Death Climbs a Tree (24 page)

“What did she do?”

“I don't know what she would have done, but that night someone brought us a big sack of groceries. Rang the bell and left it on the porch. When she went to the door, there it was. Then she cried.”

“Poor Mrs. Vint. Bad enough to have to throw yourself on your parents after you've lived on your own,” Joan said.

“Good that she has parents who could take her. Without my job, I'm on my own.” Charlotte's voice went dead. “Before I got it, I was unemployed for a long time, and it was rough. The only thing I had of any value was my violin. More than once, I came close to selling it. But it belonged to my father, and music is the one thing that sustains me through terrible times. It wouldn't have bought as much food as it gives my soul.”

“Are you afraid of losing your job?”

“You don't know what it's like! Jim's right. They'd let me go before him.”

“I had to leave a job once.” Joan's bitterness at the man she'd successfully fended off with a letter opener had long since faded, but she remembered well enough how desperate she had felt. “I had to leave town. Nobody in that town would have believed me over him. Anyway, I didn't have the courage to find out.”

“What did you do?”

“That's when I came to Oliver. And this orchestra. They needed a librarian, so there I was.”

“You couldn't survive on that!”

“No, I found something else, too. Old friends helped.” And eventually I found Fred, but I can't tell her that.

“My only friend just got herself murdered.”

Joan expected more tears, but Birdie kept the waterworks dammed up this time. Or maybe she'd cried herself out.

“She wasn't your only friend, Birdie. I care what happens to you, and I'll do all I can if you need help.”

“Thank you. I appreciate it, but it's not the same as Sylvia.”

“I know. Are you sure you'll be all right tomorrow?”

“No, but I'll try.”

“Good.” Now Joan could see the school janitor at the edge of the stage. “We'd better leave. We're about to get thrown out of here.”

“It's all right. I'm okay.” Birdie closed her case and tucked the music into the zippered pocket. “Let's go.”

24

Fred shook his head wearily. “You ever get the feeling that all we're ever going to come up with is negative?”

“Don't be so hard on yourself,” Captain Altschuler growled. He was sitting in Fred's office with the door closed. “Maybe Mayor Deckard can produce results out of thin air…”

“But the rest of us can't. I know.”

“Deckard can make it sound good with the public. Buy us some time.”

“Wish I thought that would get us anywhere.” Fred sighed.

“Look on the bright side. Last time it got us a meth lab.”

“Those guys will stay in business. They'll just move the business. We're keeping our eyes on a man we think might be one of their customers and hoping he'll lead us to them someday. Deckard got us a lead to that lab, but not to the killer. Who's killed again since then.” He ran his hand through his thinning hair. “What really gets me is having an ID that's totally useless.”

“Not totally,” Altschuler said. “When you find him, you'll know you have the right man.”

“Who'll kill who knows how many more before then. I can't begin to fathom dealing with a serial killer in a place this size. We don't have the manpower for it, for one thing.”

“As close together as Purcell and Vint were, you're jumping the gun to talk about serial killers. It's more likely to have something to do with the woods.”

“I hope so,” Fred said, wishing Andrew weren't still sitting in a tree in those very woods. “Feels more like someone warning people off his particular patch, anyway. If old Mrs. Nikirk showed up with her dog and a slingshot, now, it would make sense. She grew up in those woods.”

“But she's not Ward Utterback, whoever he is these days.”

“No. And she got a kick out of showing us the cave she knew as a child. Not that he might not enjoy showing off.”

“You think?”

Fred shrugged. “The EFF vandals did, though not in person. But nothing we found on that equipment matched the prints on Vint's car and the rocks that hit him and Purcell.”

“A long shot at best.”

“We're lucky to have that much. No witnesses. It's pretty remote—only reason we connected them was that Joan found the Petoskey stone in the woods and then Dr. Henshaw noticed the stone in the car. No reason for Utterback to think we spotted either of them.”

“He has to be thinking he's home free.”

“Maybe these are just his two latest. No way to tell how many he got away with.”

“Now you're back to a serial killer,” Altschuler said.

“Not yet. Not around here, anyway. We don't have any mysterious deaths that fit the pattern.”

“You look at traffic accidents?”

Fred nodded. “And we asked the sheriff and the state police. Nothing suspicious, and no accidental deaths in this area in the past year. As I said before, everything we're coming up with is negative.”

“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 finished. “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.