The Treble Wore Trouble (The Liturgical Mysteries) (2 page)

Chapter 1 

"God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."

"Who said that?" asked Nancy.

"I said it," replied Pete. "You just heard me."

Pete and Nancy were sitting across from me at the Bear and Brew. He lifted the pitcher of amber brew from the middle of the table and refilled his own glass, then Nancy's. Pete's pint glass had "Old Speckled Hen" printed on it, Nancy's had a Guinness logo, and mine advertised Newcastle Ale, all of which had nothing to do with what we were drinking. The pitcher contained Corona, the cheapest stuff in the place. It was Pete's contention that when you ate a really good pizza, you should always drink cheap beer. Not bad beer. Just cheap.

Pete Moss wasn't cheap by nature. As the ex-mayor of St. Germaine and the owner of the Slab Café, he had made some wise investments over the years. He looked like an aging hippie, complete with graying ponytail, one small earring, Hawaiian shirt (winter or summer), faded jeans and sandals — either with or without socks, depending upon the snow on the ground. He might look like a love-child from the '70s, but he was a Reagan capitalist from the minute he had to pay his own Social Security taxes. Pete was always on the prowl for the next Big Idea.

Cynthia Johnsson, Pete's longtime love interest, was up at the counter giving someone heck over our botched order of garlic knots which we should have been enjoying while waiting on our extra large Black Bear Special pizza. Cynthia was a waitress by trade and therefore had no patience for shoddy waiting. That Cynthia was also the current mayor of St. Germaine didn't mean she could give up her day job. After a vigorous and, some might say, "hilarious" campaign and subsequent election, Cynthia discovered that the position of mayor paid very little, certainly not enough to live on, and so continued her full-time occupation as a professional server — one of several ladies who did so. All of them worked in almost every eatery on the square, depending on their schedules and who happened to be busy. The Bear and Brew, the Ginger Cat, and the Slab Café all shared the town's female wait staff. In addition, Cynthia performed as a belly dancer, available for parties, class reunions, Shriners' conventions, and bar mitzvahs. She also gave belly dancing classes at the library when summer was approaching and the women of St. Germaine remembered that they might have to don a bathing suit at some point and thought that some hip and belly wiggling might have a positive effect.

Meg, the other member of our party of five, had excused herself to make a phone call to her mother and was just outside the brew pub. I could see her through the front window, holding her phone to her ear. It was cold out. Her breath was visible and escaped in puffs when she spoke. When she was listening, her head bobbed slightly and she smiled. Her free hand held the lapels of her overcoat tight against the stiff breeze. She hadn't taken the time to button it when her phone rang and she decided to take the call outside. I watched the snow come up in little eddies as the wind travelled down the sidewalk and whipped around her legs. Meg's black fur cap was indistinguishable from her hair, especially in the dim light of the nearest streetlight, several yards away. It gave her the appearance of a 1940s movie star or maybe an exotic Russian spy. After a few moments, she finished her call, dropped her phone into the pocket of the overcoat and pushed open the front door of the restaurant to come in out of the cold.

"I think it was Voltaire," I said to Nancy, picking back up the conversation.

"Nah," said Pete. "I thought it was Voltaire, too, but it turned out to be H.L. Mencken. It's on my Quote-of-the-Day calendar."

"That was my second guess," I said.

"It's freezing outside," said Meg. She took off her coat and dropped it over the back of one of the empty chairs at the table. Her hat followed. She ran her fingers through her hair and shook her head as if trying to rid herself of the cold. "Brrr," she said, sitting down beside me and scooting me over on the bench. "Hey! I'm starving. Didn't we order some garlic knots?"

"Cynthia's getting them," Pete said, then pointed at me and himself in turn. "Hayden and I are busy quoting Voltaire and H.L. Mencken. We're intellectuals, you see."

"The secret to being a bore is to tell everything," Meg quipped.

"There's no need to get personal," said Pete. "I didn't tell everything." He took a sip of his beer and smacked his lips in appreciation.

