Holy Terrors

by Mary Daheim

  Gingerly, Judith sat. “‘Where were the scissors, exactly?”

  Eve made a face. “That’s the strange thing. I didn’t think I’d brought them with me.”

  Judith’s eyebrows shot up. “What?”

  Eve had turned very earnest, a far cry from the volatile, hot-tempered virago Judith had grown accustomed to dealing with. “Kate Duffy brought that big box of rolls from Begelman’s. She was so busy telling everyone how pious she is that she never put them out. I wanted to cut the string on the bakery box, so I went to get my scissors. I couldn’t find them.” Eve’s wide-set dark eyes were filled with puzzlement.

  “When did you last see them?” Judith asked.

  “That morning. I was finishing off a piece for a wedding present. I could have sworn I put them in my bag. I almost always do.” She fretted again at her lower lip. “The damned bag is so crammed, and Kurt is always yammering at me about cluttering it up because things fall out of it in the car. But he locked the Mercedes. He’s very methodical.”

  “Could they have fallen on the ground in the parking lot?” Judith asked.

  Eve shook her head. “I think I would have heard them. Except that Kurt was shooting his face off about my pasta salad. He wanted me to make one with fruit. The man can really bellow.”

  Eve’s revelation about the missing scissors had sent Judith off in a new direction, though it was not one that totally surprised her. Indeed, it confirmed certain growing suspicions. Recognizing a dead end, Judith switched to a different, more hazardous topic: “You’re from San Francisco, aren’t you, Eve?”

  Eve gave Judith a curious glance. “Right. Why do you ask?”

  “Oh,” Judith lied, “my Uncle Corky—mother’s youngest brother—used to have an antiques store there, just off Geary. I thought you might have known him.” Uncle Corky, in fact, had worked as the elevator operator in an old hotel at Geary and Mason during the Depression.

  “What was the shop called?” Eve inquired, taking the bait.

  “Uh—let me think.” Judith did, wildly. “Corky’s Collectibles…no…Unky’s Junk…um…Corky and Porky? Gosh, Eve, I forget. Maybe it was before your time.” She gave Eve Kramer a self-deprecating look. “You wouldn’t have been in the business then anyway, right?”

  Eve nodded. “I met Kurt there while I was in school at Cal-Berkeley. He’d had an urge to come West.” The phone rang. Eve got up to answer it in her best business manner. Judith sat quietly while Eve discussed tapestries, both Flemish and her own. Five minutes passed before she resumed her seat across from Judith. “Where were we?” she asked her guest.

  “In the Bay Area,” replied Judith. She arched her neck, studying a wrought-iron candelabra with a grape-leaf design. “Is that where you met Eddie La Plante?”

  Eve blanched. “Eddie!” Hastily, she did her best to recover herself. “You mean Eddie, the gardener?”

  “The very one,” replied Judith calmly. “That’s quite a handsome spectacle case you made for him.”

  “I didn’t make it for him,” Eve said testily. “I gave it to him. It was an old one of Kurt’s. Kurt wanted something in leather.”

  Judith trod very carefully on what was clearly shaky ground. “Eddie treasures it,” she said, figuring that the statement was at least possible. “It’s probably one of the few nice things he has. Poor old guy.”

  “Eddie has everything he needs,” huffed Eve. “He lives in a decent apartment at the bottom of the Hill, he loves to potter in the parish garden, he has plenty to eat. A guy like that could be homeless, out on the street, living under the freeway.”

  “True,” agreed Judith. “But,” she went on, skewering Eve with her black eyes, “you wouldn’t let that happen to your father, would you?”

  Eve gasped, a hand at her slim throat. “How did you know?”

  Saying it was a wild guess wouldn’t do. Judith merely shrugged. “It seems obvious. I assumed everybody knew. Your car is often parked outside his place on Quince Street.” Judith felt the exaggeration wasn’t out of line. At least it was nearer to the truth than the trumped-up story about Uncle Corky.

  “Damn!” Eve’s hands fell to her sides. Anger flared and died. For a long moment, she remained motionless, staring with unseeing eyes at one of her own beautifully stitched couch pillows. “I couldn’t let him live in that shelter on Mission Street,” she finally said. “After he got evicted from his place in Moraga, I couldn’t track him down for six weeks. I still wouldn’t know where he was if a friend of mine hadn’t run into him outside a soup kitchen.”

