The autumn foliage fills the five bed and breakfasts in town every day during the peak season and our one hotel is full from October first through Thanksgiving. The antique shops on Main Street can do enough business to carry them through the rest of the year and you can’t even get a table at The Slab. Driving into town from my place is breathtaking in October, especially at sunset, and usually either Megan or I would comment on the view, but on that particular evening we didn’t even notice it. In fact, Meg hadn’t said a word since I told her the news and that, in itself, was strangely unsettling. I looked over at her. She was sitting very still and staring straight ahead.
We pulled into the church at about 6:45 and I was surprised to see that a crowd had already gathered. Surprised until I remembered that Mother Ryan had planned a church supper and lecture for seven o’clock. The people milling around outside on the front steps were just getting the news. Herself, wearing a gray business suit with a ruffle at the collar, and looking like she was ready for a board meeting, was blocking the door.
“Hayden! Thank God!”
“Thanks for taking charge, Loraine. Say a prayer and send everyone home, will you?”
“No! I can’t. I mean, I have a special guest speaker. She has to leave tomorrow morning. She’s going to speak on ‘Wimmyn’s Empowerment in the Ministry.’ She’s a nationally known author.”
“Sorry, Loraine. Send ’em home.”
She blocked my way, desperate now.
“Didn’t you hear me? She’s nationally known. Nationally known!”
I turned to face the crowd that had gathered in front of the church. “Friends,” I announced. “There has been a death in the church. I don’t know yet who it was or if it was an accident or purposeful mischief, but it is my job to find out. I want you all to go home, but before you go, please join me in a word of prayer.
“Our heavenly Father...” I glanced up. Herself was standing next to me shaking with silent rage. “Our Father,” I began again, “we know that you have received one of your lambs back into you fold this evening. It grieves us and shocks us but we know you are the same God whose quality it is always to show mercy and whose compassion covers us as a mother hen covers her chicks. Grant us a peaceful sleep that we may rise to love and serve you in all our works. In Jesus’ Holy name we pray. Amen.”
Amens were heard from the crowd and they began dispersing, quietly talking among themselves.
I turned to Herself. She, I noticed, was beginning to develop quite a twitch. “You can stay if you want,” I offered. I swear, I didn’t know how that woman had any jaw muscles left at all.
Meg joined me at the door and put her arm around my waist.
• • •
Nancy had found the lights by the time we had dispersed the crowd and entered the narthex through the front doors. The steps to the choir loft were directly to the right so we went on up.
St. Barnabas was built in the early 1900’s on a classical American design. The nave, or main body of the church, was in the shape of a cross and so named because the ceiling of medieval churches resembled the bottom of a huge boat. Nave meaning “ship” and being the root word of our term “naval.” The nautical term, that is—not navel, the umbilical attachment. The transepts, or alcoves, near the front formed the arms of the cross. The high altar was in the front, a smaller Mary altar in the east transept, with the choir and the pipe organ in the back balcony. The sacristy, where the clergy put on their vestments and where communion was prepared, was behind the front wall with two almost invisible doors opening in the paneling behind the altar. It wasn’t a large structure. Seating was limited to about two hundred fifty. We only had about one hundred twenty-five communicants, so we were far from full on most Sundays.
Climbing the stairs to the loft, we saw Dave and Nancy bending over a body lying next to the organ.
“What’s the verdict?” I asked.
“He’s dead all right,” Dave offered.
“Maybe he heard Sunday’s sermon,” I muttered under my breath, perhaps a little too loudly. I looked up. Sure enough, Mother Ryan was glaring at me. I gave her a sheepish grin.
“I don’t see any wounds.” Nancy squatted and took a closer look. “There doesn’t seem to be any bleeding. Should I turn him over?”
Dave reached for the body’s shoulder. “Here, let me help you.”
Nancy was probably strong enough to turn the body over by herself. She was slim and tall and had a swimmer’s upper body strength. I never asked her if she was a competitive swimmer or perhaps a low brass player, but she sure had a trombone player’s shoulders. Her uniform, which she always wore while on duty, slightly accentuated her cultivated masculinity. She kept her brown hair fairly short and her figure, from what I could tell, was more boyish than voluptuous. When Dave was around her, though, he was like a lovesick puppy. If the two of them were to arm wrestle for a beer, my money would be on Nancy. Where Nancy looked like a TV cop always ready for business, Dave looked more like Dilbert with an even worse haircut.
They struggled to turn him over. A dead body is always more unwieldy than a living one, but we all already knew who it was. People you’re familiar with are identifiable even from the back. It was Willie Boyd, the sexton.
Willie wasn’t exactly the likable sort. In fact, most of the parishioners avoided Willie like the plague. As the sexton, he was basically the janitor and was in charge of cleaning the church and locking up after everyone had left. It was a job that he completed mostly at night and the staff left him notes as to what needed doing to avoid personal contact. This arrangement was just fine with the staff because in addition to his abrasive and generally nasty personality, Willie usually smelled of cheap aftershave which he used liberally to disguise his questionable bathing habits, his equally unwashed clothing and the cheap cigar he always had dangling from his sneering lips. He had been the sexton at St. Barnabas for about a year and had been the only applicant for the position that had been advertised for six full months. There weren’t a lot of unemployed folks in St. Germaine, and those that were didn’t want or need a part-time job as a janitor. Something like a job tended to mess up the unemployment check.
