Ignorant of either woman’s presence, Montgomery confided, “Goldy, I’m so very, very sorry that I was hard on you during the service yesterday.” He made a gesture of apology with his meaty hands. “I feel terrible that my grief expressed itself in an ugly outburst against you. I called and left a message with your son. But I wanted to tell you so myself.”
I muttered, “Okay.” In her duct-taped sneakers, Frances Markasian tiptoed up behind Montgomery so she could eavesdrop on our conversation. The Stealth Reporter. I said nothing. In fact, I rather enjoyed the prospect of the canon theologian getting a painful dose of our local journalism.
“It’s just,” Montgomery went on, casting his eyes heavenward and warming to his topic, “that I’m still so terribly upset over losing Ted Olson. And this parish … I don’t know.” A cast of tragedy hung over every word. Frances Markasian was getting it all down. I couldn’t help it, I laughed. Again. Perhaps it was the lack of sleep, the stress, the pill. Or maybe it was the way Montgomery took himself so seriously that brought out the hyena in me. “In any event,” he rushed on with a self-important sniff and pat of his middle-parted white hair, “we’ve decided to move up the exams by one day, since Olson’s funeral is tomorrow and the whole committee’s already here. Will this be a problem? To have dinner for fifteen at the conference center at six? Tonight? Do you have a staff that can help you? Penitential season, better have fish.” Frances scribbled madly but noiselessly; I wondered wildly if I should set an extra place for her. My mouth hung open. Dinner for fifteen a problem? Montgomery had to be kidding. “Afterwards,” he added in a rush, “we can go through the first three answers to the coffee-hour questions. If I could just figure out the fax machine in the choir room, I think I could notify the last of the candidates. I do remember we were planning on having you do the food …”
Tom Schulz’s voice in my head said, Who’s we, white man? At least it was Tom’s voice this time. Anything was better than having the dead rector insist that I phone him up in the Hereafter. Maybe this was what schizophrenia felt like. I waited for Frances Markasian to introduce herself, but instead she just held her fingers up to her lips in a shushing motion. I wondered if this was legal. We were, after all, in church.
“Goldy?” Canon Montgomery raised his voice a shade. The last thing I needed was to have him holler at me again. Marla was shaking her head wildly and mouthing the words No food. But I knew I had to keep busy, even if the pain pills were playing tricks with my mind. The worst aspect of missing Schulz was the terrifying notion of having nothing to do, of being motionless at home waiting for the phone to ring. Not that I had done that much sitting around in the last forty-eight hours. But still …
“Yes, dinner will be fine. Will the place be open?”
He lifted his peaked eyebrows. “I’ve told Mitchell Hartley to leave the doors unlocked around the clock. That Bob Preston fellow protested—a little late for the person responsible for security to be upset, wouldn’t you say? I’m having a broken window fixed right now. Can you imagine?”
“Actually, I can. That’s our fault—”
He waved my protest away. “I’m assigning you and Doug Ramsey to examine Mitchell Hartley tonight, just for an hour. Go ahead and open your letter matching numbers with candidates, and concentrate on his written work. We hope Hartley’ll do better this time …”
There was that we again. “How’s Father Doug doing?”
“Oh, well,” said Montgomery with a sniff. “You know he was upset with Olson over the miracle claims, and I do believe he was a trifle jealous, perhaps. Olson was so handsome and charismatic in every sense, a lady’s man, you know.” Frances Markasian wrote furiously.
“He was never a lady’s man with me,” I said, my voice as stiff as my aching back. I didn’t wish to see any undocumented insinuations about Father Olson in the Mountain Journal.
“I’m just saying,” Montgomery replied, testy and oblivious, “that I’ve been working with the clergy in this deanery to change suspicious, jealous attitudes. There have already been some meaningful changes. However, I do admit to frustration over priests’ feelings that the pie is only so big—”
“Pie!” cried Marla. “I just knew there was something I needed to talk to Goldy about. Sorry that you’re feeling frustrated, Canon Montgomery. Actually, I’ve been meaning to tell you about this other canon I knew. His name was Canon Glasscock. I said, ‘Glasscock? Is that your real name? Do you have crystal balls, too?’” Montgomery gagged; I bit my lip; Frances Markasian wrote. But Marla was unyielding. “You know what the clergy should do?” she said, wagging a bejeweled finger at him. “Give you a jingle when they feel blue. Here, tell the Mountain Journal all about it. Frances here can write, ‘When you want/to feel all summery/you can call/Canon Montgomery!’” With that she grabbed my arm, whirled us both around, and marched in the direction of the kitchen.
