Toucan Keep a Secret

by Donna Andrews

  So even though I realized that every footprint I made potentially complicated Horace’s job when he switched roles from deputy on patrol to Caerphilly’s one-man forensic department, I took a couple of cautious steps to where I could peer down and see the victim’s face.

  “It’s Mr. Hagley,” I said to Debbie Ann. “The victim, I mean.”

  “Junius Hagley?”

  “That’s right.” Junius Hagley, who up until forty-five minutes ago had been one of the loud voices coming from the vestry meeting. One of the Muttering Misogynists. I hoped Mother and all her fellow vestry members were alibied. They were sure to be high on the chief’s list of suspects. Although if the list included everyone who wasn’t fond of Mr. Hagley, it would be a long one.

  “Look, whoever did it is gone,” I said. “Not long gone, though, so maybe you could tell some of those officers heading this way to keep their eyes open for suspicious characters.”

  “Already done,” she said. “Although I’m not sure what to tell them to look for.”

  “Yeah.” I glanced around to make sure no one was nearby. “‘Be on the lookout for someone heading away from Trinity Episcopal’ isn’t terribly useful, is it?”

  “And that’s assuming he’s headed away,” Debbie Ann said. “And not circling back to get rid of a potential witness. Stay on the line until Horace gets there.”

  “Will do. Although if whoever did this has any brains, they’ll know I’m useless as a witness and they’re better off not returning to the scene of the crime.” I said that last bit rather loudly, in case the intruder was still lurking outside in the bushes.

  “Criminals aren’t noted for their brainpower,” Debbie Ann said. “Just stay on the line. The chief’s headed your way, too.”

  “I’ll be glad to see him.” Since Chief Burke was also a retired Baltimore homicide detective, he usually took charge of major crime investigations himself.

  From my new vantage point, I noticed something else. Around Mr. Hagley’s head, a scattering of dirt and rocks littered the normally smooth, clean stone floor

  No, not dirt and rocks. Human ashes—cremains, as Maudie Morton at the funeral home would say—and broken bits of at least one of the polished granite panels that normally covered the niches. Farther off I saw shards of china. Fragments of glass. A bronze urn with a big dent in its base. Another urn lying on its side. A granite panel broken into three or four pieces. A rectangular bronze plaque that had fallen off the panel—with a little more light I could have read the occupant’s name and dates. Another largely intact panel with the bronze plaque still attached.

  I flicked my phone’s light up and ran it along the closest wall. Here and there gaping holes interrupted the wall’s otherwise regular expanse of granite squares, with or without bronze plaques. I counted … three … no, four niches that had been opened up by prying off the front panels. One still held a bronze urn that had been tipped over on its side. The others were empty. An inspection of the opposite wall revealed two more vandalized niches.

  And at the foot of the second wall I spotted something else that didn’t belong—a crowbar. The light was too dim to see if it was bloodstained, but Horace would be testing that. And I didn’t have to look back at Mr. Hagley’s head to tell—

  “Meg?”

  I jumped. Even though I’d been absently tracking the gradual approach of the sirens, Horace’s arrival caught me by surprise.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “Murder victim,” I said, pointing my phone’s light at Mr. Hagley. I shifted it over to the crowbar. “Possible murder weapon. You’ll find my sneaker tracks beside him, where I stooped to take his pulse, and here. You going to kick me out now?” I was actually itching to call Michael, to let him know what was happening before he heard about it from someone else.

  “Maybe you should stay with me until some of the other officers have checked the premises, in case whoever did this is still lurking around,” Horace said. “Stand in the doorway and let me know if you see anything suspicious.”

  “Can do.”

  “And can you turn on the lights?” he asked. “Unless there’s a particular reason you were creeping around in the dark.”

  “The bulbs are burned out,” I said.

  Horace took the flashlight from his belt, turned it on, and trained it on first one overhead fixture, then the other.

  “The bulbs are broken,” he said. “Be interesting to know if the killer did this or if they were already out.”

