The Countertenor Wore Garlic (The Liturgical Mysteries) Read online

  "What's wrong, Noylene?" he said, exasperation evident in his voice.

  "It's Triple Coupon Day, ain't it?" said Noylene. "I've got coupons."

  "We're not giving you cash back," said Amelia with a snarl. "Says so right in the ad."

  "No, it don't," answered Noylene, triumphantly slapping her copy of the St. Germaine Tattler onto the conveyor belt. "Lookit here. Last month the ad said 'no money back.' Not this month. You forgot!"

  Roger picked up the newspaper and skimmed the ad. Then he sighed heavily, handed the paper back to Noylene and addressed Amelia.

  "She's right. I forgot. Go ahead and give her the money."

  "Forget it!" said Amelia.

  "I'm the manager," hissed Roger. "You're causing a scene and customers are leaving the store. Give her the money!"

  Amelia crossed her arms in defiance. "Nope. Everybody knows that on triple coupons, you don't get money back. Free stuff, sure, but no money back. That's just the way it is."

  Noylene waved the paper under her nose. "Doesn't say so..."

  "How much is it?" asked Roger.

  Noylene pointed to a stack of items that hadn't been sacked yet that included a gallon of charcoal lighter fluid, five bags of off-brand dog food, and a large assortment of feminine hygiene products. "My triple coupons all add up to $63.76. The bill is $58.45. You guys owe me about nine dollars!"

  "It's $5.31," said Amelia, "but we're not paying."

  Roger dug into his pocket and came up with a hand full of bills. He counted out six ones and pushed them into Noylene's hand.

  "You don't even have a dog," Amelia said to Noylene, her disgust at Roger's submission evident.

  "Well, I've got me some dog food," said Noylene, waving the bills under Amelia's nose, "and six dollars to boot. Maybe I'll just go and buy me a dog since y'all are paying me to take this food home."

  Amelia gritted her teeth but didn't say anything.

  Noylene put on her nicest smile. "Maybe you could put these in a paper bag for me."

  "I'm on break," said Amelia. "Do it yourself."

  Amelia locked her register and stomped off toward the break room. Roger stepped behind the counter, bagged Noylene's purchases and set them into her shopping cart.

  "I'll be back in a little while," Noylene said cheerfully, as she pushed her cart toward the exit. "As soon as I print up some more of them coupons. Y'all know you can just get 'em right off the Internet?"

  "We think it's the hormones," said Hannah after Noylene had gone. "Her baby's what? Ten months old? She's been in and out of here like a wild woman for the past six weeks. It's driving us crazy." Hannah ran our two sirloin steaks across her scanner. "You have any coupons?"

  "Nope," I said.

  "Nope," said Meg.

  "Hmm. You have your Piggly Wiggly discount card?"

  "Nope," I said.

  Meg shook her head and proffered an apologetic smile.

  "We can also accept your Food Lion discount card if you have one of those," said Hannah hopefully. She lowered her voice. "Or I can let you use mine..."

  "We insist on paying full price for these steaks," I said. "It's our anniversary."

  Megan Farthing Konig and I have been married for almost three years. Three years this Thanksgiving to be exact, but October 21st was another one of our anniversaries. Not the anniversary of our first date. That was July 15th, the day that Meg went zipping past my '62 Chevy pickup in her Lexus and I was forced to detain her with a dinner of knockwurst and sauerkraut, grilled to the sounds of J.S. Bach on the stereo. July 15th, eight years ago.

  October 21st was when she took me home to meet her mother.

  Ruby, Meg's mother, had been living in St. Germaine for five years or so prior to Meg's arrival and I'd remembered seeing her around town, of course, but even in a small village of 1500 or so people, unless you ran afoul of the law or needed a police chief's particular services, there was a pretty good chance that I might not have made your acquaintance. Besides, Meg's mother is a Baptist. Baptist folk do not co-mingle with Episcopal folk unless provoked. In St. Germaine, Episcopalians will get together with Methodists (a common heritage), Lutherans (a common distrust of Papal authority), Presbyterians (a common love of mixed drinks), and Unitarians (because they'll drink anything), but Baptists? No sir. Baptists keep to their own kind.