Behind us, I heard Frances say with potently false humility: “Hi, I’m from the paper, and I’d like to talk to you about your relationship with the murder victim. Father Olson? Could you talk a little bit more about those jealous attitudes?”
“Brr-auugh!” howled Canon Montgomery.
I didn’t dare look back to see how the canon theologian looked. I felt like a Filipino racing away from an erupting Mount Pinatubo. A Filipino with a bad back, no less.
Marla took the hotel pan from the church’s oven. She set it in the chafer with a minimal amount of overflow splashing, from which she deftly leapt away. “Hey, Montgomery deserves it after the way he treated you on Sunday, so don’t give me a lecture,” she said defensively. She scooped up the salad bowl, swayed her body from side to side, and chanted, “I truly don’t know/which is worse/Listening to his sermons/Or listening to his verse!” The woman was on a roll. I saw Montgomery storm out of the church with Frances Markasian in hot pursuit. My bet was on the journalist.
The bakery-fresh smell of breadsticks heating filled the kitchen. I watched Marla toss the salad with the balsamic vinaigrette and wrap the warmed breadsticks in a linen napkin inside a wicker basket. When the ladies emerged from the prayer meeting, they oohed and ahed over the sumptuous array. In a fuzzy part of my brain, I registered that Agatha Preston hadn’t shown up; maybe Frances Markasian had nabbed her, too. Between refilling the salad bowl and breadstick basket, Marla remarked that she hadn’t seen Agatha either. But when I went outside to get a breath of fresh air and stretch my back, I saw Agatha on her knees, digging around in the columbarium construction area. With its deep mud and frozen puddles, steep-sided ditches and erratic surface, perhaps Agatha was working in the mud and thinking about her favorite topic: hell.
The women raved about the Canterbury Jumbles more than any other dish. This bore out the truth of the caterers’ maxim that you must serve a rich and sweet dessert after a fish course. This was true even if the fish is shrimp in a wine-and-cheese sauce. After virtuous behavior, even if it is not truly virtuous, people feel they have earned their right to calories.
“Tata, dear!” one woman called gaily to me as she tied her Hermes scarf under her chin. “I hope they find your fiancé!” Her tone was along the lines of, “I hope you buy a new car!”
I glanced at my watch as Marla cleared the plates. 1:00. Tom Schulz had been gone for fifty hours.
“You cannot cater tonight,” Marla insisted once we were back at my house, sitting in the kitchen with our feet up. “I won’t let you. I’m too tired. Besides, we don’t have any food left.”
I shook my head. The only message on my machine had been from Alicia, my supplier. That afternoon, she was bringing up the Chilean sea bass and vegetables I had been planning to prepare for the first meeting of the Board of Theological Examiners. This was fortunate, as I was indeed out of shrimp. I said, “This committee is counting on me. I can’t just show up with no food.”
“They were counting on you for tomorrow. Not tonight.”
I got up slowly and took unsweetened chocolate, vanilla, and Amaretto from my
pantry. “Look, Julian will be home soon, and he won’t mind helping. Dinner will be very simple,” I said as convincingly as possible.
Marla scowled. “What kind of medication did Stodgy Hodge put you on, anyway, hallucinogenic Darvon? Was lunch your idea of simple?”
Actually, the pain pills were helping. I melted butter and whirled chocolate cookies in the blender to make a crust. If we were going to have bass, especially steamed bass, then the caterers’ postfish maxim made chocolate cheesecake a dessert necessity. Besides, I wanted to use another of Tom Schulz’s recipes. It made me feel close to him.
“I don’t believe I’m watching you do this,” Marla muttered. “At least it’s chocolate. Then we can both have some. Not to mention that your back will feel a lot better after a dose.”