  “If the killer did it, won’t you find glass?”

  “We’d also find glass if the bulb had been broken days ago.”

  “But it wasn’t,” I said. “With Robyn out, Mother gives the church a white-glove inspection almost every day. I’m pretty sure she did it earlier this evening, before the vestry meeting. If she’d found broken glass in here, she’d have told me.”

  “Could be.”

  He sounded dubious. Did he doubt Mother’s attention to detail?

  “And then there’s the fact that there was light coming from here earlier,” I added. “A lot brighter than that thing.” I gestured to the fallen flashlight. “So unless the killer had an awesomely high-powered flashlight…”

  “He broke the bulbs, then. Wonder why.”

  “The switch can be hard to find if you don’t already know where it is.”

  He nodded, obviously filing away the information. He turned his flashlight on the body and whistled when he saw the head wound.

  While Horace studied the crime scene with his trained forensic eyes, I tapped out a message to Michael. It took me a couple of tries to come up with wording that wouldn’t bring him racing to make sure I was okay.

  “Don’t wait up,” my final draft began. “I’m fine, but I found a body. Junius Hagley. Horace is here with me. Dad and the chief are on their way. They’ll probably want to pick my brains before I leave.”

  Michael’s answer came back so quickly that I suspected he’d started to worry and was watching his phone.

  “You’re sure you’re fine? Rose Noire and Rob are here, so I could head over there.”

  “I’m fine, and with any luck I’ll be on my way before you could even get here.”

  I wasn’t actually that optimistic about an early departure, but I didn’t want to worry him. And I didn’t want him losing sleep over this. He had a busy day of classes and rehearsals tomorrow.

  “OK,” he texted back. “What happened to Hagley—heart attack? Stroke?”

  “Crowbar,” I texted back. “Homicide.”

  He didn’t text back right away. I was about to put the phone away when his reply flashed onto my screen.

  “Why do our local murderers always manage to commit their crimes when you’re around?”

  “Dunno,” I tapped back. “Maybe the International Brotherhood of Thugs and Assassins insists.”

  “LOL. Could be, if your dad got to them. Well, at least he’ll be happy.” True enough—few things excited Dad as much as an opportunity to be involved in a real-life murder investigation. “Stay safe. Love you!”

  I replied in kind and then tucked my phone in my pocket.

  “There’s no place like home,” I said under my breath. Then I turned back to see what Horace was up to.

  Chapter 3

  Horace, flashlight in hand, was now peering intently at the wound in Mr. Hagley’s head. He seemed fascinated, but the better lighting wasn’t an improvement from my point of view.

  I focused on the other details of the crime scene. Horace’s bright LED flashlight made for much greater visibility. I could see now that the china fragments were blue and white, and had probably once been a Chinese-style ginger jar. Most of the glass fragments were a soft green color, though I could also spot thinner fragments that doubtless had come from the light bulbs. The green glass looked familiar. I had a small vase that color at home, a souvenir of the Jamestown glasshouse. I could see a ginger jar as a container for ashes—in fact, a
very similar jar containing a great-aunt of mine graced the mantel of Mother and Dad’s farmhouse. But a glass vase?

  “That’s going to be a mess to sort out,” Horace remarked.

  Considering where his flashlight was aimed, I assumed he meant the ashes that had spilled out of the two broken containers, creating two wide swathes that merged about a foot and a half from the top of Mr. Hagley’s head.

  I didn’t realize what he meant for a second—I had been thinking how lucky it was that all the blood had run downhill, away from the ashes, without contaminating them. Then it hit me. The two sets of ashes were all mixed up now.

  “A total mess,” I agreed. “And with our luck, the families of Green Glass and Blue-and-White China will turn out to be Caerphilly’s equivalent of the Montagues and the Capulets. And they will both try to sue the diocese for allowing their loved ones’ ashes to be sullied by contact with the other.”

  “Not sure what grounds they’d have for blaming the diocese,” Horace said.

  “That won’t stop them from trying. Can we figure out whose niches have been vandalized?”

