The Soprano Wore Falsettos

by Schweizer, Mark

“It’s the worst one. I was put on because I’m on the vestry and someone thinks that I’d be a good chairman.”

  “Chairwoman,” I corrected. “It’s because you’re so irresistible. What’s the committee?”

  “Chairperson. It’s the committee to decide how to spend sixteen million dollars.”

  “Yikes,” I said, “but don’t you mean four million? Four million a year for four years. That’s what the settlement was.”

  “Yes, that’s exactly right,” said Meg. “But the bank’s accountants have now decided that it would be in their best interest to pay the entire amount this fiscal year rather than to stretch it out. They’ve got their reasons I suppose, and whatever their rationale, we’re going to have sixteen million dollars by the end of April.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “Put it in a money market account and forget about it for a long time.”

  “I wish,” Meg grumbled. “The congregation found out about it, and they all have great ideas on how to spend it. See what you miss when you stay at home? Speaking of money, has anyone cashed that Powerball ticket yet? It jackpot was up to a hundred and twenty million.”

  “I haven’t heard.”

  Cynthia Johnsson came over to take our order. She’d been working at The Ginger Cat off and on, since it opened a few years ago. She was also a certified belly dancer, giving lessons and doing quite a number of parties around the area. I asked her once how one became “certified.” She just winked, and I didn’t inquire further. I’d once gotten Meg some lessons for her birthday, but had been informed, rather brusquely, that my generosity was hardly a present for her and my birthday was quite a way off. Luckily, I’d had a back-up present in hand.

  “What’ll it be?” Cynthia asked.

  “Turkey and sprouts on whole wheat,” answered Meg. “And some raspberry tea.”

  Cynthia wrote it down and turned to me.

  “Got anything bloody? Something out of a cow?”

  Cynthia shook her head. “No beef. Annie’s on a health kick. Chicken salad or turkey. Hey! How about a bean curd and chive sandwich on toasted sourdough? Or maybe a portabella mushroom wrap with avocado paste?”

  I shuddered. “Turkey,” I said. “On rye. No sprouts.”

  “It comes with sprouts,” Cynthia said. “And a side of baby carrots in an almond glaze.”

  “Give ’em to a rabbit,” I griped. “Put some cheese on that sandwich and an extra slice of turkey. And make it rare.”

  “Our turkey’s already cooked,” teased Cynthia, “but I could put some strawberry jam on it. You can pretend that it’s blood.”

  “No thanks,” I said. “And get me a cup of coffee, will you?”

  “I will. Anything in particular?”

  “Whatever you’ve got made as long as the name contains four words or less.”

  “How about Colombia Nariño Supremo?”

  “Sure. Only three words. Sounds great.”

  As Cynthia walked off, I turned my attention back to Meg. She’d been looking at me with that kind of expression that meant I was going to be asked to do something that I didn’t want to do, something I probably shouldn’t do, and something I knew I’d regret once I got into it.

  “Okay,” I said. “What is it?”

  “Well,” she started, “since I’m the chair of this committee, I get to choose the other members.”

  “Nope,” I said. “No way. I hate committees.”

  “Now listen here, Hayden,” she said, with more than a touch of schoolmarm in her voice. “You are a member of St. Barnabas whether or not you choose to work there. This is very important, and it can’t be left to a bunch of nitwits.”

  “Who else do you have?” I asked, resignation already apparent in my voice and confirmed by Meg’s immediate change of tone.

  “Malcolm’s agreed to be on it. Billy Hixon is on since he’s the Senior Warden. Also Gwen Jackson and Lee Dalbey. If you agree, then that’ll be six. That’s what the vestry wants. Three vestry members and three lay people.”

  “You know, of course, that it will make some folks pretty angry. It smacks of nepotism, even though we aren’t married.”

  “Sure, but you’re still a member of St. Barnabas and everyone agrees that you’re the one who got the money for the church in the first place. If you hadn’t solved the crime, we wouldn’t have even known the money was out there.”