Nudging me aside gently, she beat cream cheese with eggs, sugar, and melted chocolate, then doused the smooth, dark mixture with cream, vanilla, and Amaretto while I patted the crumbly crust into a springform pan. When the cheesecake was safely in the oven, Marla poured herself a generous glassful of Amaretto. She announced she was going out to rest on the living room sofa.
“If you leave this house, I’ll never speak to you again,” she mumbled once she’d downed the liqueur and slipped off her shoes. “And another thing I’ll never do again is think catering is this easy, fun, glamorous profession.”
I shook out the heart-in-the-center and cross-in-the-center afghans and gently placed them over her. “It’s nice to be appreciated,” I told her. But immediately I felt a wave of sorrow: Here I was catering a fancy meal to a bunch of examiners and examinees, when I should have been on my honeymoon.
I dutifully hobbled back out to the kitchen and pulled out the pile of exams. I leafed through to Mitchell Hartley’s first set of questions. This section of the exam was constituted to replicate that most pastorally challenging part of Sunday morning, the coffee hour. Many parishioners saw the priest’s presence at coffee hour as an opportunity to get free advice. Think Ann Landers meets Dial-a-theologian. This year’s written questions reflected the kind of bizarre interrogatories that were common. At our last meeting, Father Olson had told the board that a long paragraph was acceptable as an answer to a coffee-hour question. We examiners were always to remember that the candidate was supposed to be pastoral first and theologically correct second. The Episcopal church didn’t want to make anyone feel unwelcome, no matter what. At least, that was their official line.
The first question went, “My neighbor asked me if I’d been born again. I said once was enough, thank you. She said I needed it, and I said I didn’t. Who’s right?”
Mitchell Hartley had written: “Your neighbor is right! You have to be born again, even Jesus says so. You need to get with the program.”
“Uh-oh,” I groaned. On the living room couch, Marla stirred in her sleep. Nor exactly pastoral, I wrote in pencil, and what happened to the long paragraph?
The second question was, “Our teenager babysat for some neighbor kids whose bedtime prayer began, ‘Our Mother and Father in Heaven …’ I thought God was a man! What do you think, Father?”
Mitchell Hartley’s tall, loopy handwriting replied: “God is a man! Don’t let your teenager babysit there again.”
Candidate Hartley was beginning to tick me off. Again.
The third question. “I don’t understand, Father. Is AIDS God’s judgment against homosexuals?”
Mitchell Hartley’s reply was unequivocal. “Yes!” he’d written.
I wrote, This guy flunks the coffee-hour section of the exam.
So much for Mitchell Hartley. My only question was why the diocese had allowed him to stay in the ordination process for all these years. Maybe he was somebody’s relative.
I carefully took the cheesecake out of the oven to cool, stowed the exams, and slapped open the files I had taken from Father Olson’s office. Readjusting my heating pad, I scanned them again, page by page. I paid particular attention to the Board of Theological Examiners’ file, which contained the correspondence between Father Olson and the bishop. The only paper of significant interest was the correspondence regarding Mitchell Hartley’s flunking last year. This coming year, the one we were in now, would be Hartley’s last chance at passing his written and oral ordination exams. In his part-time job with Congregational Resources, Hartley was at the diocesan center every day. And part of each weekday, the bishop testily reported to Ted Olson, Hartley was trying to find out from anyone in power if there was some way around taking these exams from—Hartley’s words—those liberals. After this letter was one from Aspen Meadow Outreach thanking Father Olson, Bob Preston, and the rest of the Sportsmen Against Hunger for their donation of 600 elkburgers to Outreach’s commercial freezer. Finally, there was a letter from the bishop’s office approving the parish’s support of Aspen Meadow Habitat for Humanity; the diocese said if St. Luke’s wanted to give $10,000, and could afford it, that was fine.
