Mark Schweizer - Liturgical 12 - The Cantor Wore Crinolines

by Mark Schweizer

  The front door opened with an obnoxious buzz, notifying the two ladies in the back of the store that there were customers present. I much preferred Pete’s old-timey cowbell clanging against the glass door of the Slab, but suum cuique. To each his own. I noticed that, since lunchtime, Latin phrases learned in my youth were coming back to me, probably thanks to gallus domesticus. I certainly didn’t mind. Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.

  Diana came out of the kitchen cleaning her hands on a towel. She was wearing an apron that was dusted with flour, along with other evidence of the creative culinary art process. She had dark, short hair and gave us a warm smile when she recognized us.

  “Good afternoon, Chief. Nancy. I was expecting Dave.”

  “Dave?” said Nancy.

  “He always comes in after lunch to get a dozen day-olds. Actually, he gets them before they’re a day old. They’re left over from this morning. Shall I get them for you?” She slid open the back of the glass case the separated us. We could see, on the shelves, all manner of confectionary. Cakes, and cookies, and cupcakes. Pastries and loaves of bread. Lemon squares, brownies, and eclairs. My mouth watered just looking at everything.

  “We’re not here for Dave’s donuts,” said Nancy. “We need to ask you about your book club.”

  “The Bookworms?” said Diana. “What about it?”

  Jacki came out of the back, cleaning her hands, just as Diana had a minute earlier. “What’s up?” she asked. Jacki was shorter than Diana, but pretty.

  “We need to talk to Diana,” said Nancy. “Police business.”

  “Oh,” said Jacki. “Shall I leave then?”

  “If you don’t mind,” I said. “We’ll be finished in just a few minutes.”

  Jacki undid her apron strings, then took the apron off and put in on the counter. “I’ll go get a cup of coffee.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  She walked out of the front door and, with a furtive look back at us, headed toward the Holy Grounds Coffee Shop.

  Diana looked very nervous. “So … what’s up?” she managed.

  “The book you’ve been reading,” I said.

  “Madame Bovary?”

  “Nope. The new one. See Your Shadow.”

  “I haven’t finished it yet. Rachel sent it around and thought it would be a good break from the heavy stuff.”

  “How much of it have you read?” asked Nancy.

  “Maybe the first hundred pages or so. It’s not very long. I guess I’m about half-finished with it,”

  “Has anyone died yet?” said Nancy. “In the book, I mean.”

  She thought for a moment, then said, “Three bodies so far. It’s not a very highbrow book, you know. It’s just, well … “

  “Fluff?” I said.

  “Exactly,” said Diana. “Fluff.”

  “I’m going to read it tonight,” I said. “You say that it was Rachel that recommended it?”

  “Yes. Rachel Barstow. We’re all free to recommend things, and we had a few weeks in between the big reads that we’d decided on earlier in the year. Rachel said that she read this one last summer at the beach and liked it. So we all voted to read it. It was a lark, really. I think most of the girls decided to do it to make fun of Rachel at the next meeting. She can be such a book snob sometimes.”

  “So, do you think most members of the book club have finished it?”

  “I really doubt it,” said Diana. “We don’t meet until next week, and it’s so … fluffy, that they won’t bother with it until a couple of days before the meeting. If it was something substantial, they’d all be into the middle of it by now.”

  “So you think that Rachel might be the only one that’s read it all the way through.”

  “That would be my guess, but of course, I may be totally wrong. The only reason I started it is because I have some proofreading to do next week.” She paused for a moment, had a thought, then said, “You might check the Bookworms’ blog. I haven’t been on it this week, but sometimes the girls post things about what they’re currently reading. No spoilers, though.”

  “What’s the blog address?” asked Nancy, pulling a pen and pad out of her breast pocket. She had the web address of course — we’d already been all through the blog, but this was part of our show. She diligently wrote the information in the pad, flipped it shut and returned it to her pocket.

  “Thanks, Diana,” I said. “I’d really like to meet with your book club again. I need to get some information. Do you think you can get everyone together before your scheduled meeting? It’d be easier than tracking all of you down one at a time.”