  The reason that I remembered seeing Ruby around town is that, although she is now in her seventies, she is a striking woman. Tall and statuesque with silver hair that still showed hints of black, she is an older version of Meg—same dancing gray eyes, same beautiful smile, same knockout figure, same wicked sense of humor. Meeting Ruby on October 21st wasn't particularly memorable, but it was another date Meg and I could celebrate, and we enjoyed celebrating.

  Unlike her mother, Meg is not a Baptist. She is an Episcopalian. So Episcopalian that she'd been the Senior Warden of St. Barnabas for the past three years. It was a position she'd hold only for a couple more months. The church tried to elect her again, George Romanski nominating her and citing the age-old St. Barnabas motto, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." This motto of course, flies in the face of the other, more prevalent St. Barnabas motto, namely, "If it ain't broke, have a committee tinker with it until it is," and "If it is broke, leave it alone and maybe it'll fix itself." Meg declined the nomination.

  As Senior Warden, Meg had done a marvelous job overseeing the rebuilding of St. Barnabas after the famous Thanksgiving fire that had consumed the 1904 structure. She also worked very well with our current priest, Gaylen Weatherall, but she feared, like all of us, that Gaylen wouldn't be around for too much longer. Finding yet another priest was a task that Meg wanted no part of.

  Gaylen had been called as rector of St. Barnabas, but then had been elected Bishop of Colorado and moved to Denver. It was a position she decided to vacate when her aging father, whom she was caring for, developed emphysema and couldn't deal with the altitude of the Mile-High City. We welcomed her back to St. Germaine with open arms since she was much loved, and because we hadn't had good luck with priests since her departure. Gaylen's father had gone to his eternal reward this last April, and now the Right Reverend Weatherall was on the short lists of at least two episcopates that we knew of. She'd be a sitting bishop again in a matter of months if not sooner. Whether Gaylen left or not, Meg had informed the vestry that she'd be retiring as Senior Warden come the new year.

  "That'll be $34.56," said Hannah, dropping our steaks, a couple of sweet potatoes, and some salad fixings into a bag. "And Happy Anniversary!"

  "Thanks," I said. I handed Hannah two twenties and pocketed the change.

  A couple of minutes later we were pulling out of the Pig in my '62 pickup and heading for the hills. I could afford better than the old truck. I could afford anything I wanted. As fate and luck might have it, I was quite the tycoon; this thanks to an invention I sold to the phone company at the height of the cash boom of the 90s and the proceeds having been shrewdly handled during the recent financial crisis by my extremely savvy broker, Meg. Oh, yes, she'd made me a bundle. As she so succinctly put it, "You've got more money than Tammy Faye's housecat. Why don't you buy a decent truck?" I didn't buy a decent truck, because this one was perfectly good. Better than good. The most expensive thing in it was the sound system. That and the Glock 9 under the seat. I kept an identical pistol in the organ bench at the church. I've always found that tenors can use a bit of encouragement.

  I turned on the stereo in the truck and the sounds of Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain filled the cab.

  "I recognize that," said Meg, "from Disney's Fantasia movie. I remember that I especially like the ending."

  "That ending's not on this recording," I said. "When he made Fantasia, Mr. Disney stuck Schubert's Ave Maria onto the end of it, and had it sung by some supplicants going to church to make it not so scary. All nuns and church bells. This is the original. Halloween at its finest."

  "It certainly sets the right mood," agreed Meg.

  We
swung onto the highway and drove up in the direction of our cabin. We called it a cabin. It was anything but. Nestled on two hundred acres, one of the rooms, currently the library, began life as a log cabin. Daniel Boone's granddaughter and her husband had built it in 1842 and I'd had it taken down, log by log, moved to the property, and reassembled. The rest of the house had a mountain cabin feel to it, but in reality had more in common with some of the upscale dwellings in Blowing Rock and Boone than with the mountain cabins that were tucked away in the hollers of Watauga County. In the three years that we'd been married, Meg had put her stamp on the house as well, including renovating the kitchen, redoing the bedrooms and the cabin library, and adding a garage, something my old pickup had never seen the need for. Her new Lexus, however... well, that was a different story.