Meg laughed. "I was quoting Voltaire," she said.

"Oh," said Pete. "That's okay, then."

The original Bear and Brew, located just off the square in St. Germaine, had started its life as the Kellogg's Feed store in the 1920s. But "original" this building was not. Almost three years ago, the fiery finger of God had smote the old Bear and Brew and burned it to the ground for her owners daring to petition the city to sell beer on Sunday. There had been protests and picketing and the issue had finally been decided by the voters in favor of Sabbath sales, but not before lightning and the ensuing fire had consumed the modern day Gomorrah.

The antique feed store itself had provided the ambiance for the restaurant long before "country store chic" had become de rigueur: wide plank floors stained with neatsfoot oil, fertilizer, and saddle soap; old wooden counters nicked and carved by countless penknives; pickle barrels with checkerboards affixed; metal signs advertising everything from tractor parts to windmills to chicken feed. There had been a jukebox in the corner, the kind that still played 45s, good solid tables, and wooden chairs left over from the Great War. When the Bear and Brew opened, the local beer aficionados discovered a place that made their dreams come true. There were twenty-two micro brews and six national brands on tap, an even better selection in bottles, and pizza that became famous across the state in a matter of months.

The new Bear and Brew had been constructed on the footprint of the old structure and included as much character of the original as modern building codes would allow. The design still embraced the Appalachian barley barn motif, but also now included an up-to-date kitchen, clean bathrooms that worked, and a definite drop in the rodent population. Old, original signs had been replaced with reproductions — new tables built out of reclaimed lumber and sawdust was sprinkled on the floor at regular intervals. One thing that hadn't changed was the pizza. It was still delicious. The Black Bear Special, for example, was made with the restaurant's homemade bear sausage — ground bear meat mixed with secret spices and a bit of pork — topped with black truffles, mushrooms, a double helping of mozzarella cheese, and Black Krim heirloom tomatoes, grown locally. All things considered, as far as the customers were concerned, the fire hadn't been such a bad thing.

Cynthia returned to the table with steam coming out of her ears. "Amber Jo didn't turn the order in," she said in disgust. "She thought we wanted it brought to the table with our pizza. Now, why on earth would we want garlic knots at the same time as our pizza? I told her to forget it."

Nancy snorted, having even less patience with inefficiency than Cynthia did. She smoothed the front of her shirt and straightened her badge. Nancy, unlike me, dressed for duty in her police uniform. I favored khakis and a flannel shirt.

Nancy's winter uniform was much the same as her summer outfit: official dark brown pants with a tan stripe, and a long-sleeved, tan uniform shirt with dark brown lapels and pocket flaps. The evidence of her office, her shield and her gun, were displayed prominently, the SGPD badge on her breast pocket, a Glock 19 9mm in a black auto-locking holster on her belt. She favored a black leather trooper's jacket in the winter, or, if the snow was really coming down, her law enforcement issue parka, but wouldn't wear a hat unless it was bitterly cold, preferring to simply tie her brown hair back in a ponytail. When the temperature outside reached ten degrees or so, Nancy would eschew pride for practicality and reach for the muskrat trapper-style hat that she'd bought in Canada some years ago. Her opinion was, however, that this hat bestowed upon her the "Fargo" look, and, although this was a movie that she found hilarious, it was not a look that she was eager to cultivate.

As second in command at the St. Germaine Police Department, Nancy was all business when duty called, and being one of the two police folk who answered calls in the township (the other being myself), "duty" usually called her first. I lived a good ten miles from town, and Nancy didn't mind the responsibility. Dave would handle the occasional emergency if Nancy and I were both unavailable, but that was a rare event.

St. Germaine was a town that didn't have many emergencies, if you didn't count the murders. According to Dave and Nancy, murders weren't really emergencies, the damage having already been done. Still, a dead body demanded a police presence, and we had to go and sort things out, collect crime data, look for clues, that sort of thing. We had a good closure rate on murder cases. We should. We had enough practice. When Pete had been mayor, he'd come up with a good town slogan: "St. Germaine, come for the murders, stay for the shopping!"

