The Last Suppers (27 page)

“The heck you say,” said a male voice.

I squinted. The sky had become bright without my
witnessing it, and my clothes were chilled and soaked. “What day is it? What’s the time?” I croaked.

The man and woman looked at each other, and I had a sudden memory of my parents above my crib. But these were no relatives of mine; these were Sheriff’s Department Investigator Horace Boyd and Victim Advocate Helen Keene. And I had something to tell them, but the agonizing vice cramping my spine made it impossible to think. I struggled to move my legs, to see if my body worked. Summoning an enormous effort, I pulled my knees into my chest, then pushed up into a crouch. My spine shuddered in anguish.

“Don’t move if it hurts,” Boyd’s voice ordered. “I am getting up,” I announced, and shakily came to my knees.

“Please wait,” Helen said softly, too late.

In the distance I could hear the whine of a siren. The ambulance. A stretcher. Arch and Julian having a fit. I cried out as I stood up on the icy ground. My knees wobbled and the ground seemed to be coming back up to my nose.

“Oh, Jesus,” muttered Boyd as he grabbed me on the shoulder and under the arm, then hauled me back to an upright, balanced position.

“I was attacked,” I said weakly. “Someone hit me. The paper.” I looked around on the ground. Snow and mud wavered in and out of focus. “Where is it?”

But it was gone. Boyd and Helen thought I was hallucinating and wanted
The Denver Post.
I asked them to help me walk. They said I should wait, see if anything was broken. I told them nothing was broken. I needed to move; lying motionless could worsen frostbite. With Boyd and Helen reluctantly walking beside me as I moved unsteadily across the field, we unraveled the story. My call had come in and been triaged. When someone in Dispatch had realized that the robbery location was the same as murder victim Olson’s, Boyd had been informed. When Boyd wanted to know who had placed the call and Dispatch gave them my name, he had cursed and phoned Helen. I pointed to
the dug-up area with the cross and told them about the missing sacramental vessels: chalice, paten, and ambry.

“Hombre?” said Boyd. “Like a Spanish buddy?”

“Like a small tabernacle to hold the consecrated bread. It’s often kept in a built-in area behind a church altar.”

“Glad we got that cleared up.”

I told Boyd the local rumor that had Olson involved with Agatha Preston, then handed him Agatha’s letters that I’d taken from Olson’s silver box. Boyd shook his head, but took the packet. I also mentioned the afghan that resembled the one left for me. I ruefully added that whoever had struck me had stolen a sheet from one of the exam essays, an exam that was currently being read by the Board of Theological Examiners.

“Of course, I don’t have the page,” I said as we stopped to rest next to a leafless cottonwood. I took a shallow breath and shivered. When I tried to breathe deeply, a thick line of horizontal discomfort streaked across my back. “But I remember the number. 1492. Like Columbus. Only this was 92-492.”

Emerging from the trees at the edge of the field were emergency medical folk with blankets and a stretcher. I willed them to go back, as if I were rewinding a movie. But they kept coming, spurred on by Boyd’s impatient gestures. Helen was hovering solicitously. I felt utterly defeated. I had come so close, and now—

I turned back toward the creek. With acute disappointment I saw Julian’s Range Rover parked past some trees on the other side of the creek. It might as well have been in Africa. Although the pain was excruciating, I wanted nothing more than to drive home. Besides, I remembered, I had a luncheon to cater today for the prayer group. Better not mention that to Boyd and Helen. I could hear Boyd now:
Forget the damn luncheon!
Sure, and never have the churchwomen ask me to do another affair for them. Or worse, have them spread it all around town what an unreliable caterer I was. Besides, I wanted to find out what or whom they were praying for.

“Have you found out anything about the missing
pearls?” I asked. “In my mind’s eye, I sort of saw them, imagined them being hidden—”

Boyd had started on a new match. At least he hadn’t gone back to the cigarettes. His wide face turned grim. “Goldy, you’re stressed. You’re seeing things.”

“I’ll bet those pearls have something to do with Olson’s murder.” My voice quivered. “Something else. I could hear Tom’s voice in my head.”

“Hearing things, too,” concluded Boyd. He motioned two EMTs over. I felt my control falter.

