The Last Suppers (25 page)

There was that
B.
again.
B.
for what?
B. - Read - Judas.
In the dinner context, it looked less like someone’s name. Before? British? Bring? Big? I had no idea.

In any event, the Lemon Butter Wafers called for ingredients I had on hand, so I softened unsalted butter and wielded my zester over plump lemons. A fine mist of fragrant oil from the golden citrus fruit sprayed my face. I closed the door to the kitchen so as not to wake Arch and Julian, then pulverized almonds in a small food processor and carefully mixed the ingredients together. I did a trial batch: The first hot cookie was buttery, crunchy, and as lemony as a meringue pie. It melted in my mouth. I set the rest of the batter in to chill and mentally thanked Tom for his culinary expertise. The churchwomen would think their dessert was sent from heaven.

It was two o’clock. I told myself I wasn’t going to sleep; I was just going to rest on the living room couch. Within a moment of stretching out on the uncomfortable cushions, I fell into slumber like tumbling on ice: hard. When I awoke before dawn, my mind was clogged with an undispersed nightmare, this one of an onrushing pig. Or was it a boar?

Do not cast your pearls before swine …

Good Lord. I vaulted up painfully: five o’clock. At this time of year, that meant over an hour until daylight. I rubbed the crick in my neck and stared out the picture window. Beyond the porch, the snow had stopped and the moon shone brightly over a predawn landscape of fluorescent gray. I slipped to the hall closet and donned a ski jacket and snow boots.

I had to go back out to Olson’s.

I
fed Scout, who mewed happily when he saw he was having an early breakfast, and left a note for the boys:
Gone to Father Olson’s house; back by eight.
No doubt when I got there the police ribbon would still be up. Whether this would be good or bad was an unknown. After all, I’d already crossed the one at the church office. I decided it would be good if no policeman was stationed at Olson’s to make sure the line wasn’t crossed; bad if someone was and I was rebuffed. I’d say to Boyd, I was just looking for pearls. He’d say, Oh, yeah? Try a jewelry store. I shooed away this thought and quickly filled my espresso machine with water and coffee. While it was heating I rummaged through the hall closet and found one of the flashlights Arch and I had taken to the conference center. When the dark liquid twined into my insulated mug, the clock said 5:15.

If I could just find the pearls, perhaps in some biblically related hiding place, then maybe with them, I’d find whatever it was the killer was looking for. I remembered what I’d said to Boyd:
Olson was such a packrat, you’d have to know exactly where to look to find something.
Now I had an idea of where to look. The church office had been trashed, perhaps when someone was searching for the pearls, or something unknown.
Figure the motive and you’ve got the perp,
Tom was fond of saying. I sipped the rich espresso and decided my best bet would be to drive around the way that the intruder had, via the dirt road that
led to Upper Cottonwood Creek and the back entrance to Olson’s house. Four-wheel-drive was a must, especially since I’d had such trouble starting my own van yesterday. I took the keys to Julian’s vehicle, a Range Rover inherited from our wealthy former employers.
Sorry to take your car,
I hastily penned, I
promise I’ll be back!
And with that I picked up my coffee and quietly slipped out.

Aspen Meadow in the so-called spring is about as inviting as a snow cave, especially when daily television images of azaleas and cherry blossoms remind us of April in the rest of the world. The Rover’s steering wheel was frigid under my grasp; the engine barked its reluctance. I had always harbored a vague notion that T. S. Eliot lived in the high country when he wrote that April was the cruelest month. This dark morning certainly did not promise kind weather.

The Rover growled down my street in first gear, past the Habitat for Humanity construction site. Above the foundation, ice-covered two-by-fours loomed ominously in the bright moonlight. No red flag was visible; I wondered if construction had indeed been blocked. My attention was immediately drawn back by the Rover tires skidding through a stop sign; treacherous black ice glazed the pavement. Once I had edged out on Main Street, the Rover’s headlights picked out stalactite icicles along the storefronts. The bank thermometer said 18°. Instead of allowing the morning’s unbearable chill to penetrate my bones, I imagined the cocoon of warmth Tom’s body had made nestling around mine. I wondered what the churchwomen would have said about the fact that Tom Schulz and I had been sleeping together in the five months since we’d become engaged. Lucky for me, I didn’t give a hoot about ecclesiastical opinion.

A fox scurried under a split rail fence just before the turnoff for Olson’s place. Half a mile later, I turned left on the dirt road that led across a bridge, then bumped over ruts in a wide arc to the other side of Cottonwood Creek. I parked between ponderosa pines as tall and ominous as frozen giants. When I jumped from the Rover, my breath
made clouds of vapor in the moonlight. I fumbled with the flashlight and cursed the cold. When I finally could see where I was going, I headed for the creek bank. My boots crunched over the new snow. Every now and then, they cracked through mud puddles thinly covered with ice.