  “You bet. I’ll call everyone and see if we can get together tomorrow for lunch. I don’t think we can do it tonight. A couple of us have community choir practice and I think Annabel has clogging.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Tomorrow will be fine. As many of you as can make it.”

  “Did you want to take these day-olds over to Dave?”

  “Sure,” said Nancy, taking the box from Diana, “but Dave will have to pay for them.”

  “Oh, there’s no charge for day-olds. Not for our city’s finest.”

  * * *

  “I found something,” said Kent.

  “Something important?”

  “Would I call if it wasn’t important?”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “What did you find? A different cause of death than we thought?”

  “Nope. Heart attacks, all three. No trace of any kind of poison that I can find. That doesn’t mean they weren’t poisoned. It just means I can’t find it. It also means we can’t prove it.”

  “Let’s go, for now, on the assumption that they were poisoned. It would be a very strange coincidence if three middle-aged women all died of heart attacks in random closets on their way to church.”

  “I agree,” said Kent.

  “So what is it that you found?”

  “I noticed when doing the autopsy on Amy Ventura that she had some swelling of the soft palate. I took some tissue samples but they’re inconclusive. Still, the swelling was pronounced.

  “Maybe a sinus infection or something?” I said.

  “I sincerely doubt it. If it was, then Crystal Latimore and Darla Kildair all had the same sinus infection. No, this was something else. Not only was there swelling, but there were small lesions evident on the tissue. Almost like welts.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  After I found the swelling, I checked the other two victims and sure enough, all three women had the same symptom. It was less pronounced on Crystal, but it was there.”

  “You’re thinking it was a reaction to the poison.”

  “That is my theory,” said Kent. “The interesting thing about this would be the type of poison. I did find about fifty kinds of poison that swell the soft palate, either as a side effect or as the main consequence. Everything from black hellebore to iodine.”

  “Why would it be a main consequence? You mean that the poison was intended to swell the soft palate?””

  “Well, if the palate swelled enough, that would cut off the airway and depending on the severity, could easily cause a heart attack.”

  “Can’t you check for that?” I asked. “Suffocation, I mean.”

  “I checked for petechial hemorrhaging. None evident. So I’m thinking that it was a side effect. The fact that the swelling is still visible is the strange thing. That and the lesions. I’ll keep checking on the fifty poisons on the list and I have a call into a friend of mine in Washington. She’s quite a connoisseur of poisons. If it’s one of these, she’ll know about it.”

  “How about asparagus flowers?” I asked.

  “Huh?” said Kent, confused.

  “Asparagus flowers. I have it on good authority they’re highly poisonous.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  * * *

  Bud was standing out in front of the new wine shop with his brother, Moosey, and Harm Pooter when I wa
lked up. It was cold. Bud was wearing a ski jacket, a scarf, and a stocking cap. Harm was in the traditional winter garb of the outdoor laborer, insulated coveralls, a work jacket, and heavy boots. He had a baseball cap pulled down low, but it didn’t do much to shield his ears and they had turned a lovely shade of red. His nose was red as well. Moosey was dressed in as many layers as his mother, Ardine, could make him put on. He had gloves on, something the other two had shunned, and his hat had earflaps that at least attempted to keep his head warm. He was sitting proudly at the wheel of a used gas-powered, four-wheel drive, golf cart.

  “We’ve got groundhogs,” said Bud sadly.

  My face showed my confusion. “Huh?”

  “We got groundhogs,” said Moosey, grinning with delight. At age eleven, almost twelve, Moosey hadn’t changed much since he was a little kid. He still had his infectious smile, his untamed mop of straw posing as hair, and his ears that protruded just a tad too far into space. He still sported the same wire-rimmed glasses, blue jeans, and red, high-topped Keds. He might give up those Keds in adulthood. Maybe not.

  “You got groundemhogs, sure ‘nough,” said Harm Pooter. “Never seen a worse case.”

  “What’s with the cart?” I asked, forgetting for a moment about the groundhogs.

  “It’s my idea,” said Bud. “We’re offering free delivery with a mile radius of downtown. Moosey is the delivery boy.”

