Death Climbs a Tree

by Sara Hoskinson Frommer

  “I want you and Ketcham at both those funerals.”

  Fred nodded. “And checking out anyone else who knew either of them. It’ll be our last chance at Sylvia’s sister, too.”

  “No other family coming?”

  “Only her husband and kids.”

  * * *

  Joan didn’t try to go to work before the service, as she would have done if she’d only been planning to attend it. She’d told the others to arrive by half past ten, and she’d promised to be sure chairs were ready for them. Stands, too, if she could find any. Might as well call ahead about that. It would be good not to have to carry one along.

  The church secretary reassured her. “Oh, of course we have music stands, the good heavy black kind. You need four, right? I’ll have the custodian set them up. Where do you want to sit, in the front or up in the balcony? The sound carries better from the balcony, they say, but people might like to watch you play, and they hate to have to turn around, especially at a funeral. You can park your cases in the choir room, behind the pulpit.”

  Joan agreed to sitting up front. It would be more intimate, especially if not very many people came. She had no idea how many friends Sylvia had. And Linda Smith might want to see the orchestra members who cared enough about her sister to play.

  Fred took off for work at his usual time. “I’ll see you there,” he said. “Give you a ride home, if you want to walk over.”

  “I’ll probably go on to work, but maybe you’d take the viola home afterward.” The case was heavy, and by the end of the day she’d be glad not to have to haul it back across the park.

  “Sure.” He kissed her and was gone.

  Before ten she checked her strings and her emergency supply of old strings, already stretched to tune. Even if they didn’t sound as good as when they were new, they’d be a godsend if she suddenly had to change one during a concert. Only once had they rescued her, but that one time she’d been very glad to have them.

  The sky was overcast, but judging by the thermometer outside her kitchen window, she wouldn’t need to wear a coat. She slung her viola case across her back and her bag over her shoulder and started walking. The low-heeled shoes she’d chosen for the hike across the park would do fine for the service.

  At the church, she climbed the front steps and walked down a side aisle. She was glad to see a semicircle of four chairs and stands waiting in the center of the chancel. She set her viola down and went through the door behind the pulpit. An upright piano, racks full of choir robes, and shelves full of sheet music told her she’d found the choir room, where the secretary had said they could leave their cases.

  When she returned, the others had arrived. Together, they took their instruments to the choir room and unpacked. Back in the chancel, they checked their tuning to Nicholas’s A.

  Now people were coming into the church carrying white papers the right size to be orders of worship. Joan went down to beg an usher for four.

  On the front was Sylvia’s name and her birth and death dates. Inside was a simple program, which didn’t mention the music.

  “We’re free to play in any order we like,” Joan said. “What do you think?”

  “Hymns first,” Birdie said. “That’ll get the church people in the right mood. Then Handel, for people like Sylvia.”

  “Good enough,” Nicholas said.

  They quickly agreed to play the hymns in the order in which they had rehearsed them.

  “But let’s leave ‘For All the Saints’ to the very end of the service,” Joan said. “It’s loud and if we don’t let it drag, it can be peppy, like the jazz black players used to play on the way back from the cemetery. They can talk if they want to.”

  “Won’t they be following the casket out?” Charlotte asked.

  “I don’t know that there will be a casket.”

  “It’s not about her body,” Birdie said. “It’s about Sylvia.”

  Joan hoped Reverend Eric Young, who had married her and Fred, was up to holding a service for someone he’d never met. It’s not for Sylvia, she reminded herself. It’s for her sister, and for all the people who cared about her.

  The small congregation was turning into a respectable crowd. “I didn’t know she had so many friends,” Joan said. She recognized several violinists from the orchestra and John Hocking, of course, who had worked with Sylvia as well as played music with her. Near the back she saw Jim Chandler and Alex Campbell sitting together. She wouldn’t know the other Fulford employees, though she thought a woman on one side might be the receptionist she’d met the other day. She’d had even less contact with most of the people who had supported the tree sit. No, there was Skirv, sitting alone halfway down the aisle.

  “I see a few people from work,” Birdie said. “And you know the ones from the orchestra. But I don’t know anyone else.”

  “There’s my sister,” Charlotte said. “I’m surprised she could face anyone else’s funeral this week. She said she wanted to hear us play. She might ask us to do it for Herschel’s service.”

  “Okay by me,” Nicholas said. “Maybe he won’t have as many thrill seekers.”

  Of course, Joan thought. That’s why the church is so full. It explained the buzz among some of the people. She hoped the numbers would comfort Linda, now being ushered to the first pew with her husband and little girls. No casket, though. Only the two baskets of flowers suggested that this was a funeral.

  She saw Fred enter with Sergeant Ketcham. They sat together near the center aisle in the back row. If other cops had come, they were blending in.

  “Five till,” Nicholas said. “Let’s start.”

  As Birdie had predicted, the hymns shushed the buzz. The minister came in through the choir room door and sat down. The Handel went well, Joan thought, the double-dotted long notes as they should be and their intonation as good as she could hope for. Nicholas, of course, was exactly on pitch. If the others occasionally wobbled, maybe the congregation would put it down to emotion. When they finished, Joan and the two violinists rested their instruments in their laps, and Charlotte laid her bow on her stand.