  "Who's minding the store this weekend?" asked Meg.

  I knew what she meant. The third weekend in October was prime leaf peeping season in St. Germaine and, weather permitting, the biggest tourist weekend of the year. The two weekends leading up to Christmas were second and third maybe. Since this was destined to be a glorious weekend, meteorologically speaking, the town would be packed. Heck, it was already packed, and this was only Thursday.

  "I'm off tomorrow. Nancy and Dave both have weekend duty. I'll check in Sunday after church, but unless there's a problem, I won't be hanging around."

  We took a tight curve and Meg slid across the seat and bumped up next to me.

  "You did that on purpose," she said.

  "Yep. It was my move in high school. If the girl didn't slide back to her own side, I knew she liked me."

  "Hmm."

  ***

  We drove down the road that constituted our driveway, across a pasture and up to the house, and were greeted by Baxter, watchdog extraordinaire. He barked his basso greeting, once, twice, then made for the kitchen door where he waited for us, tail wagging, in anticipation of spreading more of his thick white, black, and tan fur across the house. With winter coming, I would have expected that Baxter might keep a bit more of his coat, nature's hedge against the bitter months that were right around the corner. I was mistaken.

  Meg let him in and he raced for his place under the kitchen table, skidded to a stop, banged into a chair, regrouped, and made himself as inconspicuous as a one hundred ten pound dog can be while waiting for an escaped dinner morsel dropped accidentally on purpose. He'd wait there for ten minutes or three hours. Didn't matter to him. If he sensed that there was food to be served, he was in his place.

  "I'll cook these potatoes and make the salad," said Meg. "Give me about an hour and then you can put the steaks on the grill."

  "Good deal," I said. "I'll be at the typewriter."

  I'd put some CDs next to the Bose stereo system before we'd left this morning and now loaded them into my brand new 100 CD changer and turned it on. Halloween music. Music that goes bump in the night. The sounds of Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King filled the house.

  Meg stuck her head out of the kitchen and yelled, "Could you turn that down? You're scaring the salad."

  I turned the volume down—moderately down—because I felt that Halloween music should, at the very least, rattle your skeleton, then turned my attention to my new opus. I put on my fedora, turned on the banker's lamp that cast a yellow glow across the paper already in the typewriter, and began.

  The Countertenor Wore Garlic

  It was a dark and stormy night, although Tessie, the one o'clock weather girl on Channel Two, had nasally predicted a clear and starry night, but was once again dead wrong, chiefly due to her education (Meteorology for Blondes), her inability to read a tele-prompter, and her current preoccupation with the ever-burgeoning hope that this fellow she'd been hearing about, Doppler Radar, would ask her out on a date. The wind howled through the city like wind might do if it was howling and not just blowing; but I guess "blowing" would be more accurate because, quite frankly, "howling" is exaggerating the point since all the wind was really doing was making the kind of whistling sound your grandfather might make while trying to pronounce his S's after dropping his teeth in the dog's water bowl, but surely "blowing" could not describe the darkness and storminess of this particular night as it (the wind, not the night) moved like a howling, whistling thing across the dank (and by dank, I mean damp) cityscape.

  I'm a detective. A liturgy detective, duly baptized by the bishop, absolved by the diaconal ministers, licensed by the archdeacon, and happy to take everyone's money. Sure, I specialized. There were other gumshoes out there that were happy to specialize as well--snooping, dirty snaps, sordid, lustful affairs, intrigue, embezzlement and such. Still, that's what I liked about church work. I had all that and religion besides.

  The music ended and the opening strains of the fifth movement of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique filled the house. Meg stuck her head out of the kitchen again.

  "A bit morbid this evening, aren't we?" she hollered, struggling to be heard above the music. "How about some nice Couperin harpsichord sonatas?"

  "You wish!" I yelled back. "Can't talk. I'm on a roll."

  Usually I was scrambling like a five-legged cockroach at an Irish step dancing competition. For the past six weeks, though, business was dead, and I don't mean the good kind of dead where there's a body and I can charge two

  C-notes a day plus expenses. I mean the bad kind of dead where there's nobody dead. I had a nut to make and the rest of the squirrels weren't taking candy corn.

