A Minister's Ghost: A Fever Devilin Mystery

by Phillip DePoy

  “Only by comparing radical opposites,” my lecture generally concluded, “can we truly understand these songs, or, indeed, anything about the world in which we live.”

  It was exactly Hiram Frazier’s apocalyptic vision of universal balance.

  Eight

  A quest for universality in life is laudable, and the recognition that there are more similarities than differences between seemingly disparate philosophies is the most important step toward a universal acceptance. I was, however, absolutely unwilling to pursue the way in which Hiram Frazier and I were alike.

  To shake off the gloom, instead, I called Lucinda.

  The phone rang almost as long as it had when I called Andrews.

  “Hello?” she finally answered.

  “I’ve had quite a day already,” I said softly into the phone. “How are you doing?”

  “Getting ready for the funeral. When are you coming?” There was a rustling sound. “No, you’ll have to meet me there. We’re about to be late.”

  She’d set herself to a kind of grim determination, her best way of handling a funeral for someone she loved. I’d seen the mood before, understood it, accepted it.

  “I can be there if you want me to,” I said, “but I’d prefer to take a nap.”

  “Come to the funeral,” she complained. “You’re not old enough to nap in the afternoon.”

  “Einstein napped in the afternoon,” I offered lamely.

  “Yes, well,” she chided, “when you come up with your own unified field theory, you can take a nap. Until then, you have to be my date at the funeral.”

  “A funeral’s not a date,” I grumbled.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she rejoined in amazement. “In this town? Funerals and weddings are the best dates we’ve got. They’ll have good food.”

  “Speaking of which,” I said, “hold on.”

  I set down the phone, got a hot pad from the drawer by the stove, and took out the warmed slice of apple tart.

  “Sorry,” I told her, taking up the phone again. “I had the last bit of one of your apple tarts warming in the oven and I couldn’t risk scorching it.”

  “Don’t eat that now,” she said sternly. “It’ll spoil your appetite for funeral food.”

  Funeral food.

  “But I just warmed it up,” I told her, staring down at the perfect golden triangle, its heaven-scented steam rising to my face.

  “Set it back in the fridge,” she told me in no uncertain terms, “put on a sports coat, and meet me at the Methodist church.”

  “The Methodist?” I asked, surprised, considering what I knew to be the Dyson family religious disparity. “Not the Baptist or the Catholic?”

  “It’s a compromise.” She sounded impatient. “Are you coming?”

  “I suppose I have to.”

  “You do.”

  I knew she was right. Small-town code demanded that I attend. If I didn’t, it would make my investigation more difficult afterward. It could even affect my future folk-material collecting in general. Missing a funeral of this import could have repercussions for years in Blue Mountain.

  I could just hear June Cotage, for example: “I suppose when I die, you’ll take a nap instead of coming to my funeral too.”

  I had no choice.

  “See you there,” I sighed.

  “You’re a good man, Fever,” Lucy said sweetly, and hung up.

  I gazed longingly at the apple tart, then began to fold the edges of the aluminum foil to put it back in the refrigerator.

  “Paradise,” I told it, “once nearly was mine. What’s that from? South Pacific?”

  The tart did not know; or if it did, kept its silent secret.

  A funeral in Blue Mountain was always a social occasion as much as a memorial service. Folks dressed up, everyone brought food to the fellowship hall, a modicum of genuine sympathy and goodwill were in evidence. Of course, the dressing up was a declaration of economic status, the food a serious competition, and much of the sympathy never seemed to me to run overly deep.

  The Methodist church was newly painted white from grounded cinder blocks to pointed high steeple, as it had been every six months since its original construction. The roof was also either retarred or replaced once a year. The building was nearly 150 years old, but it looked like a brand-new movie set.

  Inside, the floors were polished gold, the pews were chocolate bronze, spotless and uncomfortable. The only stained glass was behind the altar, a lovely 1930s WPA project depiction of Jesus holding a lamb and smiling. The other windows were clear and looked out on one side at perfect green cedars and on the other at the manicured meeting grounds.

