The Last Suppers (20 page)

“What difference does it make?” she hissed. She dashed at her eyes, shook her braids, and sniffed. “Did he say something about the letters or not?” We both looked at Bob, who was pointing to his poached-egg plate and once again giving the waitress elaborate instructions.

“Agatha, just tell me,” I urged, “about Ted. And if your husband knew.”

She stepped to one side of a cuckoo clock and Swiss flag display. Her face was ashen. “Why? Why do you want to know? Ted is gone.”

“Because it’ll help me,” I said desperately, “in case the man I’m supposed to marry is still alive. Can’t you just tell me what was going on, and if your husband was jealous?”

“Ted
loved
me,” she protested. “I’m sure of it. I know he would have waited for me.”

“Waited for you for what?”

“Waited until I could get some more money together and dump Bob.”

“Agatha, did you tell the police this?”

Her face crumpled. “Of course not! I’m the married head of the Episcopal Church Women. Our rector was single. What am I supposed to say: ‘I was in love with our priest, and I’ve been squirreling away cash for the last five years? Please don’t tell my husband?’”

“Where is the money?”

“I’m not going to tell you. It’s no one’s business but mine.” Fury bubbled through her voice.

“You were at Olson’s house when your mother-in-law, Zelda, came out that day about the music, weren’t you?”

She choked and smoothed the skirt of her apricot suit. “Help me,” she pleaded. “Help me find my letters, and I’ll tell you.”

Her plight touched me. “I’ll do what I can.”

She whispered, “When Zelda came out, I was hiding in the bathroom.” Abruptly, she turned and scampered back to the table where her husband sat abusing the waitress.

I zipped the van two blocks down Main Street, turned left at my street, and gunned the engine up the hill. I whizzed past the lot where the skeleton of the Habitat for Humanity house stood abandoned for the weekend. I was sorely tempted to drive the extra five minutes it would take to go
directly to the Aspen Meadow Conference Center, but I decided I needed some tools, just in case. As soon as I was in the house I called for Arch, who came bounding down the staircase.

“Gosh, Mom, what took you so long?” He was still wearing the sweatsuit he’d put on yesterday after my wedding-that-wasn’t. He pushed his glasses up his nose and looked behind me in the direction of the front door. No Tom Schulz. “What’s going on? Was that Investigator Boyd at the door this morning? I saw the police car out my window, but figured you would have told me if they’d found him.” His young face was tight with anxiety. “I thought for sure they’d have figured out some clues by now.”

I gave him a hug. “They did find something, Arch. What they found was the car they think took Tom away from Father Olson’s house.”

“But they didn’t—”

“No. Not yet. Where’s Julian? Did you eat breakfast?”

“He’s at the grocery store. He says someone actually did send over tuna noodle casserole, so he’s out buying ingredients for a Mexican pizza he’s going to make tonight. And yes, I had one of the cinnamon rolls you left.”

“Great. Listen hon, I’m going over to the conference center—”

“But … what if Investigator Boyd calls?” His sherry-colored eyes were large with worry behind his glasses. “Why are you going over there? Are you just going to leave me here to take messages?
Why
are you going to the conference center?”

Kids. From as early as I could remember, Arch had been inquisitive. Not just on philosophical questions such as,
What happens after you die?
Arch wanted answers to everything.
What do they do with your tonsils after they take them out? Why do you have to sell the cookies you make? At Todd’s house they get to keep the oatmeal cookies his mother makes.
And, most troublesome of all,
Why does God let people suffer?
Of course I had figured being a good mom meant you had to explain everything, or try to.
They throw
the tonsils away. We have to sell cookies to live. God is with us in our pain.

“I’m going to check on the broken window,” I lied.

“You hate broken glass. You won’t let me touch it.”

“I’m just going because I’m going, that’s why!”

He squinched his face into an accusatory expression and pointed a finger at me. “It has something to do with the church, doesn’t it? And Father Olson. You’re going to that old conference place because …” He stopped talking to appraise me. “Because you think somebody’s hiding Schulz over there. That’s it, isn’t it? You’re going to try to find him all by yourself. I’m going with you.”

“The heck you are, buster.”

“If you don’t take me with you, I’ll ride over there on my bike. Then maybe the killer can get you and me together.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, then, let me call the police.”