“Look,” said Boyd. He leaned in close to me. To give him credit, he tried to make his voice sympathetic. “I don’t want to take somebody off the search for Schulz. We can’t spare an officer to keep an eye on you. Okay? So after these guys take you to get checked out, I want you to stay home with that friend of yours. That big, good-looking gal. Marla. In fact, I’m telling her to come stay over at your place, and I’m going to make the call from here.”

I choked out Marla’s number. Tears spilled uncontrollably from my eyes as the EMTs gently helped me onto the stretcher. Helen Keene held my hand the whole time, through the woods thickly aromatic with the smell of melting snow on fallen aspen leaves, around Olson’s house, which bounced in and out of view, to the driveway where Tom Schulz’s dark Chrysler was still sitting, glazed with ice.

My back felt broken, although I knew it was only badly bruised. It’s impossible to get comfortable on a stretcher. When the two uniformed fellows worked to maneuver it up the ambulance ramp, Helen disappeared momentarily. She came back with another victim-assistance quilt draped over her arm. This was a pink and green strip quilt, like something you’d see in a preppy nursery. But I meekly allowed her to tuck it around me, then asked her to get hold of Julian and Arch, to tell them I would be home soon. A negative look passed between the two medical technicians. I ignored it.

Since there was no hospital in Aspen Meadow, the daytime emergency procedure when there was no blood, no fever, and full consciousness was to take the victim to a
doctor in the mountain area who then made a medical assessment of the situation. The paramedics took me to the office of Dr. Hodges, or Stodgy Hodge, as we called him in town. In his late seventies, quick-moving, stoop-shouldered Hodges was the best diagnostician I had ever known. Unlike most of his generation, Hodges had made the transition to computers, on-line hookups, and other modern equipment with ease. But he also knew how to make his patients laugh, frequently the best medicine. When I had first visited him fourteen years ago, I had told him I was trying to get pregnant. Without missing a beat, he replied, “My dear, I am too old for you.”

Now an unsmiling Stodgy Hodge was waiting at his office in response to Mountain Rescue’s call; he dutifully opened the doors wide so the stretcher could be wheeled in. After gently poking around and trying to assess whether my kidneys had been damaged—they had not—Dr. Hodges concluded from the welt on my back that I’d been hit hard by a long weapon. Or, as he put it as he gave me the full benefit of his rheumy gaze above his smudged half-glasses, “Somebody tried to hit a home run using your body as the ball, but it was a bunt.”

Could I walk, he wanted to know. I could, I said, with more confidence than my achy body warranted. He squinted dubiously, then ordered rest at home until I felt better. No exertion. I smiled without assent as he nipped away to call in a prescription for pain pills. Helen Keene used the other line to call my house, where she got Marla, who had just arrived and would be more than willing to come get me. I checked my watch: 7:30. Monday morning. Tom Schulz had been gone less than forty-eight hours. It seemed like decades since I’d left my house to snoop at Olson’s. If I moved very slowly, and had Marla’s help, I could do the prayer group luncheon. Correction: I
would
do the prayer group luncheon.

What I could not tell Stodgy Hodge or Boyd or even Helen Keene was that I also had no intention of taking it easy until the Sheriff’s Department found Tom Schulz.

When I had somehow dressed myself and shuffled back
out in the waiting room to sit by Helen Keene, it occurred to me that Roger Bampton might also be one of Hodges’s patients. When the doctor returned bearing a sample of pain medication for me to take when I got home, I decided to find out.

“A neighbor of mine has mylocytic leukemia,” I said. Talking was still a challenge. I tried to dispel shakiness from my voice. Helen Keene patted my arm. “What exactly does that mean?”

Stodgy Hodge paused and removed the half-glasses. He looked disapprovingly at the fingerprints on the lenses. “It means your neighbor is a goner.”

“Yes, but …” I shifted in the hard chair, trying unsuccessfully to get comfortable, “If you had a case like that, how would it present? I mean, what would make you know that was the problem?”

The doctor scratched his impeccably shaven chin and replaced the glasses without polishing them. “Fellow came in here once, he was like death warmed over. Looked haggard, and his teeth hurt. He’d had a temperature for three days. I ordered a complete blood workup. It came back with a white cell count of eighty-seven thousand, and lots of abnormal mylocytes. Blood cells,” he added helpfully.

“So you concluded he had this kind of leukemia.”

“Yes, but wait.” He held up a gnarled hand. “I put him in the hospital that day. Turned out he had a rectal abscess. That’s what was causing the temperature. It’s also a major complication of mylocytic leukemia.”

