The Organist Wore Pumps (The Liturgical Mysteries) (4 page)

The other bidder had taken out his cell phone and was trying to dial a number. It was a forlorn hope. The cell service in this part of the county was almost nonexistent. After a moment, he flipped it shut and put it back in his pocket.

“
Four thousand dollars,” he called. Now the assembly went quiet. Bob was quiet as well.

Bud, still behind the other bidder but well into the crowd, held up five fingers, closed his hand and put up another five. Had I seen right?

“
Ten thousand dollars,” I said.

Chapter 3

It was a good ten miles from the police station in downtown St. Germaine up to my cabin, and, winding mountain roads being what they were, it took about half an hour to get there. I always enjoyed the drive.

My cabin began its life as an actual two-story log cabin and this structure still formed the nucleus of the house, but it had now been relegated to library status rather than sheltering the eleven people who had occupied the twenty by twenty foot home in the 1840s when it was built. The rest of my “cabin,” as it was known in town, was a study in mountain chic and a testament to what you can do with enough money. Set on two hundred mountain acres, it was home to Meg and me as well as Baxter, our oversized, overly-friendly canine companion, and a semi-tame barn owl named Archimedes, who came and went as he liked.

The leaves had long since changed from their summer green to autumn reds and golds, and then dropped, leaving the branches of the hardwoods stark and bare against the graying sky. Evening came on quickly in late November and, here in the Appalachians, by five o’clock dusk was upon us. As I crossed onto the property the lights of my old truck picked up two foxes dancing across the drive. I drove up the steep hill, crested the mountain and headed down into the valley, following a winding road that at every curve afforded distant views, in winter at least, of the house, glowing like a beacon in the smoky eventide. Judging from the amber glow and figuring the number of lights that might be needed to achieve such illumination, I knew Meg would be home. I might even get lucky in the supper department.

Baxter boomed out a few of his basso barks as I drove up, having seen me drive the very same pick-up truck to the house every evening for all of his seven years, but presumably sounding the alarm out of some doggy need to stay in practice in case a real burglar happened to show up. He met me as I got out, tail wagging and with what might be a genuinely happy look on his face. Baxter was getting a little age on him, but he still looked to be in his prime. At ninety pounds, he was a fine watchdog, and his long tricolored coat—mostly black with a white blaze down his muzzle and chest, and patches of rust on his head and legs—marked him as a poster dog for a Burmese Mountain Dog Best-in-Show advertisement. I reached down and scratched his ears for a moment, but he’d already said his hellos and so turned and bounded toward the kitchen door. He stood there, rigidly at attention and waited impatiently for me to let him inside. I knew what was next: I’d open the door, he’d shoot past me almost knocking me over, race across the polished wood floor, put on the brakes, slide under the kitchen table, and silently await whatever scraps happened to fall his way during dinner.

Meg wasn’t in the kitchen, but Baxter didn’t seem to be too disappointed. He could smell something cooking and was happy to lie in wait—he was the crocodile under the table, biding his time in silence, eyes darting to and fro, eyebrows rising and falling, his pink tongue just visible beneath his black nose and muzzle.

I peeked into the pot simmering on the stove. Soup. Creamy tomato and basil soup if I wasn’t mistaken, and I seldom was, as far as soup was concerned. This one was one of Meg’s specialties. I also suspected we’d be having grilled cheese sandwiches. There were several clues that pointed to this deduction including two loaves of homemade bread cooling on the counter, a selection of cheeses on the cutting board and a note saying, “Hayden, we’re having grilled cheese sandwiches. Don’t eat the cheese.” I was, after all, a detective.

Meg and I had been married for two years. Although our anniversary was three days ago by the calendar, we’d decided that we would celebrate each year on Thanksgiving. A moveable feast to be sure, but easy to remember. Yesterday evening (Thanksgiving), Meg and I went over to the Hunters’ Club outside Blowing Rock, the restaurant where I first asked Meg to marry me. Of course, she said “no,” and continued to say “no” for a few years after that, but we still considered the Hunters’ Club to be our own romantic corner. That it was open on Thanksgiving was a bonus. That Meg’s mother, Ruby, had declined our invitation to join us was like double-coupon day at the Piggly Wiggly. We weren’t even required to order turkey. Tradition now dictated that our Thanksgiving dinner include quail, broiled new potatoes, apple-walnut salad, and whatever else looked great on the menu. Dessert and coffee were followed by the presentation of the gifts. This year, I’d gotten Meg a necklace set with garnets, garnets being the second anniversary stone of choice. Meg had gone with tradition as well and chosen cotton for her gift—Turkish cotton, in the form of a monogrammed bathrobe. Nice.

“
I’m in the living room. Don’t eat the cheese.”

“
I read the note,” I called. “Anyway, Baxter’s guarding it.”

“
The soup won’t be ready for about half an hour. Bring me a glass of wine, will you?”

“
It would be my pleasure.”

I found an opened bottle of Shiraz on the counter with a stopper protecting the six inches of wine that remained. I looked at the label—another one of Bud’s recommendations—and recognized it from our last foray to our favorite wine shop in Asheville. I poured Meg a glass and found a bottle of Buffalo Bill’s Pumpkin Ale in the fridge. It was Thanksgiving weekend after all.