CHOCOLATE TRUFFLE CHEESECAKE
CRUST:
9 ounces chocolate wafer cookies
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
FILLING:
½ pound unsweetened chocolate
1 ½ pounds cream cheese
3 large eggs
1 cup sugar
¼ cup Amaretto liqueur
1 ½ teaspoons vanilla extract
½ cup whipping cream
Whirl the chocolate cookies in a blender until they form crumbs. Mix with the melted butter. Press into the bottom and sides of a buttered 10-inch springform pan and refrigerate until you’re ready to fill and bake.
Preheat the oven to 350°. In the top of a double boiler over boiling water, melt the chocolate. Set aside to cool. In the large bowl of an electric mixer, beat the cream cheese until smooth. Add the eggs and sugar and beat until well incorporated. Stir a small amount of this mixture into the chocolate to loosen. Add the chocolate mixture to the cream cheese mixture and stir well. Stir in the Amaretto, vanilla, and cream. Stir until all ingredients are well mixed. Pour the filling into the prepared crust and bake for 50 to 55 minutes or until the cheesecake is puffed slightly and no longer jiggles in the center. Cool to room temperature, then refrigerate until chilled, at least 2 hours. Take the cheesecake out of the refrigerator 30 minutes before serving for ease of slicing. Remove the sides of the pan and cut with a sharp knife. If the cheesecake is hard to slice, hold a long, unflavored piece of dental floss in 2 hands and carefully saw through the cake to cut even pieces.
Makes 16 servings
The mention of the Sportsmen and Habitat made me think back to the Prestons. Too bad I hadn’t had a chance to visit with Bob or Agatha before or after the prayer meeting. They probably would have the best idea of where those pearls actually were. If they were telling. The thought of going and searching for anything, when I’d already had unsuccessful forays into the church office, Brio Barn, and Olson’s place, did not fill me with excitement.
Do they have other places to hide things? Schulz’s voice insisted inside my brain.
I tried to think back. I was so tired. I put my head in my crossed arms on the kitchen table. Nowhere to hide. Hmm. I sat up with another jolt. Habitat.
“Where do you think you’re going?” said Marla groggily when she opened one eye and saw me putting on my heavy jacket.
“The Habitat house. Right down the street. Want to come?”
She groaned as she creaked her way up off the sofa. “You know I have to come. The cops have told me I absolutely cannot leave you alone. Just tell me,” she mumbled as she searched for her shoes, “why are you torturing me?”
“Because of Tom Schulz. I miss him and I need some help.” I handed her one of the large garden shovels from the rear of the closet.
“Oh,” said Marla, “what are we doing, digging up graves?”
“I don’t really know what we’re doing.”
“This is getting better and better.”
We zipped up our coats against the cold and walked the bloc
k and a half to the Habitat house. Marla insisted on carrying both shovels; this bit of consideration didn’t keep her from grumbling every step of the way. At the deserted site, we stepped gingerly through frozen mud and over strewn boards, and looked around inside. The spaces for windows were large empty rectangles through which an icy breeze blew. Sheets of all-purpose white vinyl floor had been partially installed over the wooden subfloor. It was this white vinyl that got my attention. I looked down across what would eventually be the kitchen, and saw what appeared to be a large spider. When I came closer and bent over, I picked up the missing keys to Hymnal House and the diocesan vehicle, EPSCMP.
19
They were even labeled. Hymnal House. Brio Barn. Nissan. I didn’t know what finding them here meant, but I knew it meant something. Marla and I scoured the rest of the construction site, but came up with nothing else: no sign of pearls, or letters, or sacramental vessels. No sign of Tom Schulz.
We walked back to my house as quickly as my throbbing back would allow. I held the keys tightly in the pocket of my jacket the whole way. Habitat. Bob Preston. The Bob-projects. I couldn’t wait to tell Boyd, who still was due to report back to me about Mitchell Hartley. I called and left a breathless message with the Investigations secretary. Within minutes, Boyd called me back.
“We called Hartley and asked to meet him at his apartment. He wasn’t too pleased to have to meet with us. Anyway, his place is so small, he’d have to be a magician to have somebody hidden there.” Boyd’s voice was barely audible above the static; I couldn’t imagine where he was calling from. “The guy doesn’t have much, that’s for sure. And he sure doesn’t have Schulz.”
The Last Suppers Page 23