  “All right,” I conceded. “How’s it going to work?”

  “We’re going to have a church-wide meeting for anyone who wants to come and voice an opinion. Then the committee will make recommendations, and the vestry has the final vote on the committee’s proposals. If they don’t take them, it goes back to the committee and we start again. The vestry can vote on the committee’s recommendations, but they can’t make their own.”

  “Pretty clever,” I said, as our sandwiches arrived.

  “It was George’s idea. Six people are going to have a hard enough time trying to decide. The vestry’s twice as big and half as smart.”

  “And the vestry agreed to this?” I asked, lifting up the top piece of rye and peering suspiciously into my sandwich. It looked fine, but I was always leery of some kind of tofu-esque surprise snuck into the turkey by the Health Nazis.

  “Yes,” said Meg. “They did. Malcolm gave them a form to sign. I don’t think all of them actually read it.”

  Malcolm was a retired banker and had handled my investment accounts before I met Meg. Still in his early sixties, he wasn’t old enough to retire — just rich enough. His second wife, Rhiza, had been a friend of mine in college. She was a few years younger than I was, and Malcolm had a decade and a half on both of us. Malcolm Walker was a savvy broker and understood money and how it worked in a way that few St. Germainians did, save Meg Farthing.

  “When’s the first meeting?” I asked, removing a piece of stray pine nut from my mouth and dropping it onto my plate.

  “Next week. I’ll let you know for sure. You know,” she said, “you really should come back to church, even if you don’t want the job. I’m going to start singing with the choir again.” She looked at me for a reaction.

  “I think you should.” I lowered my voice. “You can be my spy. I want to know how they’re sounding. Call it professional curiosity.”

  “No way. You’ll have to come back if you want to stay in the loop. And anyway, you know how they sound. Everyone and his brother has been reporting to you weekly.”

  “Well,” I said, “I can’t come back just yet. It seems that I may be doing some subbing for the next few Sundays. My name got out as an available organist, and I’m getting a couple of calls a week.”

  “So, are you going to do it?”

  “I think so. No rehearsals — just a Sunday morning service. Plus, as you know, if I’m the organist of St. Barnabas, I can’t be on your committee.”

  “What about Holy Week?” Meg asked, sadness evident in her question. “And Easter? It’s almost here. Don’t make the church suffer through Agnes Day’s rendition of Rise Again . They already went through The Silent Night Calypso on the fourth Sunday of Advent. You can’t do it.”

  “Yep. I can and I will.”

  Chapter 4

  I sat at my desk and went over my notes. Memphis Belle was a pro. She’d come to me because I was a pro. Marilyn was a pro. Francine was a pro. Everyone I knew was a pro. So why was I feeling like it was amateur night at the Feed and Seed Opera?

  Memphis didn’t have much and I didn’t have to pump her like an old squeezebox for what I got. More importantly, she didn’t blink at my two hundred-a-day plus expenses. I guess the big bishop could afford it.

  General Convention was coming up, and there were always problems. As usual, someone was noodling with the prescribed readings for the church year. The Reformed Common Lectionary was up for the final vote, and someone had stuck John 3:16 in twelve times. I wasn’t worried and neither was Memphis. They’d work it out. They always did. But there was another game afoot. The Presiding Bishop
had been tricked into approving a “color” committee. He’d assumed it had something to do with racial equality. It didn’t, and now he had to explain the “Presiding Bishop’s Committee on New Liturgical Colors” which, not surpris-ingly, was a hundred and sixty-five large over budget.

  The church had prescribed seasonal colors for eons. Sure, a few odd colors had weaseled their way into the yearly cycle over the years--blue during Advent, gold for special feast days, black for Good Friday--but, by and large, most churches were still working with four colors--green for ordinary time, red for Pentecost, purple for the penitential seasons, and white for Easter and Christmas. What would be the effect if the church voted to change to chartreuse for Advent? Or burnt umber for Epiphany? I shuddered to think.