  “Next up on my list.”

  “Excellent idea,” came a voice from just behind me.

  I started again, and then felt guilty. Horace had asked me to keep watch, and I’d been so busy gawking at the inside that I hadn’t even noticed someone coming up behind me. Fortunately it was Chief Burke, not a grave-robbing murderer returning to up his body count.

  “Provided we can do it without contaminating the crime scene before Horace works it,” the chief added. I had a feeling that was intended for me.

  “Staying put,” I said.

  Horace trained his flashlight on one of the fallen urns.

  “P. Jefferson Blair,” he read. “January 14, 1965 to November 13, 2000.”

  The chief pulled out his notebook and began scribbling. I just kept my ears open.

  The other urn—the dented one—belonged to a J. A. Washington, who’d died in 2007. I wasn’t surprised when the plaque still loosely attached to a cracked polished granite panel revealed that the blue-and-white ginger jar had probably contained Dolores Kelly Hagley.

  “The victim’s wife, I assume?” The chief glanced at me.

  “Yes.” I hadn’t recognized Blair or Washington—Blair had died before I’d even heard of Caerphilly, and Washington before I’d become as involved as I now was in Trinity—but I remembered Mrs. Hagley. “A very nice lady. And according to Mother, a sorely missed good influence on Mr. Hagley. She only died about a year and a half ago.”

  “Hang on.” Horace focused his flashlight on a fallen bronze urn. “According to the engraving, that’s Mrs. Hagley—I guess she rolled away. The broken china must belong to someone else.”

  “What a mess,” the chief murmured.

  Horace had turned his flashlight toward the wall and was peering at a fallen bronze plaque.

  “Lacey Shiffley.” He sounded surprised.

  “Here in Trinity?” The chief’s surprise echoed Horace’s. And I understood. We all three knew—the way one does in a small town—that nearly every member of the sprawling Shiffley clan who attended church went to First Presbyterian. The only exceptions I knew of were one or two who’d married staunch Catholics and moved over to St. Byblig’s, and a talented baritone who’d defected to the New Life Baptist Church to become a soloist in its nationally famous gospel choir.

  “She died in 2006,” Horace said. “Before my time.”

  “I was here then, but I hadn’t yet gotten to know many Shiffleys,” I said.

  “I was here then, too,” the chief said. “And I remember Lacey. But I didn’t know she was buried here. We can check with her family to see how that happened.”

  The panel, belonging to the niche that still contained its urn revealed another surprise.

  “‘Known only to God,’” Horace read. “That’s weird.”

  “It’s the customary inscription used for a poor soul who’s unidentified,” the chief said.

  “But what’s a John Doe doing buried here in the Trinity crypt?” Horace asked. “Not to sound crass, but I was under the impression that those little niches go for a pretty penny.”

  “A very good question,” the chief said. “Let me have his date of death. I’m sure there will be something in our files back at the station.”

  “Depends on how far back the files go,” I said. “January 12, 1995.”

  “A mere quarter of a century? No problem,” Horace said. “I bet we’ve still got the wanted posters for the Lindbergh kidnapping around somewhere.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised to find a wanted poster for Benedict Arnold,” the chief said. “Though thank goodness we’ve archived all those really old files in the courthouse basement.”

  The owner of the sixth vandalized niche was the third surprise—at least for the chief.

  “Beatrice Helen Falkenhausen van der Lynden,” Horace read. “The inscription’s a little smaller than some of the others—had to be to fit her whole name in—but I think the death date is 1993. I think the broken china must be hers.”

  “Mrs. Van der Lynden,” the chief exclaimed.

  “Someone who died under suspicious circumstances?” I asked.

  “No,” the chief said. “But she is connected with one of the more interesting outstanding cases I inherited from my predecessor.”

  “What case is that?” I asked.

  “Horace, why don’t you get your forensic kit and make a start.” Evidently the chief was not in the mood to discuss cold cases.

