The Organist Wore Pumps (The Liturgical Mysteries) (12 page)

“
Where’s that owl?!” hollered Moosey from the kitchen. He came dashing in a moment later, looking around in anticipation. “Where’s Archimedes?”

“
He’s not here,” I said, closing the laptop and setting it on the shelf. “He takes off when it gets dark and usually doesn’t come back in until morning.”

“
Aw, man...” Moosey flopped onto the sofa in a disappointed heap. He was wearing the winter jacket Meg had given him for Christmas last year, but, even though Meg had gotten him a size larger than he needed, he’d grown so much over the past year, it looked as though he’d need another one in a few weeks. His mop of straw-colored hair was sticking out from beneath a lumberjack’s cap, red-plaid with sheepskin earflaps. The wire-rimmed glasses sat slightly askew on his freckled nose and his red high-top tennis shoes now rested comfortably on the coffee table.

“
Shoes off the table,” I said. “If I can’t do it, you can’t either.”

Moosey grinned and shifted his position, dropping his feet to the floor just as Meg and Ardine walked into the room.

“
Ardine brought us a bottle of wine,” Meg said, holding up a bottle of Shiraz.

“
It was Bud’s idea,” mumbled Ardine. “He said to tell you not to drink any of the other bottles. Whatever that means.”

Ardine was bone thin and hard. She’d had a tough life, no doubt, but now did a good business making and selling quilts. Her graying hair was tied back in a loose ponytail and she had on a wool overcoat that had seen many winters.

“
He said you’d like this one just as well. Maybe better.”

“
Excellent!” I said.

“
Hey, what’s this?” Moosey, never one to sit still for more than a minute, had bounced over to my typewriter and was looking over my latest literary effort.

“
That’s my new children’s book.
The Adventures of Sophie Slug
.”

“
Hmm,” said Moosey, reading over the page, his lips moving silently. He finished and looked up, a confused smile on his face. “I don’t get it.”

“
You’re not alone there,” Meg said.

“
This is very complicated and sophisticated humor, Moosey. It works on many levels.”

Moosey looked at me, waiting for an explanation.

I sighed with exasperation. “Okay, Sophie is obviously on a trip to Mozart’s birthplace, which, as we all know, is Salzburg, Austria. The first funny thing is that a slug is on a vacation in the first place. Then, the fact that she ‘almost’ wept aloud, but couldn’t because she didn’t possess any vocal cords, is the setup for the last bit of her dissolving in a puddle of tears.”

Moosey looked at me blankly. I looked over at Ardine. Same expression.

“
Because dissolving in a puddle of tears is a metaphor for crying,” I continued. “And tears are salty. So when it’s revealed that Sophie is a slug and dissolves non-metaphorically, it means that she really did dissolve—literally—because of her tears. Also, the fact that she empathizes with Mozart’s genius is hilarious!”

Meg giggled. Moosey just stared.

“
Salzburg,” I explained, “literally means ‘salt castle.’ It’s named for the salt mine on Mount Dürrnberg overlooking Hallein, just south of the city. Of course Sophie wouldn’t know this, being a tourist slug and not speaking German.”

Moosey blinked.

“
And if you put salt on a slug, the slug dissolves. It’s ironic, then, that Sophie Slug meets her demise in a city named after salt even though her own tears were the instrument of her death—tears that might just as well have killed her in Peoria, Illinois. Then, to top it off, there’s the clever little tag:
Eine Kleine Slug-Musik.
It’s a reference to a famous work by Mozart. So you see, Moosey, this story contains multiple layers of pathos and irony. It’s a fable for our time.”

“
How could she get a ticket?” asked Moosey.

“
Huh?” I said, confused.

“
How could a slug get a plane ticket?” said Ardine. “I was wondering the same thing. It’s a legitimate question.”

Meg laughed out loud.

“
You know,” I said, “great writers and humorists aren’t really appreciated until they’re dead.”

“
There’s a thought,” said Ardine, a smile finally appearing on her worn face.

“
I like Harry Potter better,” said Moosey. “Not as many slugs.”

“
Are y’all gonna come up and get a Christmas tree this year?” asked Ardine. “We’ve still got some nice ten-foot-tall blue spruces left. I’ll give you a real deal.” Ardine was a seasonal employee at the Pine Valley Christmas Tree Farm.

“
What kind of deal?” Meg asked, always on the lookout for a bargain.

“
Forty-five bucks,” said Ardine. “No one wants them ten-foot trees. They’re two years too late in the harvesting. All we can do with ’em is chop ’em up for garlands and they’re even mostly too big for that. Needles too far apart.” She looked around the living room. “It’d go great in here, though.”

“
It would,” agreed Meg. “We’ll come up on Saturday morning and pick one out.”

“
Why so late?” asked Ardine. “Most folks around here get their tree up right after Thanksgiving.”

“
We like to leave ours up a little longer,” Meg answered. “So we wait until a couple of weeks before Christmas to put it up.”

“
You know,” I said, “the twelve days of Christmas and all that.”

“
Ten frogs a-leaping,” sang Moosey, breaking into song and jumping over the ottoman to illustrate the verse. “Nine ladles prancing, eight days of milking, seven swiney swimmers, six something-something...” He went down on one knee and stuck his arms out like Al Jolson. “Five gooool-den riiings!...”