My first thought was that Willie had had a heart attack but my thinking changed once he was rolled onto his back. His eyes were open, and his lips were pulled back from his teeth in a snarl. He had vomited before he died and upon further inspection I noticed that he had lost most of his vittles all over the organ console.
“Jeez,” I said. “It might be a heart attack, but I don’t think so. Get the coroner and an ambulance down here from Boone. We’re gonna need an autopsy. And Nancy, let’s scrape whatever crap we can off the keyboard, put it in a plastic bag and send it down with him. I’ll have to take the stupid thing apart to clean it before Sunday.”
Mother Ryan was standing toward the back of the loft, watching with dispassionate distaste. Megan was closer to the stairs as if she would dart down them at any second.
“Who called it in?” I asked Nancy, who immediately flipped open her notepad in a most officious manner.
“The 911 came up to me from Boone. It was made in by an unknown caller from the church’s number.”
“Who was here?” I wondered aloud. “Well, nothing we can do till the coroner arrives,” I said. Let’s get a cup of coffee in the kitchen.”
“I’m leaving,” Mother Ryan announced, pushing past Meg. “I still have a guest sitting in the car.”
I reached under the organ bench to see if my 9mm was still there. It was. I thought I might be able to wing her before she made the door. Nah.
• • •
We went through the sanctuary, into the sacristy, out the back door, down some steps into the alley and into the back door of the kitchen. The parish hall, of which the kitchen was a part, was a separate building with a hallway linking it to the sanctuary from the front but opening to an alley in the back. JJ Southerland was standing by the stove stirring a large pot of soup with a cut off canoe
paddle.
“I presume that soup is for the supper tonight?”
“Of course, dahling.”
JJ’s southern accent is hard to place. It’s almost British in its gentility and it is a joy to listen to her. Of course, she’s just plain nuts and one of my favorite people. She’s been cooking for the church for years. She’s not part of the staff, but she enjoys doing what she has time for. Sometimes her soup is delicious. Sometimes it is the worst stuff you ever put in your mouth.
“Your crew isn’t coming for supper,” I said to JJ as I poured a cup of coffee and handed it to Meg who had come in right behind me.
“I heard. But I might as well finish the soup for Sunday.”
“It was Willie.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” she said, not looking up from her pot, her two hands continuing to pull the paddle though the vegetable-laden hodgepodge.
Dave had gotten a soda out of the machine. I got a cup of coffee for myself and for Nancy. The good thing about the St. Barnabas kitchen was that there was always a cup of coffee and it was always good. Not that weak, watery swill that most churches pass for coffee. St. Barnabas had Community Coffee shipped in monthly from Louisiana. I didn’t know if we had a Minister of Coffee or if angels came down and fixed it on a regular basis, but there was always a pot ready to drink. It was sort of like Elijah and the jar of oil that never emptied—an analogy I enjoyed.
Dave walked over and looked into the pot. “Mistake,” I thought. JJ didn’t like people looking into a pot of unfinished soup.
“What’s in it?” Dave asked. “Did you say it was beef?”
“No,” said JJ. “Not beef. I said beak. Duck beeeeak.”
Dave was an easy mark.
• • •
I drank my coffee and turned to JJ. “You didn’t make the 911 call, did you?” I was trying to be as offhand and innocuous as possible.
“No, I did not!” said JJ emphatically, glaring at me. “You think I would do that without calling you first?”
“Nah. I guess not.” I paused, then framed another question. “I think Willie might have been poisoned. Did he come by here and get anything to eat before he went to work?”
JJ stared daggers at me, pulling up one of the straps on her overalls that had slid down over her shoulder. “I’ve been here since three. He came by once but didn’t take anything. Then I did pass him in the hall on my way to the bathroom. That was about five, I guess. But if he was poisoned, it wasn’t anything that I cooked!”
“Any food missing?”
“Nothing I brought. I don’t know what was in the fridge.”
Meg was leaning against the counter, cupping her coffee in both hands as if trying to warm herself over the mug.
“Why would someone do such a thing?” sheed of no one in particular. Nancy put an arm around her.
The refrigerator was stocked with staples. It was a commercial model of stainless steel with wire racks. I pushed around some sticks of margarine, mayonnaise and other condiments, some leftover Jello salad from last week, some kind of marinade and other unidentifiable but seemingly harmless stuff. I really didn’t know what I was looking for.
“Let’s empty the refrigerator and send everything down to the lab in Boone. I know it’s a pain, but we don’t need to take any chances.”
I lifted the bowl of marinade and gave it a sniff, but in reality, I didn’t have a clue what I was sniffing for. I thought briefly about sticking my finger into the bowl and giving it a taste, but a vision of Willie lying up in the choir loft made me quickly put the bowl back onto the shelf.