  The place exemplified the cleanliness that was closest to godliness.

  I was late, and the entire church was packed by the time I tiptoed in. Pastor Davis, regal in a black robe, was speaking about Tess in well-pronounced, round tones.

  “I was thinking about the wrens in the spring of the year,” he was saying, “and how the hours and the seasons turn like a wheel. Only yesterday these sweet girls were in a school play. Only last week they were riding bicycles and singing in the choir. But I believe that the soul occupies the body just the way the body occupies a house, or wrens nest in a tree.”

  I slipped in next to Lucinda, an ash-colored wool jacket over the rest of my black attire. Watertight, black construction boots had replaced my high-tops. Knowing I’d be tardy, she’d taken a place near the back and saved a spot for me beside her on the aisle.

  “You’ll be late to your own funeral, you know,” she chided softly in my ear.

  “Sh,” I whispered, “I’m trying to listen to the funeral lecture.”

  She grinned.

  Lucinda’s smile made me think about her mother’s funeral, years before. Lucinda had dressed in in black and stood somber-faced, but I knew she didn’t really feel that. Everyone expected her to be sad, so she pretended to be, but she was actually quite happy.

  “Mama always believed in a better home waiting in the sky,” she’d told me confidentially. “When it was her time to go, I couldn’t think of anything better than that. No more worry, no more trouble, no more pain in the body or in the mind. And she could see Daddy and Grandma.”

  “And Patsy Cline,” I teased, “whom she always admired.”

  “Hush.” She shook her head. “The point is, I have acted out my false sorrow, but my heart deep down is glad.”

  I smiled too. That sort of acting is a part of everyone’s life. People say what they think they’re supposed to say, or what they’re told would be best.

  “And as to Rory,” Pastor Davis went on from his podium, “I recall how she thought a certain friendship ring had been stolen by her fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Barksdale, the ‘meanest woman’ in the county.”

  Nearly everyone in the church laughed. We had all heard the story dozens of times.

  “Rory and her best friend, Emma,” the pastor told us again, “were caught talking in class, and Mrs. Barksdale said they were not allowed to talk to one another for the rest of the school year. It seemed a harsh punishment, but in our town the teacher is always right. So Emma gave Rory a silver ring the next day, a token of friendship, out on the playground. The ring would replace their conversations. Alas, Mrs. Barksdale saw this happen and took the ring away from Rory, saying it was forbidden. Mrs. Barksdale told the girls she would give the ring back at the end of the year. But at the end of that year, when Rory and Emma went together to ask for the ring back, Mrs. Barksdale told them she had no idea what they were talking about. The girls protested, and Mrs. Barksdale, in a rage, changed both of their final grades from A to B. That was the only year Rory ever got a B. Several years later, as you all know, Mrs. Barksdale succumbed to liver cancer. Rory, then in middle school, asked to sing at the funeral. She said it was her way of making peace with her old teacher. Church members may recall that Tess joined her sister in the loveliest version I personally have ever heard of one of our favorite hymns. The ch
oir will now stand and sing for us the song that Rory sang at that funeral. We pray we may attempt, in the way Rory did, to make peace with our terrible loss.”

  The singers stood. The organ made a gentle nest of sound, and voices rose from it on invisible wings. The choir sang “Be Thou My Vision.” Nearly everyone cried. Most remembered the girls’ singing, angel voices in three-quarter time. We sang every verse in the book, and even I was sorry to hear us relinquish its final chord.

  “And now,” Pastor Davis said quietly at the conclusion of the hymn, “if you would all join us in the fellowship hall adjacent to this chapel, we’ll share food with one another while the caskets are moved to the burial ground. Burial in one hour.”

  Five minutes later, the fellowship hall was packed. I strained my eyes to catch a glimpse of Judy, knowing she would be there, wondering if Orvid would be with her. Unfortunately I was immediately distracted by the folding tables laden with food.

