3 Requiem at Christmas (11 page)

“Selective hearing.
I’ve had it all
my life.
So, out with it.
What do you want to do that
I won’t like?”

“The first one you probably won’t mind. I want to visit a
candy store.”

“Okay, why?”

“I don’t know. I just think I should.”

“Fine.
And the
other?”

“I’m thinking of going back to the scene of the murder. If
the bad guys are worried about me finding something there, maybe there is
something there for me to find. Perhaps near the cabin that burned down.”

“I don’t like it. But I think you have a point. Let’s stock
up with candy and then go look at crime scenes.”

So, he had planned on doing it anyway.

The candy shop was crowded, but with Esteban’s help, Juliet
managed to fight her way to the counter. She asked to speak to the manager, or
whoever handled large orders.
An older man, thin and leathery
but exquisitely polite, came out of a back room to speak to Juliet.

“I’m Albert
Newscombe
. How can I
help you?”

“Mr.
Newscombe
, I’m Juliet Henry.
We are here for the Requiem Mass to be performed at Saint Clair Church?”

“Ah, yes. We are looking forward to it very much. Mr. Peters
has been kind enough to give us tickets.”

Juliet beamed.

“Harrison is just wonderful,” she gushed. “I wanted to send
some gifts to friends who are here for the performance, but don’t want to
duplicate either what Harrison—or maybe his friend, Darby O’Hara—has ordered
for the party. Or what Jeremiah Holtz gave the singers earlier this week. Is
there any way to check these orders so I can choose something different?”

There was no reaction to Holtz’s name, so obviously the
police hadn’t been in to question anyone. That was a little strange. But then
there had been nothing in the newspapers either. Maybe someone was once again
hushing things up, making unpleasant facts disappear.

“Certainly.
I know that Mr. Peters
selected caramel sea-salt and lavender-mint wafers for the reception and Mr.
Holtz….” He went to a computer and began typing. “Mr. Holtz did five boxes of
lemon drops, a one-pound box of mocha truffles, and two one-pound boxes of our
sea-salt wafers.”

“Wonderful. Thank you so much for looking that up.”

“Not a problem. So what can I do for you?”

Juliet looked in the case at the prices and tried not to
gulp. She did need to bring a thank-you gift back to Garret and decided to
start there.
White peach, golden peach,
persimmon rind, white tea, black tea
…. The list seemed endless.

“What do you have that is less sweet?
Perhaps
just dark chocolate?”

“We have some dark chocolate wafers that have been stenciled
with various designs. They are part of our
beaux
arts
collection. Our chipotle chocolate is delicious and an excellent
choice for someone with more sophisticated tastes.”

“Oh!” Juliet said in surprise. “You have cats! Can you do a
small gift box—maybe one of those pretty
gold
ones—with
a variety of the cat wafers? Those will be perfect for Garret,” she said,
smiling at Esteban who had been silent. “I need a thank-you gift for him.”

“Mrs. Johnson will be happy to help you,” Mr.
Newscombe
said and then turned toward his office. He was
abandoning the heathen who was choosing chocolate by design and not by flavor.

“Thank you.” Juliet was relieved that the manager had
departed. She wouldn’t have to place any gigantic orders to make her story
believable. She smiled at Mrs. Johnson and began pointing out chocolate cats.

*
 
*
 
*

Juliet chose to let Esteban drive to the bypass. She wanted
to be able to pay attention to their surroundings and not have to concentrate
on the weather and the car.

They came at the GPS’s proposed workaround from the opposite
direction and Juliet found it a little disconcerting. It looked quite different—for
one thing, the cabin was gone. Only blackened snow and part of the foundation remained.
It was also noon and not blowing a gale. There were boot prints everywhere,
crisscrossing and overlaying each other until making sense of the tracks was
impossible.

Esteban drove slowly and Juliet studied everything with
what, on another day, would be agonizing slowness. Finally she had him stop and
they got out of the car. The view didn’t improve.

The cold was tightening its grip on the mountain, squeezing
the feeling out of them, as though it wanted what had happened to stay buried
in its drifts and for all the humans to leave it alone.

A cutthroat wind straight from the pole picked up the loose
snow and made it dance over the edge of the ravine. Juliet stayed away from the
brink of the cliff where the car had spun out, but Esteban bravely peered over
the side at the vertiginous view after he had wiggled out to the drop, one
cautious, sliding step at a time. It wasn’t the Grand Canyon down there but it
was far enough and
rough
enough to make him shudder.

“
Madre
de Dios
.
Not for any amount of money would I climb down there,” he
muttered. “If anything is down that ravine, it can stay there.”

Juliet was frustrated and tired of the alternating shivering
and brow mopping
she
had done all day. There was
nothing to learn here. Either the thing everyone was after had been destroyed
or was lost, or it was back at the inn or, perhaps, the clan tent. Maybe she
could find someone who liked to gossip.

“Do you want to talk to Ranger
Nyland
for any reason?” she asked.
“Supposing that he’s even here.”

“No, and I have no wish to linger either. It’s a cursed
climate. Even the trees look unhappy. Why would anyone come here?”

“Lumber.
And that was a long time
ago.” Juliet thought that the trees were unhappy because they had been damaged
by fire when the car and cabin burned, but she didn’t argue the point. They
were not in the heart of some winter wonderland. “I’ve got to admit that I feel
like we’ve scraped the bottom of the barrel this time. I just don’t know why
anyone—especially after the police—came out here. What the heck did they hope
to find? And what the devil did they think I would find? It would have to be
something massive—and I just can’t think what that would be.
A
heisted armored car carrying the gold of Fort Knox?
A
downed airplane full of stolen securities?”

The wind gusted, flinging ice in her face, and Juliet turned
back for the car.