I put in a call to Boyd and identified myself to the person who answered. I asked that the Sheriff’s Department send a car over to the Aspen Meadow Conference Center, that I had a good idea Tom Schulz might be there.

“They were already there,” the policeman said. “But if you have another idea about Schulz, they’ll go back. Twenty-five minutes, tops,” he said and then hung up.

“Okay, Arch, the police are on their way.”

He gave me a baleful look. “I miss Tom, too, you know.”

“All right, all right, we’ll go over and meet the police there. But I have to go find some tools and my Mace, just in case …” I didn’t finish the thought. “Get your coat, hon. It’s cold.”

He raced up the stairs and announced sonorously over his shoulder, “Mom—we’re going to need at
least
two flashlights.”

W
ithin minutes my van was whining up Meadow Drive toward Hymnal House. The air was unusually chilly for an early Colorado afternoon in April, and a bleak sky threatened snow. No law-enforcement types had arrived by the time the van crunched over the gravel of the long conference driveway. Silently I castigated myself for agreeing to bring Arch into a potentially dangerous situation. I wavered about going back. I saw a jogger in my rearview mirror, backed up, and rolled down my window. Yes, the police had been here, he informed me, panting. It was a while ago, maybe half an hour.

I would not go into any of the buildings until they got back, I vowed. I would not put Arch in danger.

I pulled the van up to the split-rail fence by Brio Barn. We jumped out onto ice-slickened grass at the edge of the cliff overlooking Main Street, Cottonwood Creek, and St. Luke’s. Across the creek, the church lot held two cars. But it was empty of people. No signs of activity animated the conference center, either. The two ninety-year-old conference buildings were distinguished by dark cedar shake shingle siding, stone entryways, red roofs, and an air of benign neglect. Red paint curled off the window frames and dead pine needles lay in a haphazard pattern across the window-sills. The place looked like a Victorian summer camp shuttered for the off-season.

Up the hill from us, next to Hymnal House, stood the
old garage. It was a one-story edifice originally built to accommodate three horse-drawn carriages. Now its door yawned widely. Arch and I walked up slowly. The notion of Tom being hidden somewhere in the center was an idea I found alternately brilliant and inane. I glanced around the empty conference garage with its ancient hedge clippers and rusted engines, its workbench cluttered with tools and leaning towers of snow tires. Had Tom been in here? The dusty surfaces revealed no signs of human presence.

“When do you think the Sheriff’s Department will get here?” Arch asked impatiently when we returned to the van and I slid open its side door.

“Any minute,” I assured him with more confidence than I felt.

“Forgot to tell you,” Arch said as he snapped the buttons on the flashlights to test the batteries. “A guy named Canon Montgomery called. Wanted to apologize for his little outburst, he said. Wants to get together with you before the exams. What outburst? What exams?”

So Canon Montgomery had called. If he truly was feeling contrite, maybe I could play off his guilt to get him to discuss the woman waiting for Ted Olson outside the Society of Chad meeting. “You know,” I replied, “the exams for the candidates for the priesthood. They start Tuesday night …”

But Arch wasn’t listening. “What’s all this?” he asked. He shone his flashlights in the corner of the van that held the two thick files and books I had pilfered from Olson’s office.

“Oh, that’s just—” Startled by the approaching whine of a car engine, I stopped talking. For a moment, we were transfixed by the sight of the small foreign automobile barreling down the conference drive.

“Mom,” said Arch, “that looks an awful lot like—”

“Don’t tell me. Quickly, hustle up to Hymnal House. We need to hide.”

I slammed the van’s sliding door. And then we ran. But the steps were snowy, and Arch was unsure of which way to go. We were not fast enough to elude Frances Markasian.
The
Mountain Journal’s
investigative reporter lunged out of her Fiat, hoisted up her voluminous bag, and bounded up the stone steps to Hymnal House in hot pursuit. Gasping for breath, she caught up with us on the old stone patio by the double-door entrance. We stood panting just feet from the window that hung, snaggle-toothed and cardboard-covered on the inside, after Julian’s breakage and Mitchell’s repair.