  Eric Young climbed into the pulpit and began the service. He kept it simple, as Joan had expected, sticking at first to familiar scripture readings, which might not have meant anything to Sylvia but would speak to her sister and her family. Finally he came to Sylvia.

  “Not even Sylvia Purcell’s friends knew her well. She was, everyone agrees, a private person. But we know some of what mattered to her. She loved music, which she played well, and her friends from the orchestra have brought some of that music to remind us of that love.” He nodded in their direction. “With no children of her own, she loved her young nieces, who delighted in the letters they received regularly from Aunt Sylvia.” He smiled down at Linda’s girls. “She was committed to standing up for defenseless creatures, and in the end, she gave her life for that commitment.

  “There’s an Indian saying that may describe her approach to life: ‘When you wake up ask yourself the question: What good can I do today? And think, when the sun goes down, It takes with it a piece of the life allotted to me.’

  “As we celebrate Sylvia Purcell’s all-too-brief life, let us ask ourselves what good we, too, can do today and every day.” He closed the service with prayer and crossed the chancel in front of the quartet to shake hands with Linda and her family. Then he started down the center aisle to the narthex, behind the seats.

  Nicholas raised his violin, and the quartet struck up “For All the Saints.” It wasn’t “When the Saints Go Marching In,” which wasn’t in the hymnal, but they took it briskly enough to give it almost the same effect. The people began to file out, speaking to one another, at first softly and then more naturally. Nicholas signaled the quartet to repeat the music until the church was almost empty.

  While they were still playing, Linda Smith made her way up the chancel steps, leaving her daughters with their father.

  “Thank you so very much,” she said when they fini
shed. “It meant a lot to me that you played. Could I contribute something to the orchestra?”

  “We’ve set up a fund in memory of Sylvia,” Joan told her. “You might want to designate your contribution for that fund.”

  “Perfect. I’ll get my checkbook.” She went back to her family, presumably to collect her purse.

  Another woman had come up and was talking with Charlotte Hodden. They looked more than a little alike.

  “This is my sister, Gail Vint,” Charlotte said, and she introduced the other members of the quartet.

  “It was beautiful,” Gail said. “Charlotte thought you might be willing to play at my husband’s funeral.”

  “If we can, we’ll be happy to,” Joan said.

  “Of course I’d pay. How much do you charge?” She was being very stiff-upper-lip and businesslike.

  Joan thought of what Charlotte had told them about Gail’s financial straits. “We don’t charge a fee, but of course the orchestra would welcome a donation when you’re on your feet again. There’s no hurry. If you never can give us a penny, that’s all right.”

  Now Gail’s eyes filled, and her words came tumbling out. “That’s so kind of you. I don’t even know when it will be yet. The funeral, I mean. We’re still waiting for the coroner to release his body. It’s so awful—Herschel doesn’t usually work Sunday afternoon, but he went out to check on some reports of animals being killed in the woods. Mostly raccoons and squirrels and such, but wild turkeys and other birds, too, and one small doe—it’s not even deer season. No shot or slugs or bullets, and for some reason they were just being left to rot. That wasn’t his job, but he was so conscientious. He didn’t take the children, the way he usually would of a Sunday, because he was afraid whoever was going after animals might not stop at little boys.”

  Instead, Joan thought, he hadn’t stopped at Herschel.

  25

  “I’ll bet she saw him,” Andrew said. “From where I sit, I can see way into the woods. Clear across that creek, even. I’ll bet she saw him hit a bird.”

  Walking to work after lunch with Fred, Joan hadn’t been able to resist calling him to report that someone was using animals out in the woods for target practice. She hated walking with a phone to her ear, but she didn’t want to call from work.

  “I suppose it’s possible,” she said.

  “It’s more than possible. Don’t you remember? She hollered out something like that right before she fell.”

  “Andrew, I couldn’t hear her; you could.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Well, trust me, she did.”

  “I believe you. You think this guy shot her because he heard her?”

  “He wouldn’t have heard her. It’s hard enough to hear down to the bottom of the tree—you know that. But she was standing up. He could have seen her.”

  “And killed her so she wouldn’t tell anyone she saw him hit a turkey?”

  “I don’t see how he could expect to kill her. It was a freak accident.”

  “Don’t count on it, Andrew. He’s killed a lot of animals out there. Even a deer. You keep down.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  He said it, but she didn’t trust him to do it. By now he had to be stir-crazy on that tiny platform, and there were branches within reach. How could he resist climbing, for the exercise, if nothing else? She couldn’t remember ever seeing Andrew that still for any length of time when he wasn’t sick.

  She’d told Fred what Gail Vint had said about the reason Herschel had gone to the woods, but he’d already known.

  “The sheriff interviewed her on Sunday,” he’d said outside the church. “He’s been good about keeping us informed.”

  “And you don’t think it’s important?”

  “It proves the man can aim. Gives us that much more reason to treat these deaths as homicides.”

  “Oh.” She stood there, the sun in her eyes, a chilly wind blowing her hair, and the weight of her viola case pulling on her shoulder.