  “For five dollars an hour plus tips,” said Moosey proudly. “Bernadette’s gonna help. Bud says I don’t even need a license to drive this around town.”

  “Depends,” I said. “Is it street legal?”

  The golf cart was dark green and had only two seats, but was equipped with a small cargo bed on the back. It was about four feet wide and had a hardshell canopy covering the whole thing, a full windshield, but no windows.

  “It’s not street legal,” said Bud, “but I made sure that it’s street allowed. I checked with Mayor Johnsson. We have a town ordinance that says golf carts are welcome in the community of St. Germaine. No drivers license needed. No registration, no tag, no headlights, none of that stuff. We can’t go on any highways though and we have to stay inside the city limits. That’s why we only deliver within a mile.”

  “You’ve got it all sorted out,” I said. “Sounds good. Any rules about underage delivery boys or girls?”

  “No, sir!” said Bud with a grin. “I checked about that, too.” He looked sheepishly at his feet and said, “I sort of told Bill Crowell that you’d pay him for the cart. I have a receipt inside.”

  “No problem,” I said. “It’s a good idea.”

  “Now about these varmints,” said Harm, “you got a botheration of groundemhogs.”

  Harmonious and Tommy Pooter were the two septic tank guys in town and they made a good living. Not a profession I would have chosen, but an honorable, if not odiferous, way to make ends meet. Harmonious Pooter’s Robo-Rooters was a well-known local business and the bright lavender van parked in front of anyone’s house always announced who was having problems with their plumbing. Pooter’s (as it was known) was a member of the Chamber of Commerce, gave liberally to the scout programs and churches, could always be counted on for a donation to almost any cause, provided free services to the library and any number of other worthy organizations, and yet the owners were hardly ever invited to any of the gatherings that the rest of St. Germaine’s business community frequented. There was a reason for this and the reason was obvious.

  “Where’s Tommy?” I asked.

  “He’s got another call,” said Harm. He didn’t offer me his hand. Years of having no one shake it had conditioned him to keep them both stuck deep into the pockets of his insulated overalls. “You got a whole passel of them hogs. They’re in the busted clay sewage pipe and have dug clean through all the field lines.”

  “Well,” I said. “That’s a new one on me. I would have thought that this time of year they’s all be hibernating.”

  “They were hibernating,” said Harm, “till I dug ‘em up. Then they weren’t.”

  “How many are there?”

  “I counted four that I seen, including a young pup, so there are probably more pups down there somewhere. There could be dozens. And that’s not your only problem.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I brought the little backhoe and dug down to the tank to clean it out …”

  “And?”

  “And you don’t got no septic tank,” said Harm. “What you got is a refrigerator. Looks to me to be a 1950 Northstar. Cherry red. My grandma had her one of them. She liked it right well.” He reminisced thoughtfully for a moment and smiled at the memory of his grandma. “Looks like they sunk it in the ground and run the sewer pipe in through the top.

  “Oh, man,” I said, glancing at Bud. He had a sick look on his face.

  “What are our options?” I asked.

  “I was you,” said Harm, “I’d keep my mouth shut, cover the fridge up with concrete, exterminate the groundhogs, and hook up to the city sewer. You gotta pay the water bill anyway. Cost you maybe a couple of thousand by the time you get the permits, run the pipe, and all.”

  “Sage advice,” I said.

  “You’re not gonna kill them groundhogs, are you?” asked Moosey, horrified at the prospect.

  “They ain’t no good to nobody,” said Harm, wiping a sleeved arm across his nose. “All they do is dig stuff up. You can eat a young one, though. Tastes right good barbecued.”

  “Can’t we take ‘em out of here?” asked Moosey. “We can let them go in the woods. Maybe I can keep a pup if there is one.” Moosey was always happy to have a new pet. He and the rest of the McColloughs lived out in Coondog Holler, far away from anyone who might care what kind of critters Moosey came home with. “Penny Trice has a little groundhog,” he said. “His name is Pig Whistle. She’s also got a possum named Possum Joe, and a turtle, and a hamster, and a mousey thing with a long nose. Oh, and a chicken.”