“
That’s the one,” I said. “The very song. Here. Have a cookie.” I tossed him a springerle from a basket on one of the end tables. Springerles are very hard Christmas cookies made from an old German recipe that uses quarry stone as the main ingredient. The upside is that they will last indefinitely, impervious to mold, insects, nuclear wars, and the ravages of time. The downside is, if you’re not careful, you will break all your teeth trying to eat them. I liked springerles and ordered a tin of them every Christmas.

Moosey caught the cookie and immediately tried to take a bite. “Ow!” he said, then took it out of his mouth and looked at it in consternation.

“
You’ve got to work at it,” I told him. “Once you break through the outer shell, it’s the most delicious cookie you’ll ever eat.” I didn’t tell him that it was
all
outer shell.

“
Tastes a little like licorice,” said Moosey sitting down on the sofa and gnawing on the hardtack. “I like ’em.”

He kicked his feet back and forth and sang to himself while trying to figure the best way to break the springerle code. He finally decided to lick it into submission. “Four clawing birds, three wenches, two turkledoves, and a parson up a psaltree.”

Chapter 12

The first big snowfall of the year in St. Germaine is a beautiful thing, and this one was no exception. Getting snow the second week of December was about business-as-usual for us in recent years. Old-timers talk about getting blizzards in early November, but that hasn’t happened for a while. Oh, every now and then a cold front will come through early in the season, but we don’t really get geared up for a good, heavy snow until December.

Meg had driven me into Asheville the day before and I’d rented a new Toyota Tundra four-door pickup: four-wheel drive, automatic everything, a sound system with eight speakers, satellite radio, and more bells and whistles than you could shake a stick at. It rode like a dream, or so it seemed compared to a 1962 Chevy that saw its last new shock absorber when Nixon was president. More than that, I could make a turn with only one hand. My other hand rested on the steering wheel, encased in plaster, in a supporting role.

I drove slowly into town and was amazed, as I always am early on a sunny, cold morning following eight inches of powder, at the sparkling beauty of the square—the boughs of the fir trees weighed down with new snow, drifts resting against the gazebo in the middle of the park, the streets still pristine and unmarked except for the occasional footprints of other early risers. It was a picture that Norman Rockwell would have been proud to paint. It wouldn’t last long, of course. As soon as traffic picked up and businesses opened, the snow on the streets would turn to sludge. But right now, it was a beautiful sight.

The Kiwanis Club had begun to put up their Christmas crèche, a project that would take most of the week. It was quite a structure, a full-sized stable with post and beam construction, and was being erected in its now-traditional location, the southernmost corner of Sterling Park, just across the street and down seventy yards from the front doors of St. Barnabas. The main posts had been set into the ground and the rest of the construction materials—beams, siding, thatching for the roof, and everything else—were stacked neatly in the vacant lot on the other side of Maple Street. Everything had been covered with tarps and looked, on this cold morning, like a mountain of snow. The Living Nativity program would begin a week from Wednesday and continue every night until the Sunday before Christmas. Five shows, each lasting forty-five minutes. The park would be packed. Our other big event, the Rotary Club’s Christmas parade, was scheduled for this Saturday at two in the afternoon.

I parked my truck in front of the police station, went inside and was making a pot of coffee when the phone rang. It was Meg.

“
Can you make a phone call over to England?”

“
I guess so,” I said. “What’s up?”

“
I just spoke to an Arthur Farrant. He’s a vicar somewhere in Nantwich, wherever that is. He wants you to call him back.”

“
I don’t know anyone named Arthur Farrant.”

“
I think Geoffrey put him in touch with you.”

Geoffrey Chester was an old friend who worked at York Minster. He knew absolutely everyone. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll give him a call. What’s the number?”

Meg read it to me. I wrote it down and sat at Nancy’s desk, flipping idly through the week’s reports until the coffee pot sputtered to a stop. Then I poured myself a mug and went into my office to make my overseas call.

•••

Gaylen Weatherall wasn’t in the church office when I walked across the park to St. Barnabas about an hour later. Marilyn told me that, until Gaylen felt a little better, she wasn’t planning to come in except for emergencies and Sunday mornings. She’d do her day-to-day business from her house.

“
Would you like to see Deacon Mushrat?” she asked, her eyes darting to his open office door across the hall. “He’s
always
here.”

I declined the offer and decided that, on a beautiful morning like this, a walk up to the parsonage would be just the thing.

“
I’m just going to go get my gun,” I told Marilyn. “I’m getting in some target practice this afternoon. I’ll drop in on Gaylen and see how she’s doing.”

I unlocked the side door of the church, entered the nave, and walked up the stairs to the choir loft. I slid behind the organ console, reached underneath the bench and felt for the box that my friend Michael Baum, of the Baum-Boltoph Organ Company, had built into the seat. I found the two hidden levers, released them both, and the drawer popped open. Then I took the Glock 9 mm pistol out of the box and slid it into my coat pocket.

•••

Gaylen answered the door when I rang the bell, looking pretty good, all things considered. Her makeup almost covered the two black circles under her eyes. Almost, but not quite. And the piece of tape that crossed her nose was flesh-colored. If you saw her from a ways back, she looked just fine. Or, as Raymond Chandler once wrote, “From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.” Her right hand was in a cast up to her elbow, and she held it tightly against her side.