I was going into Olson’s house when no one was there, I told myself firmly, because Boyd had ordered me to let the police do their job. In other words, I wasn’t supposed to call them in every time I had a hunch. Besides, they had already gone through Olson’s house. What I was looking for, and it really was a wild hunch, were the missing chokers, with
something,
in an unusual hiding place, a place where a squirrelly person who laughingly gave the head of the raffle committee gold chains gift-wrapped in a frankincense box would stow them. There were references to pearls in the Bible: Don’t throw them before swine, a merchant who finds a pearl of great value and sells all he has to obtain it. There were probably others, I just couldn’t think of what they were. I had already looked up Judas: He’d only dealt in silver coins.

I tried to focus on what Tom would think about this crazy excursion. Overhead, the wind swished through the snow-covered trees and showered my head with fine, cold flakes. I
always look for what’s out of place, what’s there that shouldn’t be there, what’s not there as well as what’s there,
I could hear Tom say. I stepped over a snow-covered log and tried to visualize Olson’s home as I’d seen it during the vestry dinner: the Stickley couch, wood floors, worn Kirman rugs, shelves of books, religious artifacts and knick-knacks, the plants, the teapots, and trays. That was the problem with a packrat. In all the jumble, it was hard to remember exactly what stuff Olson had possessed.

Well, you’re going to have to.
Schulz’s voice invaded my thoughts with his patented chuckle. I felt a great wave of affection for him then, and did not know if the sigh I heard was my own or the wind moving through the cottonwood trees at the edge of the creek. I stopped by the precipitous bank and saw a fragmented reflection of the moon in the rushing water seven feet below. This was where Tom had
dragged himself, or been forced, across. I firmly placed my right boot at an angle and made a series of careful steps down the muddy, snow-covered bank.

My feet squished through the mud as I focused my concentration on seeing Olson’s rooms: shelves of Bibles in several translations, biblical commentaries, leatherbound biographies of the saints, oversized art books featuring Chartres, Canterbury, and other cathedrals. In the realm of religious artifacts, I pictured the rubbings on Olson’s living and dining room walls. Medieval, I thought, from my college course in art history. And then on a shelf were his own beaten silver paten and chalice, for serving the sacrament, and his portable ambry, a hammered bronze box rimmed in brass for storing the consecrated host. A portable wooden case in his home office held his sterling flatware service. When I’d stored the overflow of covered pans in Olson’s office before the vestry arrived, I’d noticed a mind-boggling number of disheveled piles of papers on the desk and on the floor: the true mark of the Highly Disorganized. Without a secretary at home to keep his act together, Ted Olson had undoubtedly had a vague desire to sort through his correspondence one of these days. But when I’d asked him where to put the pan of pork dumplings, he’d swept the dish out of my hands and left it teetering on what looked like a stable pile. I’d realized Olson had no intention of ever sorting through the paper disaster, much less throwing anything away. After the dinner, he’d repacked the silver flatware himself and left it on an unused bed in the bedroom-turned-office.

I turned my attention back to the creek. The stones protruding from above the roiling surface of the freezing water looked wet and slippery. This was where Schulz had dropped the box containing my wedding ring.
Don’t think about it.
I hopped lightly across the rocks. Breathing hard, I clutched the flashlight and scrambled up the other side of the creek. When I arrived at the snow-whitened meadow below Olson’s house, it looked as if the sky was beginning to brighten. Or maybe it was just wishful thinking on my part after the deep shadows of the creek bed.

My eyes involuntarily traveled to the place where the police had found Father Olson’s body. Instead of being smooth like the rest of the meadow, that area was indented. Odd. I breathed deeply and walked over to the spot.

My flashlight played over the shallow rectangle. Someone had carefully spaded up and removed the dirt from the area where Father Olson had lain. The artificially made ditch was covered with snow, and at one edge of the dug-up area, someone had put a crudely made cross of lashed-together twigs. This couldn’t be part of police procedure, I reasoned. They might analyze the soil where someone fell, but they wouldn’t leave a cross.
You’re going to have to call Boyd and tell him about this.
I could hear Tom Schulz’s voice in my brain as clearly as if he were standing next to me. Boyd wasn’t going to be happy. The fresh snow on top of the rectangular hole left by the Mad Digger indicated that this activity had not taken place in the last few hours. That was good, anyway. The last thing I needed was to be hit over the head by a lunatic wielding a shovel.

I swept the flashlight beam in a circle around the spaded area and saw a clear path of small ruts: the outline of footprints leading up to and away from where I stood. Successive sweeps of the light revealed shallower footprint ruts surrounding the spaded area. I guessed them to be from all the police activity here on Saturday afternoon. And shallower still, of course, there would be the footprints of Tom Schulz and the suspect. Didn’t want to think about that, though.

Time to go up to the house and look for pearls. Maybe Olson had a hollowed-out Bible.
Maybe he has a phone that you can use to call Boyd.
I ignored the sour taste in my mouth and, careful to avoid the footprint path, walked to the wooden steps leading up to Olson’s house.

There was no yellow police ribbon around the back, at least that I could see. I climbed the stairs and tried the back-door handle. To my surprise the door was already partway open, and I ended up crashing into one of the kitchen counters. My chest shuddered painfully. I rubbed my hip, which had taken the brunt of the blow. My free
hand moved along the wall and flipped on the kitchen light.