  “Good to know,” I said. “I’ll call Gwen and see if she has some live traps she can bring over. We’ll trap them if we can, but the ones we can’t get will have to be destroyed. They’ll start tearing up other people’s yards and then we’ll be in trouble.”

  Moosey nodded thoughtfully. For a twelve-year-old kid, he was pretty savvy. “I understand. I’m thinking I’ll name mine Ginger.”

  Harm shook his head in amazement. Saving groundhogs? He’d obviously never heard of such a thing. He said, “You want me and Tommy to come on out and take care of ‘em, we’ll do it no charge. There’s one of them pups, there’s prob’ly a dozen. Them younguns is right tasty if you cook ‘em right.” He smacked his lips at the prospect.

  “I’ll probably take you up on that, Harm, but give us a couple of days,” I said. Then I turned to Bud. “Can you tell Roberto that we’re hooking up to the city sewer line? Tell him we’ll need some concrete dumped on that refrigerator in the back yard, then have him cover it up.”

  “Yessir,” said Bud. “I’ll take care of it.”

  Chapter 15

  Ecclesiastica Rodentia: the newest wrinkle in the polyester leisure suit of the common liturgy. The Fraternity of Insane Bishops was behind it of course. I’d gotten the memo last week, read it, then put it in the bathroom on top of the stack of the other memos from the F.I.B. where I found them to be useful in the end.

  The bishops had decided to merge Groundhog Day with Candlemas. Why not? They both fell on February 2nd and Candlemas needed a boost. As a feast day, it ranked slightly behind Septuagesima in popularity and the groundhog was getting more press popping out of his hole than You-Know-Who.

  St. Groundlemas was revisionist theology at its finest and the Council wasn’t above creating a few ancient narratives to make it all work. Now, according to the “newly discovered” texts, the Groundhog appeared on Candlemas to give his blessing to The Presentation at the Temple. Sure. Why not? They even had some hymns ready: Hail the Day that Sees Him Rise, O Sacred Hog Now Grounded, and The Snow La
y on the Woodchuck. I figured that before it was over, Lazarus would come forth, see his shadow, and predict six more weeks of Advent.

  I took a slurp of my Schweinestinke and noticed we had company. She was parked next to Pedro, and he was already dancing his eyes at her, a suggestive allemande or maybe a trollopy hornpipe, but her gaze was on me and I met it with the intensity of a vegan baritone in the meat aisle of the Piggly Wiggly. Her long fingers slided slippily on her champagne glass and her eyelashes fluttered independently, as if they had a mind of their own and weren’t being wiggled by an infestation of eyelash mites.

  “My name is Kitty,” she purred cuddlingly. “You boys looking for a good time?”

  I didn’t trust her. Groundhogs didn’t mix with cats. Not in my book.

  Pedro coughed up a hairball.

  * * *

  Nancy, Dave, and I were at the Slab on Friday morning having breakfast when Cynthia walked up and dropped a copy of the Tattler in the middle of the table.

  “You made the front page,” she said. “Again.”

  “No doubt,” said Nancy. “If we can’t make the front page of a weekly rag with three dead bodies, something’s wrong.”

  “They’ve had almost a whole week to put the story together,” said Dave.

  Cynthia pulled up a chair and joined us. Pete wasn’t far behind. The Slab wasn’t doing much business, and Noylene had the two other customers well in hand. They had their food, full cups of coffee, and they were now digging in. We had our coffee, but were still waiting for our food orders to come out of the kitchen. Nancy picked up the paper and read the headline.

  “Foreclosed Properties Cloak Gristly Murders.”

  “Good headline,” said Dave appreciatively, taking a sip of coffee. “Descriptive, concise, makes you want to read further.”

  “It’s Annette’s byline,” said Nancy as she skimmed the article. “The headline’s better than the article.” She tossed the paper back onto the table.

  Dave picked it up and read, “A woman was found dead in each of the three houses auctioned last Saturday on the steps of the courthouse. Foul play is suspected. The three dead women, who seemed to have no connection, were identified as Darla Kildair of St. Germaine, Amy Ventura of Tinkler’s Knob, and Crystal Latimore of Linville. According to an eyewitness at the scene of the discovery …”