  A long line moved slowly past fifty or sixty choice items. People were laughing, talking, eating. I did not speak, preferring to concentrate on securing the best the buffet had to offer. Within ten minutes I had a paper plate packed to the edges, carefully selected and artfully arranged. I was trying to navigate to a wall where I could be safe from jostling. Precious cargo occupied every square millimeter of my plate: potato salad with bits of apple-smoked bacon, thumbnail-sized whole pickled beets, and a cassoulet of wild duck, black mushrooms, and white beans.

  We boasted several prominent members of Ducks Unlimited in our county, and I fancied that the duck on my plate was fresh, and superbly prepared. I was wishing I’d had a proper steel fork instead of the white plastic monstrosity I felt irritating the fingers of my left hand.

  I made it to a corner of the windowless cinder-block walls; breathed a sigh of relief. Just as I was about to settle against the concrete and address the duck, Lucinda called my name.

  “Fever.”

  I searched for her face in the crowd, found it by the door.

  I made it back through the fellowship hall to the door quickly, wearing a mask of patience.

  “I’m trying to eat my duck,” I explained to Lucinda as I approached.

  “I see,” she said distractedly. “You’ve got to come in the church fast. Skidmore’s in there trying to stop the girls from being buried.”

  The fellowship hall was chaos. Robert Dyson had his Sunday coat off and was nose to nose with Skidmore. Mrs. Dyson was crying and, I noticed, surreptitiously fingering rosary beads. Everyone was talking or yelling. Pastor Davis was sheet white, standing firmly in the doorway that led back to the chapel.

  “I have the order from Judge Hayes right here!” Skidmore was roaring, shaking a fistful of papers at his side.

  “I don’t care if you have orders from Jesus H. Christ on a cross!” Mr. Dyson matched Skid in volume and vehemence. “You’re not taking my little girls!”

  I turned to Lucinda. We were just inside the door.

  “How did this start?” I asked her over the pandemonium.

  “It was calm at first,” she said, shaken by the scene. “I was standing with Robert and Sara. Skid came up and offered his condolences. He said he’d gotten some news from the coroner that made him want to have a few more tests done on the girls before they were buried.”

  “Your brother-in-law reacted badly,” I surmised.

  “You can’t blame him, really. What’s the matter with Skid?”

  “Yes,” I said slowly, “lately I’d like to know that too.”

  “Are you going to do something?” she demanded.

  “I suppose,” I sighed, handing her my plate of food.

  I waded through a sea of distraught Christians, made it to Skidmore’s side.

  “Oh, great!” he exploded when he saw me. “You’re just what I need right now.”

  “Skid,” I responded gently. “Calm down. You’re in your own church.”

  I turned to Mr. Dyson.

  “I’ve been to this fellowship hall dozens of times since I’ve come back to Blue Mountain,” I said calmly, “and it rarely gets this exciting. Is it like that in the Baptist church?”

  “You tell your buddy he’s not getting his hands on my daughters,” Mr. Dyson shot back, in no mood for my pathetic attempt at placation.

  “Well, strictly speaking,” I told Mr. Dyson, “Skidmore is less my buddy than he is the county sheriff. The man who replaced Sheriff Maddox.”

  I’d pitched my voice so as to be heard by as many people as possible. The mention of our former sheriff’s name produced the desired effect: a ripple of relative quiet around me.

  “This man,” I went on, indicating Skidmore, “is an officer of the court with a legal document in his hand. If you can take a deep breath and remember back to the horrific reign of Sheriff Maddox, I’m sure you’ll see the difference between him and our new Sheriff Needle. Maddox would have drawn his pistol by now, arrested you, insulted your wife, and shown, in general, his patented brand of anticompassion. He wouldn’t have argued with you, Mr. Dyson. He would have beaten you into the ground.”

  “Maddox,” someone in the crowd growled. “He’d probably have shot somebody by now.”

  God bless him, whoever said it. I recalled many an encounter with Sheriff Maddox when he was alive, not a single one of them pleasant. I was glad to know that others felt the way I did about him. He had died quite suddenly—dressed only in a red raincoat and saddle oxfords, in the arms of another man’s wife. It seemed a fitting epitaphic image. Maddox died, leaving the post of county sheriff open for Skidmore to fill.