  “I admire you for seeing after him,” asserted Judith, getting up from the armchair. It was now well after noon. Gertrude would be seething. Eve wasn’t the only one with filial obligations.

  “The old fool should be under lock and key,” Eve declared heatedly. “His brain is fried from too much booze and too many women. He wouldn’t know anything about gardening if his last wife hadn’t worked for a nursery.”

  “He’s a widower?” Judith inquired as Eve walked her to the door.

  Eve’s expression turned furtive. “Well—yes, and no. He’s been both widowed and divorced. About five times. My mother died six years ago, but she left him when I was fourteen.”

  “Have you replaced John yet?” Judith asked with her hand on the crystal knob.

  “No. It’s going to be tough.” Her piquant face puckered up with an emotion Judith couldn’t quite read. “Oddly enough, I’ll miss him.”

  The phone rang again. Eve excused herself. Judith went out into the spring sunshine, feeling no less depressed, but a lot more curious. Eve Kramer had been more amicable than she’d expected. But she’d also been less candid. Judith’s concern for Father Tim was now matched by her growing anxiety for Eve.

  “You know, Mother,” said Judith, “you could open a can of soup yourself.”

  “I can’t bend over to reach it, you dope,” snarled Gertrude, shredding crackers into her cream of tomato. “If you’d organize this kitchen the way I used to have it, I could manage just fine. But oh, no, you had to redo it for your fancy-pants guests.”

  Judith’s retort was cut off by the phone. Joe Flynn’s smooth voice had an unusually businesslike edge: “I’m on my so-called lunch hour,” said Joe, with the sound of masculine voices in the background. “I wanted to be sure of your time.”

  “I told you, the first week of May,” said Judith, giving Gertrude a furtive glance. “I thought it was all pretty firm.”

  Joe chuckled. “It’s firm, all right. What are you talking about?”

  “Uh…dates?”

  “What kind?” But Joe didn’t wait for an answer. “Hey, I’ve got to make this quick. We’ve talked to all the people who were up at Star of the Sea about the time Sandy was killed. You fixed your conversation with him at approximately one-thirty, right?”

  Embarrassed over her misinterpretation, Judith switched the phone from one ear to the other, as if the gesture might improve her hearing. “Right. Maybe a little later. It took me less than five minutes to get to Falstaff’s. I was there before two.” She paused, considering exactly how much time the short drive up Heraldsgate Avenue to the grocery store actually required. Though it was now only Tuesday, Holy Saturday seemed like a long time ago. “It could have been as late as one-forty,” she amended.

  “We got the call at one fifty-five p.m.,” said Joe, “responding with patrol officers at two-oh-three, aid car at two-oh-nine, police back-up at two-fourteen, fire department at—”

  “What? I can’t hear you over Mother’s soup.”

  “Never mind. The only people we could fix on the scene for sure were the two priests, John Frizzell, Kurt and Eve Kramer, Mark and Kate Duffy, and Wilbur and Norma Paine. Oh, and the gardener, Eddie Whazzisname.”

  “La Plante.” Judith tried to ignore Gertrude’s glare. “What about the housekeeper, Mrs. Katzenheimer?”

  “Off buying her Easter bonnet, or something like that. She didn’t show up until around four. Don’t worry,
” said Joe, “we’ll check out her alibi. She has obvious homicidal tendencies.”

  “That gives you less than fifteen minutes for the murder to have taken place, and for the body to be discovered.”

  “Right,” agreed Joe, then apparently turned to whoever had been talking in the background and said something Judith couldn’t hear. The voices died away, which was more than could be said for Gertrude’s slurping. “Okay,” Joe went on, “we’ve been trying to pin down everybody’s movements during that critical fifteen minutes. Not that we’re ruling out the proverbial unknown intruder, but after going over the layout, nobody could have entered the nursery without coming through the school hall. The other entrances were locked, and only the pastor and the principal have keys. All the nuns—all four of them—had already taken off for the weekend.”

  “So who have you talked to?” asked Judith.

  “What’s for dessert?” queried Gertrude.

  “Arsenic,” snapped Judith.

  “What?” queried Joe.