Meg was relaxing on the sofa with her laptop. A fire was blazing in the hearth and I immediately recognized Mozart coming from the speakers of the stereo system: one of the early symphonies—not number 23, I knew that one—but late teens or early twenties I’d bet. Unmistakably Mozart.

I set Meg’s glass on the coffee table in front of the leather sofa.

“
Thanks,” she said and raised her eyebrows. “Aren’t you going to guess?”

“
Hmm. Mozart symphony. Third movement obviously since it’s a minuet. An early effort, I’d say.” I cocked my head and listened for a moment. “Interesting. Flutes instead of oboes. He was probably sixteen or seventeen when he wrote it.”

Meg gave me a smirk. “That just shows how wrong you can be.”

“
E-flat major. Probably the key of the symphony. I can’t say for sure, but I’ll guess Mozart Symphony Number 18 in E-Flat Major, third movement, written in 1772.”

“
Wrong, Mr. Know-it-all. It’s Number 19.”

“
Rats. And how old was Mozart when he composed this work?”

Meg picked up the CD case, opened it, pulled out the liner notes, and read for just a second. “Well...you were right about the year, so he was sixteen. But that was easy. It says here he wrote six symphonies when he was sixteen.”

I took a sip of my ale. “Still, I was within one.”

“
Yes,” Meg admitted. “You’re very good at this game. I’m going to have to get some CDs of my own. I think you have all these memorized.”

“
Hardly. There are six or seven thousand CDs in the stereo closet.”

“
Then how do you do it?”

“
Styles, keys, periods, who lived when, what instruments were popular at the time. It’s not that difficult.”

“
Ah, but one must know how to listen.”

“
That’s true,” I said.

“
I mean, I can tell Beethoven from Bach, but I couldn’t possibly pick out a Mozart symphony.”

I laughed. “Mozart symphonies are easy. There are only forty-one and Mozart died young. Haydn’s harder. There are a hundred and four of those.”

“
And how many are in E-flat?” asked Meg.

I pondered for a moment. “Eleven.”

Meg looked surprised. “Really?”

“
I have no idea, but I suspect I’m close. Mathematically, that would be about right considering the instruments of the time.”

Meg typed for a moment on her computer, then looked up, astonished. “Eleven.”

“
There you go. See? It’s easy.”

•••

The phone rang and Meg headed for the kitchen to answer it—and, I hoped, to fashion some delicious grilled cheese concoctions. I took the opportunity to sit at Raymond Chandler’s old typewriter, put on his fedora, and let my fingers play over the keys. It was easy enough to let myself pretend to be a writer. My title, looking resolute on the expensive rag paper, was beckoning and calling for even more bad prose. I was happy to oblige.

The Organist Wore Pumps

Chapter 1

It was a dark and stormy night: dark as chocolate, not milk chocolate, or even “dark” milk chocolate which is only slightly darker, but as dark as the dark-dark chocolate guano collected from the caves of the chockobat by the under-dwarves of Kooloobati and savored by Polynesian chiefs during the tempests that battered their tiny islands throughout monsoon season (hence “stormy”), but it wasn’t nearly that bad, just a little breezy.

I sat back in my chair, lit a stogie, and studied the scotch singing love songs to me from the half-empty bottle on my desk. The knock at the door rattled it like an old wooden thing on three hinges with a knob about half-way up and a loose frosted window that told the inside story: EYE ETAVIRP. If you happened to be on the outside, the side that needed to hire a gumshoe, the side that had some ready cash, the sign read “PRIVATE EYE.”

The knob turned, the door creaked, and trouble spilled into the room, trouble spelled with a capital D -- no, not “Drouble,” even though that might make more sense except that “Drouble” isn’t a word, so not really: capital D, small a, small m, small e (a Dame) but, come to think of it, a small d would work just as well since she wasn’t proper at all and didn’t even try to begin a sentence.

The dame that wiggled into my office was a definite thirty-six: as in years old, two out of three measurements, looks on a scale of 1 to 36, number of teeth, eye-bats per

minute, shoe size in Japan, inches from her lips to mine,

hours it would take me to fall in love, days our relationship would last and, finally, miles I couldn’t come within as per the judge’s restraining order.

“
Hiya, Toots,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

She smiled. I might have been wrong about the teeth. “I need someone. Someone I can trust.”

“
We all do, Sweetheart. We all do.”

•••

I was feeling more than satisfied. My latest detective serial would find its way into the choir member’s folders. They’d read it, as they had so many others, but this time my literary brilliance would finally be applauded. Well, I thought, not so much “applauded,” as “disparaged with less ferocity than usual.” I didn’t mind. Genius is never recognized in its own time.

“
Guess what I just heard?” asked Meg as I walked into the kitchen, smelling the delicious bouquet of fried bread and cheese. Baxter’s tail thumped heavily on the heartpine floor.

“
I can’t imagine,” I said. I finished the last of my Pumpkin Ale and set the empty bottle on the counter.

“
I just heard from one of my spies that you spent ten thousand dollars on some bottles of wine. Vintage 1998.”

I scratched my head sheepishly. “Well, yes. You might have heard that. Three cases of wine, actually. Thirty-six bottles. I’m told 1998 was a very good year.”

“
And you did this because...?”

“
Bud told me to.”

“
If Bud told you to jump off a bridge...”

I laughed. “I haven’t had a chance to talk to him. He sort of disappeared right after I won the bid.”