“You’re right. Let’s go. I’ve had enough of the great
outdoors. It’s time for a hot bath and a brandy—and maybe not in that order. If
there’s something here, the North Wind can have it.”

Juliet was not an expert on the Requiem Mass, but she had
listened enough to Harrison and Darby that she knew that it was a Mass to honor
the dead that dated back to the second century, though its current form as a
mainly orchestral piece with liturgical text set to music was only a few
hundred years old and frowned on by certain churches.

Black vestments were worn by all the singers and the
orchestra since it was the color of deepest mourning and reflected what would
have been worn by the officiating priest or bishop had this been a true
Catholic
exequial
Mass. Nor would the body be present,
of course, which would have been the case centuries ago. That seemed best to
Juliet who couldn’t get enthused about singing madrigals to a corpse.

The crowd was swathed in velvet and satin—little of it in
black. A few were men in fine, muted wool from England and finer, more muted
wool from Italy. The jewels in the crowd were mostly fake but sparkled
enchantingly in the candlelight. Banners had been added to the beams overhead
and there was so much greenery on the overburdened altar that if it ever lost
its moorings and toppled onto the choir, the singers would be smothered before
anyone could dig them out.

The artists from Bartholomew’s Woods sat together, except
for Darby who was up front. Elizabeth and Raphael were seated at the ends of
the pews near the back so their wheelchairs didn’t block the aisle. Asher was
next to his mother with Carrie Simmons, Hans and Rose in the same pew. Juliet
was next to Raphael with Esteban on her other side. Mickey, Robbie, Jerry, and
Thomas finished out their pew. Except for Rose, the penguin among peacocks, they
were not wearing black—probably didn’t own anything in such a somber color, but
they were all—including Carrie—dressed with dignity, though her brown and peach
ruffled dress looked a little like peaches floating in a bouillabaisse.

The biggest surprise was Mickey, since with him it was
always couture potluck, but he had managed to put himself together for the
event he thought of as a musical funeral. This meant slacks, shoes, and a navy
turtleneck sweater, and a sport coat with suede elbow patches instead of a message
t-shirt.

Rose came out of her seat to hug Juliet. Once standing, she looked
a bit like she was wearing a tent that had pulled up its stakes and rolled
through some moss, but it was a chic cashmere tent in basic black and anyway
she was short enough for her strange green fringed hem to go unnoticed.

Esteban was gorgeous in a coat of some strange woolen
brocade that looked almost baroque, though he was too scarred and tanned to
pass as a nobleman. Raphael was the noble lord, Esteban the battle-scarred
knight.

Harrison, dressed entirely in unrelieved black, approached
the podium and made a brief announcement about Holtz’s death. He handled the
matter with dispatch and dignity. Juliet looked to the brother sitting in the
front row by Darby. He was heavier than the dead man, but the resemblance was
there and she realized that she had seen him in the lobby of the hotel amongst
the other
Buchanans
and also in the restaurant the
night before.

An organ thundered to life, and incense filled the air
though there were discreet fans to keep the smoke away from the singers and
musicians. The state’s smoking law obviously didn’t apply to holy smoke let
loose in churches.

The crowd hushed. The tenor stepped forward. He looked
confident. No one would guess that he had assumed the lead only days before.

“
Requiem
aeternam
dona
eis
,
Domine
,
” he sang. Grant them eternal rest, O
Lord.

His was not a
stand-and-deliver kind of voice, but a nuanced and gentle performance. Juliet
wondered how much better the dead man could have been for Harrison to have
chosen him over this boy and, for the first time, felt a moment of mourning for
the man who died that was specific to Jeremiah Holtz—his gifts and his life—and
not just a John Donne
no man is an island
and
every death diminishes me
kind of
a thing.

Juliet tried for
more pious thoughts but found
herself
scanning the
audience, wondering if the killer was there.
And if so, why?
Did he expect to pass off his prize to someone—assuming he had found it? This
wouldn’t be a bad place for an exchange.

There was a block
of
Buchanans
, looking for once very sober even in
their bright kilts. Ranger
Nyland
was in the audience
along with Captain Denver. Both men were in suits, though not from England or
Italy. The detective was seated right behind Christopher Columbus and two of
his satellites, one of whom had been near the concierge’s desk when she was
asking directions to the trail, and the other the man who had taken a long hard
look at her and Esteban the night before.

Orbiter three was
probably off guarding the car, making sure no one with a
sgian
dubh
or a nuclear device slipped inside
it during the performance. She doubted very much that Columbus had killed
anyone himself, but it was not beyond the realm of the possible that one of the
satellites had gotten overzealous and ended up killing the tenor before he
revealed the whereabouts of … whatever.

And it was for a
something
. For a physical
thing
, she was sure, not an intangible
reason
or
emotion
or esoteric knowledge. Not for vengeance or love gone wrong
or any of the messy passions that could lead to murder—though of course
sticking a knife in someone had to lead to all kinds of feelings. Someone in
the audience had to be feeling how macabre it all was, to be at this funeral,
even if it wasn’t for the man they had killed. If they were religious, they
might even
be fearing
for their soul.

“…
ad
te
omnis
caro
veniet
.
” To
You
all flesh
shall come.

The brother,
Joshua, was weeping, his head bent, a handkerchief to his eyes. Columbus and
his satellites watched him. Juliet could only see them in partial profile, but
they didn’t look overcome with compassion for his loss and she was sure Denver
was also making note of this.

“
Kyrie,
eleison
;
Christe
,
eleison
; Kyrie,
eleison
.
”
God, have mercy; Christ, have mercy; God, have mercy.

Juliet wasn’t
alone in her scrutiny of the assembled. Esteban and Raphael were also less
attentive to the singers than the rest of the audience who were beginning to
tear up at the soprano’s
Pie
Jesu
.