  “Skip it,” said Judith.

  “Got any of Auntie Vance’s apple pie left?” interrupted Gertrude.

  Judith shook her head. “So where were all of them?” she asked into the phone.

  “What about the banana cream?” Gertrude was commencing to sulk.

  Judith held up her thumb and forefinger, indicating the size of the remaining slice. Impatiently, she gestured at the refrigerator. Gertrude stayed put, lower lip thrust out, knife in one hand, fork in the other, looking for all the world like a convict about to start a prison riot.

  “Let me see…” Joe was obviously referring to his notes. “Much coming and going at that point. Kurt Kramer was backstage, putting away some props the kiddies had hauled out. Eve went down the hall to a cupboard or closet to lock up supplies. Mark Duffy had to check on something in the boiler room—seems your janitor quit a couple of weeks ago and the parishioners are filling in until a replacement can be found. Father Hoyle was backstage, in the kitchen, the parking lot, the sports equipment room off the hall, and then went to see how Mark was doing with the furnace. Pastors are really busy guys, I see. Father Tim had been in the church, presumably going out the main entrance, and had returned just after you left, I gather. Get this—Wilbur Paine says he went to the car to wait for Norma, having taken off the rabbit suit and left it in the men’s room.”

  “Why’d he do that?” inquired Judith, trying to avoid her mother’s ominous glare.

  “Says he thought it belonged to the school. The Santa suit he wore at Christmas did.”

  “That’s possible,” Judith conceded.

  “Kate Duffy went to the dumpster which is located just inside the rear door that leads from the back of the kitchen to that breezeway between the hall and the school itself. Norma insists she never left the church hall and kitchen area after the egg hunt, but with everybody else on the move, who can be sure?”

  “What about John?”

  “He doesn’t remember seeing Norma at all, which, considering she looked like a mobile shrub, is hard to believe. Let’s call him dazed.”

  “What about Eddie?” asked Judith, as Gertrude wrestled with the walker in an attempt to get up.

  Joe sighed. “Eddie says he wasn’t any place he shouldn’t have been. If you ask me, Eddie lost the key to his roller skates a long time ago.”

  “I kind of feel that way about him, too. Though…” Judith saw Gertrude thumping angrily over to the refrigerator, making so much noise that the dishes rattled on the table. “Never mind just now. Joe, I’ve got a few things to tell you.” She lowered her voice a notch. “Can you meet me at Toot Sweet in about an hour?”

  Joe hesitated. “Maybe. I’ll bring Woody. Get Renie to come along, and we can have a double date over hot fudge sundaes.”

  “I may do that. Hey—what about the rabbit suit?”

  “As we supposed. The blood samples match Sandy’s. Not much else—or rather, too much. Every little nipper at the church must have pawed Wilbur’s paws. If we went by the fiber samples, the leading suspect would be a four-foot first-grader of Chinese-American descent.”

  Judith laughed in spite of Gertrude’s thrashing about in the refrigerator. “Oh—did you talk to Norma Paine about why she ditched the costume?”

  “Norma talked to us—lengthily and volubly,” Joe replied. “She said she didn’t realize Wilbur had left it in the rest room until later so she went back to retrieve it before somebody swiped it for their own Easter egg hunt. When she saw the bloodstains, she panicked. The dumpster was the first thing she thought of, since she knew that Falstaff’s Market gets its trash collected every morning, Sunday or not.”

  The thought of Norma Paine in a state of panic almost overwhelmed Judith. “That makes sense—I guess.” She glanced at Gertrude, who was sneering at a container of congealed tapioca pudding. “Around two, then?” Judith said, deciding she’d better hang up before her mother vandalized the refrigerator. “By the way, who found Sandy’s body?”

  “Tim Mills,” replied Joe.

  “I thought so,” said Judith, and rang off.

  Toot Sweet was Heraldsgate Hill’s ice cream and confectionery parlor, located between Holiday’s Drugstore and Nottingham’s, the local florist. Wet Your Whistle and Shoot the Breeze was lettered in gold on the frosted glass door, along with the notation that the shop had been established in 1919.