  “Roger,” Horace said. “And then—”

  “What’s that?” the chief said, pointing to the far wall of the crypt.

  “What’s what?” Horace asked.

  “I saw it too,” I said. “When you turned, something reflected your flashlight beam, just for a second.”

  “Could be a piece of red glass,” the chief said.

  “Red glass?” I looked over at the two stained glass panels, hoping neither was broken. Horace was running his flashlight along the far wall. I was about to ask him to point it on the stained glass windows when—

  “That’s it,” the chief said.

  “Holy cow,” Horace said softly.

  Lying on the floor near the other wall was a ring with a red stone. A stone so large that common sense said it had to be a fake. Red glass.

  No. Red glass might sparkle in the light. It wouldn’t give off such a pure, intense, and ever-so-slightly sinister glow.

  “Could that thing possibly be real?” I asked aloud.

  Chapter 4

  “I also see the ring,” the chief said. “But I suspect that’s not what you mean. I’m sure in due time Horace can figure out if it’s a ruby or a garnet or just a piece of glass. For now, let him get on with processing the crime scene. I want to hear from you exactly what happened here tonight.”

  The chief and I left the crypt and sat just outside on a weathered concrete bench. Horace bustled past us, heading for the parking lot. The chief fished out his notebook, flipped it open, and attached a little clip-on book light to it. He paused to pull out his cell phone and call Debbie Ann.

  “I want the files on a cold case,” he said. “The Van der Lynden robbery case … late eighties, I think. Thanks.”

  I didn’t exclaim “aha!” or anything—just sat quietly, trying to look like the sort of trustworthy and discreet person you’d want to discuss your cold cases with.

  “Take it from the top.” His pen was poised over the notebook.

  Maybe later.

  “Okay,” I said aloud. “So this was one of my nights to fill in for Robyn until all this evening’s scheduled events were over and I could lock up. I got here at seven P.M.”

  Horace hurried back with his forensic kit in hand and disappeared inside. While he was doing his examination of the crime scene, I filled the chief in on my evening. I’d texted Michael frequently while at the church with the sort of snarky comments that helped make my job bea
rable. The time stamps on my texts let me reconstruct a rough sequence of events. A text at 8:46 confirmed that by that time the Office Committee had finished folding, stuffing, and sealing the latest newsletter and the members had gone home, while the Altar Guild was long gone. The choir director had finished a powwow with the organist and a soloist at nine sharp, and the Food Ministry Committee had wrapped up at 9:14. The vestry didn’t adjourn its latest stormy meeting until 10:15, and the twelve-step group members didn’t leave until 10:25.

  “Lord, what a hotbed of activity,” the chief said. “Of course, it’s much the same at New Life Baptist, I suppose, but I mostly hear about the choir.” Not surprising, since his wife, Minerva Burke, was the choir’s director.

  “So from 10:25 until five or ten minutes before I called 911 I was going through the whole building,” I continued. “Locking doors. Turning off lights. Testing window latches. Checking that all the faucets were off. Doing a few bits of housekeeping that couldn’t wait, like unstopping a toilet in the downstairs women’s bathroom and wiping up spilled sugar in the kitchen. Making sure no one was lingering anywhere.”

  “Was the parking lot empty?”

  “Except for the church minivan, which usually lives here,” I said.

  “And your car.”

  “No, Mother gave me a ride in,” I said. “I was going to drive the van home so I could take it in for service in the morning. So far Osgood Shiffley has been able to keep the old wreck running.”

  “Interesting.” The chief scribbled.

  “You mean because anyone familiar with how things work here at Trinity would assume everyone had gone home?”

  “Unless you had a lot of lights on.”

  “It’s my job to turn lights off, not go around leaving them on. The church wasn’t completely dark, but there would only have been a couple of lights on. Mainly Robyn’s office and wherever I was in my rounds. I spent rather a long time downstairs unstopping that toilet and then cleaning up after myself.”

  “How long?”

  I pondered. The chief waited patiently with his pencil poised over his notebook.