or,” she added pensively, “maybe the canon theologian, Montgomery, has a little heart-to-heart with his beloved former student, Olson. The heart-to-heart turns loud, and a bunch of folks at the diocesan center overhear them yelling.” She paused. “Maybe the diocese is saying to Olson, give up fair Agatha or else.”

  “Or else they’ll kill him?”

  She held out her arms and shrugged dramatically. The big trench coat collapsed like a nosediving black kite. “Look, Goldy, I’m just trying to put this together. That’s all I want to do,” she whined with unconvincing naïveté. “There’s one more thing. You know the Habitat house they’re building over by you?” I nodded. “There’s a flap among the neighbors, in case you weren’t aware. They’ve just gotten the project red-flagged. They say it violates the neighborhood covenants ‘cuz it’s too small. The neighbors enlisted Olson to be their go-between with the Habitat board, where Bob Preston is a big old striped bass in a teensy-weensy pond. Know anything about that? There’s going to be an article in the paper this week.”

  I said no and wondered if Arch was following all this. To my dismay, he was staring open-mouthed at Frances Markasian. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I saw awe in his eyes.

  She gave me a skeptical look before lighting another cigarette with the glowing end of the one she’d been working on. “So what do you think was going on between the head of the Episcopal Church Women and your priest?” The first cigarette landed at her feet.

  “Gee, Frances, guess you’ll have to ask the head of the Episcopal Church Women that one.” I crushed the cigarette stub under my heel and stood up as an act of dismissal.

  Frances took a deep drag, looked across the street at the roof of St. Luke’s, and blew smoke. “What do you know about Roger Bampton?” she asked.

  “Nothing that isn’t common knowledge in town. How much of it is true is another question.”

  “Do you believe his healing was a miracle?”

  “Do you?”

  She shoved herself to her sneakered feet, sighed, and heaved the bag over her shoulder. “The only thing I believe in is the power of the press. That’s where the truth is. For me, anyway.” She gave me a good-natured handshake and half-smile around the drooping cigarette. “Well, Deep Throat, if you hear anything else, be sure to give the Mountain Journal a jingle.”

  “My pleasure,” I lied.

  “Stop by the office some time, Arch. I keep a fridge full of Jolt back by the press.”

  Arch’s face turned momentarily jubilant until he caught my don’t-even-think-about-it glare. When Frances had hopped back down Hymnal House’s stone steps and roared away in the smoke-spewing Fiat, Arch and I picked up our flashlights to go back to the driveway and wait. When we got near the entrance to Brio Barn, we heard something. Something like a drawer or a door being closed hard. Or a metal chair sliding across a floor. Arch shot me a look.

  “What was that?”

  “Honey, I don’t know.”

  “We have to go in, Mom.”

  “Forget it.” Despite my words, I eyed the barn door.

  “It could be him! He could be trying to get out! Mom! Are you listening to me? He might be trying to signal somebody! But maybe he’s about to pass out or … And anyway, check it out!” He gestured widely to the houses near the conference center, the row of old cars puffing through Aspen Meadow. “This is like, a neighborhood. Nobody’s going to bother us in the middle of the day in a neighborhood. But if you say we can’t, then he’ll probably be unconscious by the time the police get here, and we won’t find him until—”

  He stopped talking again as the scraping sound again reached our ears.

  “Okay, look.” My voice quavered. Arch already was walking down the old stone steps to the barn. “Don’t call out to see if anybody’s there until we get inside and have a look, say, on the stage, underneath the stage, in the storage areas, and so on. Do you want the Mace?”

  Arch’s voice said firmly, “Okay. I don’t know where anything is in this place.”

  “I’ve catered here enough to know the ins and outs. Just follow me.” I spoke with more confidence than I felt.

  The padlock chaining the barn doors was unhinged. I didn’t stop to wonder why as I threaded the rusty metal loops over and up to free the door handles. We swung the creaking doors open to the cavelike, shadowy space and were immediately greeted by a current of icy, dank air. What the hell am I doing here? my inner voice demanded. I groped for the switch to the overhead light that I knew existed. When I snapped it, nothing happened. Of course. Although winter was technically over, the electricity would be off until the summer conferences began. That meant that anywhere except Hymnal House, there would be no power, and anyone kept here would be cold. I thought of Tom shiver
ing from exposure.

  “Turn on your flashlight.” My voice sounded like gravel. We swept fragile beams of light into the interior. The theater-shaped space was primarily used for rehearsals, choral concerts, and conference liturgies. In front of us across the wooden floor, the old pipe organ stood like a tall museum ghost. Sensitive to cold, it wasn’t used here, merely stored. The stage was on our right; chairs were stacked haphazardly against the walls. The smell of old, musty wood was strong. I didn’t want to shine my flashlight upward. The thought of creatures that could be skittering through the rafters was a distinctly unpleasant one. Gooseflesh prickled my arms. I was going into a cold, abandoned, semidark space on a cloudy Sunday afternoon to look for Tom Schulz. I didn’t know which was worse, the ear-ringing fear or that recurring thought that I must be losing my mind. Actually, what was worse was the fear that Tom might indeed be … worse than unconscious.

  “You do remember my birthday is this coming Sunday,” Arch said in a low voice.

  Leave it to a kid to bring up a birthday. Discussing something completely unrelated might relieve anxiety, after all. And where were the police?

  “Yes,” I said as I moved tentatively into the room. My voice came out too loud and echoed along with my footsteps. “It doesn’t usually fall on Easter, but it does this year.”

  “I think when I grow up,” said Arch courageously as he parted from me and walked in the direction of the stage, “I’m going to be the kind of guy who does people’s taxes. Four days after tax day every year is my birthday. Then I’ll always be able to have a big celebration, even though I’m grown up.” He hesitated, then hissed, “Shouldn’t we be calling his name, anyway? Since it doesn’t look as if anybody’s here? If he’s in a storage area, maybe he could make noise …”