  Judith arrived on the dot of two. Renie had turned her down, succumbing to an unexpected spurt of artistic genius. Judith ordered a vanilla cream soda and sat sipping slowly for a quarter of an hour. Ginger came by, remarking favorably on her husband’s handiwork with Judith’s hair. Mrs. Dooley paused to report that though deep and savage, the bite on her youngest child’s arm was healing nicely, thank you. Norma Paine entered Toot Sweet as stealthily as her ocelot-spotted nonjoggers’ jogging suit would permit, and gave a little jump when she saw Judith.

  “I just stopped by to look for a friend,” she explained. “I’m not one for sweets, especially in the middle of the afternoon.” Norma surveyed the score of customers with contempt. “At least,” she noted condescendingly, “you’re only having a soda.”

  “I’m using it to wash down a pint of lemon custard ice cream, rum cheesecake, three maple bars, and a dozen chocolate-covered peanut clusters.” Judith smiled, wishing it were true.

  “Judith!” cried Norma, apparently so overcome by such a confession of decadence that she collapsed onto an empty chair.

  “Actually,” Judith began, feeling faintly remorseful, “I only ordered this…”

  “Really, Judith,” interrupted Norma, “I cannot get over this business with Sandy Frizzell! The nerve! As far as I’m concerned, they both should have been stabbed!”

  “Huh?” Judith almost choked on her last swig of vanilla cream soda. “Isn’t that a bit harsh?”

  Norma’s spotted bust jutted indignantly, almost knocking over a shaker of chocolate sprinkles. “Think of poor Emily! It’s all a sham. She stipulated that John should be married in order to inherit. Well, he wasn’t anything of the sort! Wilbur feels that he stands to lose the entire estate. It would serve John right.”

  “Hmmm,” murmured Judith, marveling at Norma’s lack of reticence regarding her husband’s professional affairs. “Exactly how was the will worded?”

  Norma blinked. “Let me see…It specified that John Casper Frizzell had to be an established family man with an unblemished reputation.” She narrowed her eyes at Judith, then fluttered uncharacteristically as the waitress approached. “No, no, Shana, nothing for me! I’m watching my figure.” Smiling politely, Shana started to walk away, but Norma’s hiss summoned her back. Norma put a hand on the girl’s ebony-skinned arm and lowered her voice: “That white chocolate torte with the orange filling and dark chocolate frosting—have you just the teensiest piece left, dear?”

  Shana allowed that the existence of such an item was indeed possible, and scooted toward the counter. Norma gave Judith a vaguely shamefaced g
lance. “An indulgence, just to keep you company, Judith.”

  But Shana was back already, not with Norma’s order, but with a message for Judith: “A Mr. Flynn called to say he and Mr. Price couldn’t make it. Something came up.” Shana’s sculpted features turned mystified.

  “Thanks, Shana,” said Judith, outwardly unperturbed. Inwardly, however, she was vexed by the cancellation. Typical, she thought.

  “I’ve got to run,” she announced. “I’ve got guests coming in about an hour. By the way,” she added, getting to her feet, “if John doesn’t get all that money, who would?”

  Norma’s attention was momentarily diverted by the arrival of her torte, which, Judith judged, probably weighed close to a pound. “Just the way you like it, Mrs. Paine,” said Shana cheerfully, with a wink for Judith.

  Torn between glaring at Shana and diving into the chocolate torte, Norma glanced up at Judith. “What? Oh, I don’t know. That Stella, I suppose.”

  “Stella Maris?” asked Judith, picking up her purse and the bill for her soda.

  Norma, her mouth already full, nodded.

  “Who is she?” Judith inquired.

  Norma shrugged her heavy shoulders. “Somb rewatib, no dowd.”

  “Oh.” Judith gave Norma a halfhearted smile and walked over to the cash register. She was beginning to wonder if Norma and Wilbur Paine had a language all their own. Most of all, she was wondering about Stella Maris.

  TWELVE

  THE TWO COUPLES from Oregon arrived just before three-thirty. They were brothers named Nelson from Grants Pass and Medford, accompanied by their wives, all retired, and headed for the Canadian Rockies. Judith foresaw no problems.

  The rest of the day passed uneventfully, except for Sweetums getting into a fight with the Ericsons’ Dandy Dinmont and Gertrude getting into a fight with Auntie Vance over the phone about the allegedly measly number of pies her sister-in-law had provided for the Easter dinner.