  The economy was so bad that when Marilyn went to her weekly exorcism and couldn't pay, the priest repossessed her. I had to tell her to take a permanent vacation. A secretary whose head spins all the way around tends to put a client off. Now I was down to calling a few low-level canons, bishop wannabes who were hiding past careers as music evangelists and I had the record jackets to prove it. I didn't like blackmail, but I knew these Holy Joes, and I knew they'd throw some shekels my way to bury that vinyl in someone's back yard.

  The unmistakable strains of the Dies Irae began to rumble in the bowels of the orchestra. Day of judgement, day of wrath. I closed my eyes and let the music envelop me until I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  "Time to put on the steaks, Mr. Shakespeare," said Meg. "Or rather, 'Mr. Chandler.' I think you fell asleep."

  "Maybe," I said. "Did you turn the music down?"

  "Just a hair." She kissed me on the cheek, then, moving her lips to my ear, said in a husky whisper, "Before you grill those steaks, how about putting something a bit more romantic on the stereo? I'll make it worth your while."

  Thank you, Harry Connick, Jr.

  Chapter 2

  The cowbell tied to the door of the Slab Café banged loudly against the glass when I walked in, announcing the arrival of yet another hungry customer. I wiped my dress shoes on the mat inside and looked for Nancy and Dave, whom I suspected would be frequenting the establishment, it being nine in the morning and an hour into their shifts. I didn't have to look far. The Police Department had a table in the back, complete with a RESERVED sign molded in high-gloss red and engraved with white letters. Nancy had had the sign made and no one, not even Pete Moss, the owner, dared to take it off the table. The cherry red of the hard plastic matched the decor of the Slab to a tee. Each of the tables was covered with a red and white checked vinyl table cloth, and the chairs, although wooden, had seats covered in a lovely red Naugahyde. This fabric choice extended to the six booths along the side wall and to the upholstery of the four chrome stools that sat in front of the aluminum trimmed, white linoleum counter. The floor was also tiled in a checkerboard pattern, eighteen inch squares of black and white. The counter top and each of the tables were adorned with the requisite ketchup bottles, salt and pepper shakers, small bottles of Tabasco sauce, and sugar shakers. A refrigerated pie case leaned against the far wall. There were also menus. We didn't need the menus.

  "What are you doing here?" asked Nancy as I walked up to the table, having made my way through a raft of customers, all eating
breakfast as though it were their last meal. "You're off today."

  "Breakfast," I said. "Meg had some business, so I came into town for breakfast." I pulled out a chair and sat down. "How are things in the constabulary?"

  "No problem," said Dave with an affable grin. "We have everything under control."

  Nancy Parsky and Dave Vance were the other two-thirds of the SGPD. Dave had been moved from part-time to full-time status after it had become apparent that Nancy and I couldn't police the town by ourselves—especially from the beginning of October through Christmas. Corporal Dave did most of the office work, answering phones, typing reports, and such. He and I both dressed in civvies although mine tended toward work khakis and L.L. Bean flannel shirts during the cold seasons. Dave was more J. Crew and worked the chinos and light blue button-down motif, although when the weather turned cold, he favored Icelandic sweaters. Dave was in his mid-thirties, blond, and in reasonably good shape. He'd had a schoolboy crush on Nancy Parsky, off and on, for the past seven or eight years. Nancy, on occasion, returned the favor.

  "What's the special, Noylene?" I asked, as she poured my coffee. We didn't order coffee. Coffee was a given.

  "Meatloaf," said Noylene, then held up her hand to stop the next words out of my mouth. "Yes," she said slowly through clenched teeth. "Meatloaf. Don't ask me why. I don't know. Meatloaf and eggs with a side of cheese grits. It's some bee got under Pete's bonnet. He read about this restaurant in Southern Living. Savannah or somewhere. They serve meatloaf and eggs for breakfast."

  "Anybody ordering it?" I asked.

  "Everybody's ordering it!" said Noylene, then lowered her voice to a whisper. "These tourists are just plain crazy. You give them weird and they lap it up like it was caviar on a cat plate."