I held my breath and let it out. “So what happened?”

The stooped shoulders shrugged. “He began chemotherapy in the hospital. But the disease is ninety-nine percent fatal.” He sighed. “I hope your neighbor has a will.”

“Did your other patient die?”

Dr. Hodges’s grim expression altered. “Actually, that was the strangest case I’ve seen in four decades of practicing medicine. Ten days later, the fellow was feeling better. They ran more blood tests. His white count was normal. Under twelve thousand.”

“Oh, wait,” I said, aware that Helen’s eyes were on
me. Surely, she was wondering, at a time like this, with my fiancé missing and my body bruised from a callous attack, I shouldn’t be worrying about my neighbor’s health? “I did hear about this. Roger Bampton, from the church, right?”

“You heard about it? I shouldn’t be surprised, the way news travels in this town.”

“Yes. I guess I just didn’t believe it.” The office phone rang, and my next words came out in a rush. “Do you think it was a miracle?”

Stodgy Hodge’s voice rustled in a dry laugh. He let the answering machine pick up the call. “I’ve seen good people die, and I’ve seen bad people live,” he said when I looked at him expectantly. “Let’s say it was … unexplained. We’ll see how long he lives without a recurrence.”

“But then, how would you know when something is a miracle?” I persisted. “Some of the folks down at the church say Roger got better because Father Olson laid hands on him.”

He shrugged. “Maybe that’s true.”

“Doctor Hodges!” I cried. “Either it is or it isn’t!”

Outside, a vehicle roared up to the curb and then stopped. A car door slammed.

“Please,” I begged, knowing my time was short, “you saw Roger Bampton. What do you think?”

He chuckled. “I know he was having copies of his blood tests framed for Father Olson.” When I glowered at him, he went on, “I also know our church isn’t the most harmonious place in the universe. So why would God choose us to do something like this? The folks at St. Luke’s can’t even agree on the size of pipes to use in plumbing renovation. How would they explain a miraculous healing?”

My eyes still questioned him.

Stodgy Hodge, the best diagnostician I had ever known, shrugged. He said, “All right, I guess I believe the healing of Roger Bampton was a miracle.”

“Goldy!” shrieked Marla as she banged through the office door. She was wearing an enormous white raincoat over a brilliant yellow sweatsuit. She looked like a large,
angry egg. Her unbrushed brown hair flew out in unkempt tendrils. She stopped and glanced around at Dr. Hodges, Helen Keene, and then gave me and my wet clothes the once-over. “Went for an early morning swim, did we?”

“Don’t start.”

“No wait,” she said, winking at Helen Keene and throwing her frizzy mass of hair back for effect, “the churchwomen wanted fish, so you thought you’d throw a line into Aspen Meadow Lake. The things caterers will do for food! But then you fell in—”

“Marla—”

“Don’t bawl out the person who’s come to nurse you.” She put her chunky arm around me, helped me up, and started to guide me out the door. “I even have a covered cup of fresh cappuccino in the Jag for you.”

Helen Keene bid me good-bye, and Stodgy Hodge placed the sample bottle of pain meds in my palm. Both knew I was in good hands.

“The police tell me you’ve been terribly, terribly naughty,” Marla chided once she had me settled into the front seat of the Jaguar. I uncapped the hot, creamy coffee she had brought and tried to sip the froth as she rocketed the sedan over the icy streets. “What were you looking for at Olson’s that was so important? Copies of S
and M Fantasies!”

“I was looking for those doggone pearls that were going to be used for the women’s jewelry bazaar. You said he hid things in strange places, so I just thought—”

“Oh, excuse me, I said he hid things in strange places? So this is
my
fault? You think the motive was robbery. That’s the theory you risked getting
killed
for? If stealing was the motive and it failed, don’t you think the police would have found the pearls when they first went out there, when Olson died?”

I didn’t answer. We pulled up by the curb in front of my house.

“What’s that supposed to be?” demanded Marla.

I followed her pointing finger. Yet another crocheted
afghan swung gently from a rafter on my front porch. This one was green and had a white cross at the center. “Oh, Lord, why—”

But my exclamation was interrupted. Julian and Arch vaulted out the front door. Their faces, full of curiosity and worry, pinched my heart. These last few days had been so hard on them.