Meg found a couple of empty liquor boxes in the corner of the kitchen by the sink and started to empty the refrigerator, glad for something to do. Dave came over from where he was trying to decide if he dared to try some duck-beak soup and began helping her.
“Come on, Nancy,” I said. “Let’s go wait for the coroner.”
Chapter 3
It was a long, quiet twelve miles back to the house.
“I liked your prayer,” Meg said finally, breaking the silence and giving me a kiss on the cheek. “The one you gave outside the church. I was afraid for a minute that you were going to do one of your stupid prayers.”
I looked offended. “There are no stupid prayers.”
“You know...like the one you offered last Thanksgiving at my house, in front of my relatives. If I may I quote you. ‘Thank you God for dairy products including cheese and on this, the 26th day of November, we thank you especially for Roquefort, Brie and all the many varieties of cheddar. Thank you God for turkeys who willingly gave their lives that we might celebrate your bounty. Thank you God for grain from which we get our bread and beer. Thank you God for all your many vegetables, especially Raymond Burr. And thank you God for hamsters and all the little things that make our life worth living. Amen.’”
“How could you remember all that? I didn’t think your memory was that good.”
“I told Mother to record it.”
“What!?”
“I told her that she wouldn’t believe it, so she had better record it. She wrote it down afterwards for posterity. And possibly blackmail.”
“I’m glad to have made her life a little brighter.”
“Well” she sniffed, “she was not amused. She takes Thanksgiving rituals very seriously. And Raymond Burr’s been dead for years.”
“He was the only vegetable I could think of on the spur of the moment.”
“You’re supposed to be a man of the church.”
Actually Meg’s mother seemed to like me a lot. Although she’d wanted Megan to meet me, I doubt that she originally viewed me as son-in-law material. I’m sure Meg changed her mind by casually dropping some information about my portfolio along the way.
The silence broken, we wound our way through the mountains, making small talk and managing somehow to dance delicately around the looming hippopotamus named Willie, until we finally saw the cabin lights we had left burning in our hasty departure. Over the years, Meg has learned to let me ponder for a while before drawing me into speculation about a case. We pulled into the drive, turned off the truck and went back through the kitchen door.
My cabin is situated on about two hundred acres about twelve miles from town. It included some good bottom land that was originally used to grow tobacco, several mountains and a good sized creek winding through the whole thing. I call it a “cabin” because one of the rooms—now my office—is a twenty-by-twenty log cabin with a loft that was originally built in 1842. I bought it from a fellow in eastern Kentucky who swore he had documentation that the cabin was built by Daniel Boone’s granddaughter. I’m not sure I believed him, but the cabin was in great shape, having been covered with clapboards for the last hundred years, and it came with a good story. We numbered the logs, took it apart and moved it to North Carolina. The rest of the rather large house was built to complement it. It sported a huge stone fireplace, a stuffed elk head above the mantle, and a lot of leather furniture. It suited me just fine.
I grabbed a beer and I sat back down at the typewriter, hoping that a little imaginative prose would help clear my thoughts.
• • •
“I heard about the hymn selection last Sunday.”
Her voice was low as she stood in front of me, filling out a brown tweed suit the way Reggie White filled out the Packers’ front line. Usually I didn’t care for tweed on women. I was more of a chiffon and lace kind of guy. And this was that rough kind of tweed that you could strike a match on. So I did. She didn’t flinch.
“Just for the record,” she growled, “I don’t think you did it. You just don’t look like the kind of guy who would schedule ‘Just As I Am’ as a processional.”
You know, I didn’t like her attitude. She was taking far more for granted than I thought she should. I lit my cigar.
“Maybe I did pick it. Maybe I really think that ‘Just As I Am’ has a regal majesty combined with just a hint of pietism that makes it the perfect processi
onal hymn for the Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost.”i>
Laughter escaped her lips as she picked up an open hymnal lying on the desk. I had left it open to “Hyfrydol” with the date penciled in beside the title. Rats.
“OK,” I said, grabbing the book from her hand and throwing it back into the corner with all the other denominational hymnals. “Just what is it you want?”
Pulling up a chair, she sat down gracefully, crossing her tweed-covered legs with an elegance belying the sound of tweed-on-tweed, a sound not unlike forty Amish farmers shucking corn. “I heard you were good with altos and I need some advice. My name is Denver. Denver Tweed.”
They were always coming to me for advice. I had gotten a reputation over the years. A reputation as a tough but understanding guy. It was a reputation I didn’t deserve. I was in it for the money.
“It’ll cost you.”
I could tell she wasn’t put off a bit as she dropped two C-notes on the desk in front of me and pulled a meerschaum pipe from her pocket. Somehow I wasn’t surprised. Tweed and meerschaum. What next?
“Someone stole my elbow patches.”
Like I said before, I wasn’t surprised.
• • •
On Saturday morning, Meg and I trucked our way back to St. Barnabas to meet with my two cohorts and clean up the choir loft. Nancy, Dave and I scraped some more samples indicative of Willie’s demise, bagged them, and looked around again for any obvious clues. Finding none, Dave and Nancy left Megan and me to the arduous task of making the church presentable.
The Alto Wore Tweed (The Liturgical Mysteries) Page 3