  The Color Committee was looking for an up or down vote at convention and, if they played their cards right, the vote could be scheduled right after the Senior Liturgical Limbo finals. It would be easy to pack the house, swing the vote and set new colors for the next millennium.

  “ Marilyn,” I called. “How about some java?”

  • • •

  “I think she’s dead,” said Nancy. “And it wasn’t an accident. She was killed.”

  “Not again,” said Dave with a shake of his head. “For a populace this small, there certainly have been a lot of murders lately.”

  “I don’t know if I’d call it murder,” I said. “It may just be an accidental death or even a plain old homicide.”

  “You mean an ichthyocide,” said Nancy, scooping poor Gertrude out of the tank. “I think it was one of the other fish. She was just fine yesterday.”

  “I don’t trust those two angel fish,” Dave said, tapping on the glass. “Look how they’re huddling together. It’s like they’re planning something.”

  “You know things are slow when you’re trying to figure out which fish is the murderer,” I said as I went into my office. I sat down behind my desk, put a CD into the player and the sounds of Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio filled the room. It was an old favorite that I revisited every few years and the first opera recording I ever bought. I had purchased the three-record set with the first money I had ever made at a church job. Last year, I finally found the same recording reissued on CD.

  “Who’s your favorite composer, boss?” asked Nancy, leaning against the doorjamb.

  “Why?”

  “I just wondered. Plus your birthday’s coming up. A CD is a pretty cheap present.”

  “It’s hard to say,” I said. “Depends on my mood. I always like Mozart, though.”

  Nancy pulled her notepad and pen out of her breast pocket and jotted something down, presumably my taste in birthday music.

  “Hey, guess what?” said Nancy, putting her pad back and buttoning the flap over her pocket. “You remember the Passaglio wedding back in February?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I didn’t play for it, though. I was taking a break, as I recall. Wasn’t it in Boone? Something about our church being too small?”

  “I only know one thing about it,” said Nancy. “I heard this morning on the radio that it was going to be featured on America’s Funniest Videos. ”

  “Is that show still on?”

  “Syndication,” answered Nancy. “Anyway, check it out. Sunday night, seven o’clock.”

  • • •

  Meg was right. I did have several people filling me in on the services at the church. Bev came by at regular intervals to complain bitterly. Georgia would see me in the street and tell me about the latest anthem disaster. Elaine had taken to going to early mass at eight o’clock and skipping the musical service altogether. JJ would come by the police station on occasion and laugh. Where Bev was appalled by the Christmas Eve communion performance of O Holy Night with Agnes Day on accordion and Shea Maxwell squeaking away on the clarinet, JJ found it hilarious and couldn’t wait to tell me about it.

  According to the information that had come my way, the choir had dropped from around twenty members to about eight, with two of them being new. One of the new ones I knew. He was a church member who had come a couple of times when I first started with the choir, but he informed me that he didn’t like to come to rehearsal. The latest choir member had joined a couple of weeks ago. She was a retired junior high school music teacher, going by the name of Renee Tatton, who had recently moved to town. Bev was informed that Renee Tatton was her “professional” name. Renee didn’t share her real one. She had given Bev her life story over lunch one afternoon. When she was younger, she had sung opera in Austria and Germany. After returning to the United States, she’d gotten her teaching certificate and taught school in Maryland until she decided to retire in January. She had vacationed in Boone many times through the years and had fostered the notion that this area would be a lovely place to live. So, upon her retirement, she moved to our beautiful city and set about making friends and finding a niche for her musical talents. That niche included the St. Barnabas choir. It also included hanging out a shingle for voice lessons.

  Bev was not impressed, but I thought it was a soprano thing. I had met the lovely Ms. Tatton, and although I hadn’t actually heard her sing, I did know one thing about her. Renee was quite a devotee of the cosmetic surgeon’s art. As Bev so delicately put it, she’d had more tucks than a hospital bed sheet.

  • • •

  I was listening to the end of the first act duet when Nancy came in and interrupted.

  “We gotta go, boss. It’s Ruthie Haggarty. She finally killed him.”