Holding my side, I noted that the shoes enabling Frances to sprint up the steps were sneakers held together with duct tape. Above these hung her oversized black trench coat that was either a journalistic affectation or the only piece of outerwear available at the same garage sale where she’d unearthed the sneakers. The recession had obviously left its mark on Aspen Meadow. She dropped the big handbag on the flagstones and sent her dark stringy hair shaking wildly as she pounded her chest and coughed hard.

“Gee, Goldy, where’re you going so fast? You’re going to give me a heart attack.” As if to remedy this situation, Frances leaned against a pile of metal deck chairs on the stone patio, leaned down to retrieve the bag, and groped inside. After a moment’s search, she pulled out a pack of cigarettes and book of matches. She shook out a smoke and looked us over. “Whatcha doin’ with the flashlights? Looking for something?”

“We’re going in to find some pans of mine,” I said laconically. “I know by order of the Aspen Meadow Fire Department that there’s no smoking within ten feet of any of the conference buildings.”

“That’s too bad,” said Frances. She lit the cigarette and inhaled greedily. With the hand holding the cigarette, she pulled a curtain of her hair off her face so she could see what she was doing. With the other hand, she brushed snow off one of the deck chairs, a rusted green contraption that looked as if it had been salvaged from the
Titanic.
Blowing smoke out in a thin stream, she dragged the chair over to the short stone wall that edged the deck. Fifty feet below, cars passed along Main Street. Without giving the view even a cursory glance, she plopped on the wet chair
and put her feet up on the wall. “If I don’t sit close to the building for a smoke, then I won’t be able to tell you what I’ve learned about your parish.”

Arch raised one thin straw-brown eyebrow above the frame of his glasses. I cursed inwardly. But the flesh is weak. I brushed snow and ice off two more chairs.

“Is this something Arch can hear?” I demanded as I scraped our chairs across the flagstones to the wall.

“You don’t need to protect me, Mom,” my son said grittily. “I am a week away from being thirteen, in case you forgot.”

Frances waved this off and carefully balanced her cigarette on the edge of the stone wall before again reaching down into her bag. She brought out a Jolt cola, shook it lightly, then popped the top and sucked fizz.

Arch watched in open-mouthed awe. He said, “That is so cool!”

Frances retrieved the smoke and smiled beatifically. “What, the drink or the cigarette?”

“The pop! I’m not allowed to have that stuff.
Triple
the caffeine of regular cola? Are you kidding? Man! You must be cruisin’!”

“Uh, excuse me?” I interjected mildly. “What happened to your Diet Pepsi and Vivarin?”

“That’s only for morning.” She set the can on the stone wall and sucked on the cigarette as if it were an oxygen machine. “This is for afternoon. Listen. Bob Preston is b-r-o-k-e.”

“No kidding?” I looked off the deck at the tops of pine trees that grew along the steep slope. An evenly spaced line of antique cars passed sedately on the road below. The Model-T Club of Denver often brought their point-to-point rallies through our little burg. It was better than the motorcycles. Beyond the chugging cars, the A-shaped roof of St. Luke’s resembled an enormous tent top.

“Flat broke,” added Frances. “Busted. And in hock up to his sanctimonious ears.”

“I thought he had oil well royalties or something.”

She chugged more Jolt and made a satisfied lip-smacking
noise. “That’s why I’m the reporter and you’re the caterer.”

“Cut the chorizo, Frances. What are you saying? And who’d you get this financial information from?”

I tried to stare her down. Unfortunately, her eyes were mostly concealed by that dark stringy hair that looked as if it’d just been released from dreadlocks. “Bob’s well,” Frances intoned with a swipe at the hair, “is dry. Literally and figuratively. But then there are forty thousand dollars worth of pearls floating around somewhere.” She rubbed the cigarette between her fingers and smirked. “Forty thousand clams—or is it oysters?—might not be enough to kill for, but it would give somebody a nice little stake. Now about Agatha and your priest, Olson—” Frances studied my face avidly. Since I didn’t have any dreadlocks to hide behind, I kept my expression resolutely blank. She went on. “—I heard she wanted him a whole lot more than he wanted her.”

“Really? Who told you that? Please, Frances, I need to get into the conference center to look for my stuff. The police were here, and they’ll be back soon.”

“What’s the hurry?” She glanced over her shoulder at the broken window. “What’d you leave over here, pans? They’re probably stolen by now, if anybody would think to look up here.”