  “You want me to run that by the house for you?”

  “Yes, please.” She slid the strap off her shoulder and handed the viola to him.

  He slung it over his own shoulder as if it weighed nothing at all.

  “Why not come with me,” he said. “It’s past noon.”

  Why not, indeed. And so they’d gone home together for a quick bowl of soup. Joan had changed out of the suit she’d chosen for the funeral into comfortable slacks and shirt. On the way back, she’d asked him to drop her at the police station, to give her a few minutes in the fresh air.

  At the door of the center, after talking with Andrew, she resolved to put him and the dangers he faced out of her mind, at least until the end of the workday she’d already cut short. But the people who greeted her when she came in made that impossible.

  “You went to that funeral?” Berta Hobbs asked. As dummy now, while her partner played out their hand of bridge, she was free to talk.

  “Yes,” Joan said.

  “She played the music,” Annie Jordan said. “They had a string quartet instead of an organ. I never heard of such a thing, but it was downright pretty. None of that deedle deedle deedle those groups play, but regular hymn tunes.”

  Joan suppressed a smile. “Thank you, Annie.”

  “I kinda wanted to sing along, but nobody else was doing it, so I figured it wasn’t the thing to do. But I sang inside my head, you know?”

  Joan let the smile out. “I hope you weren’t the only one.”

  “I don’t expect I was. Till you got to that slow piece, right before the preacher started talking. What was that, anyway?”

  “It was from Handel’s Messiah.” When Annie looked blank, Joan added, “The one with the ‘Hallelujah Chorus.’”

  “I don’t suppose you could play that for a funeral,” Annie said.

  “Or without the chorus,” Joan said.

  “I like when everyone stands up for it,” Annie said. “I don’t know why, but they do.”

  “The story is, the first time he heard it, the king of England was so impressed, he stood. So of course everyone else had to get up. And a lot of people still do.”

  “Well, I never.”

  “Was Sylvia’s family there?” Berta asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Annie said. “Her sister and the sister’s husband and little girls. The preacher talked to them especially. And he said Sylvia gave her life for little animals and such and we all should live like that.”

  Close enough, Joan thought.

  “I don’t know about that,” Berta said. “My days for climbing trees are long past.”

  Ora Galloway, her bridge partner, laughed.

  “You don’t think I ever did?” She bristled. “You should have seen me. I was a regular tomboy. I could beat my brother at basketball, too.”

  “Did the preacher talk about the man who killed her?” Ora asked. “I figure he’s still on the loose out there. It’s only a matter of time before he kills again. Ow!” He looked at Berta. “Keep your feet to yourself!”

  She’s looking out for my feelings, Joan thought.

  “Just play the cards,” Berta said.

  “Well, good grief, all I said was—” But he stopped when she glared at him.

  Joan went to her office, stashed her shoulder bag in a drawer, and sat down. Annie followed her in.

  “You all right?”

  “Thanks, Annie, I’m fine.”

  “That Ora shoots off his mouth too much.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’m tougher than I look.”

  “The music was beautiful. And so was the service.”

  “Her sister liked it.”

  “Well, that’s what matters, isn’t it? Everybody’s always trying to figure out what the dead person would like, when it’s the ones in the pews they ought to worry about.”

  Good for Annie. “Yes. But you know, I think maybe Sylvia would have liked it, too, even if she didn’t go to church.”

  “You get any lunch?”

  “Th
anks, Annie. We went home. Anything happen around here?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I went to the service.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Well, it’s quiet now. I’d better return a few of these calls.” There were no message slips waiting on her desk, but the blinker on her phone showed several voice messages.

  Annie left her to it. The first couple of calls were requests for more information about programs announced in the newsletter, which must just be reaching people now. That was quick, Joan thought, as she noted the numbers to call.

  Last was a call from Alex. Her words, asking for a return call, were straightforward, but Joan thought her voice sounded agitated. She hated to think what was coming.

  Taking the work calls first, she signed up two new people for the exercise group. The first, a man, said he was only doing it because his wife wanted him to. “She thinks if I don’t do something about this paunch, I’m gonna keel over. I held out until she quit cooking anything decent. So I’m giving in.”

  “I hope you enjoy it,” Joan said, and made a mental note to ask the pretty young leader to pay him a little special attention.

  The second was a woman with enough arthritis that she worried about being able to participate. “I don’t want to get stiff, but I’m not supposed to do anything that hurts, and I’ve heard it has to hurt to do you any good.”

  Joan assured her that she could take it at her own pace, whatever the class was doing. “That no pain, no gain business doesn’t mean joints.”

  The third and fourth calls were from orchestra members complaining about the new text to the Britten. Joan already knew what John Hocking thought, but the first chair violist gave her an earful when she returned the call. “Bad enough to listen to those jokes, but to have insults about us spouted at our own concert goes beyond bad. I don’t know if it was the kid or the narrator who wrote them, and I don’t care. You stand up for us, you hear?”

  Then the first flutist exploded in her ear. “I know some people don’t like a piccolo, but Heather was almost in tears. That’s no way to treat her. I expected something better of you.”

  “I didn’t—”