  But the specter of the departed Maddox hovered over the crowd for a moment and produced an ashen calm.

  “Now,” I said to Skid, “exactly what’s in the document that you’re crumpling in your right hand?”

  “I got the coroner’s toxicology report an hour ago,” he said, calming slightly. “The Dyson family was in such a hurry to get the girls ready for this service that they rushed the Deveroe boys over at the funeral parlor, which, in turn, truncated the coroner’s work. But when I saw the initial finding, I rushed over to Judge Hayes to get this cease and desist. I mean, it’s better to do it now than to exhume the bodies tomorrow, right?”

  “Why?” was all Robert Dyson wanted to know.

  “Do you really want me to tell you in front of all these people?” Skid’s voice was distant and cold.

  “What is it?” Sara Dyson chimed in, letting go of her rosary beads.

  “All right,” Skid sighed, still emotionless. “The initial toxicology report indicates that the girls might have been under the influence of hallucinogens.”

  The statement could have caused the room to erupt again, but instead it shut everything down. The fellowship hall fell silent as a tomb.

  Only then did I finally see Judy. She was standing close to the hallway door, nodding, a grim look of determination on her face.

  “But you don’t believe,” I pressed, trying to keep my voice down, “that the girls were taking illegal drugs.”

  I could still read Skid like a book. He had a wild look of determination in his eyes.

  “Of course not,” he answered me, his voice betraying a shaky underpinning. “I believe that they were poisoned with them, given drugs without their knowledge.”

  “What?” Mrs. Dyson whispered.

  “And if that’s true,” Skid barreled forward, “then these drugs would most likely be the cause of the girls not getting off the railroad tracks.”

  “And that would change the coroner’s report,” I supplied, “to murder.”

  I followed Lucinda home shortly after that. No one wanted to stand around and watch as the bodies were loaded into hearses that should have carried them to their burial sites.

  I pulled my truck up next to her car and got out, saw her to her front door.

  “Listen,” I said as gently as I could, “do you have some photos of the girls in your wallet? You know, school pictures or something?”

  �
��What?” She glared at me.

  “I have a few things to do.” I locked eyes with her.

  She nodded.

  “You want to show the pictures to someone who might have seen them that night.” She sighed.

  “I’ll give them back today.”

  She opened her purse, fiddled with her wallet, produced two yearbook-style portraits.

  “You get enough to eat at the church?” she mumbled absently.

  “Anyway,” I said quickly, “I’ll be back in a couple of hours. Will you be all right until then?”

  “Uh-huh,” she told me unsteadily, fishing in her purse for her house key. “Where are you going?”

  “Over to the Palace in Pine City. I want to show these photos to someone. I might be able to discover if the girls had dates.”

  She stopped all motion for an instant.

  “They might have,” I said before she could form a sentence.

  “I see.” She opened her front door.

  “Two hours.”

  She nodded and headed into her house.

  I turned my truck around and headed for Pine City, trying to remember the name of the young man at the movie theater with whom I’d spoken, the usher-filmmaker. He’d said it wasn’t a good name for a director.

  What was it? I asked myself.

  I spent the entire drive over the hill to Pine City failing to recall the boy’s name and trying to ignore my stomach. As I pulled up to the Palace, I realized it was the middle of the afternoon and there probably wouldn’t be anyone there.

  I parked directly in front of the entrance. There were no lights inside.

  The facade of the place was like its interior, a romantic amalgam of Moorish temples, Hollywood fantasy, and art deco glamour. The fired tiles had been cleaned to their former gold, and the marquee dazzled the entire town square with several thousand moving lights. The day’s feature was A Guy Named Joe, a heartbreaking bit of World War II mysticism: a fighter pilot’s ghost, Spencer Tracy, teaches the girl he loved in life to fall in love with another man, a man who was alive, his replacement, in fact. She fell in love with a younger pilot about to leave on a bombing mission, never knowing that the ghost of her dead lover had whispered in her ear. I stared up at the title feeling surrounded by ghosts.