  “Little Bubba?”

  “Yep. She called it in herself. I sent the ambulance over, but she said he wasn’t breathing.”

  “Okay, you go ahead,” I said. “Let me call down to Boone and tell them we’re coming. I’ll be right behind you.”

  Ruthie Haggarty was married to the meanest man in three states. His given name was Bob Wayne, but everyone called him “Little Bubba.” This was to distinguish him from his father “Big Bubba,” who was older but not larger than his son. Little Bubba was about six foot six and weighed close to three hundred pounds with two hundred eighty of it being muscle. I had seen him lift the front end of a tractor and hold it in the air while Ruthie changed the tire.

  Ruthie, a good church-going gal, was the only one who wasn’t intimidated by him. She’d dress him up and make him go to church with her twice a year, once at Easter and once on her birthday. Ruthie, with or without Little Bubba, was in her pew at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church every time the doors opened.

  Ardine McCollough had made friends with Ruthie some years back. Ardine had been in a bad marriage that involved quite a bit of abuse, and I suspected that she had solved the problem in the traditional mountain way — a nice cup of oleander tea. Her husband, PeeDee, disappeared one night and hadn’t been heard from since. I had asked Ardine about Ruthie and Little Bubba.

  “She told me,” said Ardine, “that he never hit her. Not once.”

  “Hard to believe,” I said. “He’s got a volatile temper. I’ve had to lock him up more than a few times.”

  “I know it. That’s just what Ruthie told me.”

  “Did you…give her a few tips?” I asked with a hard smile.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” sniffed Ardine.

  That had been several years ago. All I knew for sure was that for the past several months Ruthie and Little Bubba had been going at it hammer and tongs. I had been called out on three separate occasions by neighbors who had heard gunshots coming from the trailer. The first time I knocked on the door, Ruthie apologized to me and said that the rifle had gone off by mistake. The second time, I arrived to find Ruthie standing on the stoop with her arms crossed and Little Bubba sitting down, digging a slug out of his bicep with a hunting knife. When I walked up, Ruthie spun on her heel, went into the trailer and slammed the screen door after her.

  “She just nicked me,” he muttered as the bullet popped free.

  “Yeah, I can see that,” I said. “You want any h
elp?”

  “Nah. I don’t know what she’s always on about. I married her, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, Little Bubba, you did.”

  “I ain’t hit her much.”

  “That’s good.”

  “She’s always on me about my girlfriend. Walleena don’t even live in this town.”

  “It’s good to keep your wife and your girlfriend separated if you can,” I agreed.

  “There just ain’t no pleasing that woman.”

  “Well, if you’re okay and she’s okay, I’ll be on my way,” I said. “Just let me say hello.” I knocked on the door. Ruthie came up to the screen, but didn’t invite me in.

  “You all right?” I asked. She nodded.

  “Do me a favor, will you? Stop trying to shoot him.” She nodded.

  The third time I had been called out, Ruthie was washing her face and hair in the kitchen sink. There was a lot of blood. Little Bubba was nowhere to be seen, and his truck was gone as well.

  “Can you tell me what happened?” I asked.

  “He cut me,” she said, still washing up. “Not bad, I don’t think. Look at it and tell me, will you?”

  I looked. “It’s not bad, but you’re going to need some stitches. You want me to take you to the hospital?”

  “Nah. I can do it myself.”

  “What about Little Bubba? Did you shoot him?” I asked.

  “Missed him. I hit the truck, though.”

  “You know, I can arrest him if you’ll press charges.”

  “How long will you keep him locked up?” she asked.

  I had to answer honestly. “Probably a couple of weeks if we’re lucky. Then I can get a judge’s order to keep him away from you.”

  “You think that’ll work out here?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Don’t do it then. It’d just make him madder,” she said.

  That was a couple of weeks ago. I had heard from Ardine that he’d come back and that they were getting along. But now, apparently, she’d killed him. I hoped it was justifiable. I liked Ruthie.