A town of fifteen hundred souls, St. Germaine was larger than it appeared at first blush. The downtown square — the part of town that gave St. Germaine its structure — was built around Sterling Park. The street that ringed the park and passed in front of all the downtown shops, City Hall, Noylene's Beautifery, the Slab Café, the Ginger Cat, Eden Books, St. Barnabas Episcopal Church, and a few other buildings was Sterling Park Court, but everyone called it the "The Square." If someone wanted to send a letter to St. Barnabas Church, the address would read: St. Barnabas Episcopal Church, The Square, St. Germaine, North Carolina. This flew in the face of the U.S. Postal Service, which generally demanded actual street addresses, but the Postmistress of St. Germaine, a fine southern lady named Mary Miller, didn't seem to mind, and all the mail was delivered in a timely fashion.

Outside the square, the town meanders into the surrounding mountains, tree-lined streets snaking their way into the hills and hollows. There is a Piggly Wiggly grocery store, many churches, a drug store, small businesses, Christmas tree farms, a library, nearby summer camps, a couple of cemeteries, a fur farm, and many, many residential avenues — all things that create a community.

"Ah, here we are!" exclaimed Pete, seeing Amber Jo hoist a large aluminum platter from the counter and look our way. "Dinner is almost served."

A few moments later we were divvying up the pie and digging into a sumptuous repast.

"My," said Cynthia, "this is everything that
Our State
magazine said it was."

"That review last month?" asked Nancy. "You haven't eaten here since then? This Black Bear pizza is the best thing since their last thing, whatever that was."

"The Polar Bear Special," said Meg. "Alfredo sauce, fresh spinach, sun-dried tomato, artichoke hearts, feta, provolone and mozzarella."

"You have the menu memorized?" I asked.

"You bet," Meg said, happily.

"You've been busy," Cynthia said.

"It's the truffles that makes this great," declared Pete. "That and the bear sausage. But mainly the truffles."

"These are mostly mushrooms," said Meg, holding one of the black, shapeless blobs aloft on her fork. "There may be a smattering of shaved truffles, but I'm almost sure that what we're tasting is just some truffle oil. Real truffles would be cost prohibitive."

"It's true," I said. "Truffles are very expensive."

"Which is why I've called you all here," said Pete. "And why we ordered the Black Bear Special."

"Why?" said Cynthia.

"You see," began Pete, "as you may or may not know, last week a Mr. Willard Shady from Troutdale, Virginia, was digging a grave for his cat, Frisky, under a large oak tree, and dug up a white truffle weighing just over two pounds."

Nancy swallowed the last bite of her pizza, and chased it down with a gulp of beer. "Is that a big one?" she asked, taking another slice and putting it onto her plate. "Two pounds seems sort of big. Bigger than a turnip, anyway."

"About the same size as Frisky's head, I'm told," said Pete. "Anyway, Mr. Shady sold his truffle in New York City for one hundred eighty thousand dollars."

"Are you kidding?" said Meg.

"Nope," said Pete. "The size is the key. Truffles go for six to seven thousand dollars a pound normally, but if you find a big one, the sky's the limit. Here's the thing ..." Pete looked around the table, smiling. "Troutdale is fifty-three miles due north of St. Germaine, well within the acceptable geographical norm. Therefore, according to Hiram Kennedy, our extension agent, there is no reason why truffles shouldn't be growing here in St. Germaine or the surrounding areas."

"So what causes truffles to grow where they do?" asked Nancy.

"No idea," said Pete. "Spores or something. That's not the point. The point is, how do we find them?"

"Pig?" I said.

"Exactly," said Pete. "We're going to need a truffle-pig. Then we're heading up into the mountains. I asked the game warden. He doesn't care about roots. Any truffles we find are ours to keep."

The Appalachian Mountains are the oldest chain of mountains in North America and run from Newfoundland down to Georgia. In our area — here in northwestern North Carolina — we are blessed with majestic mountains, deep forests, rocky crags, breathtaking waterfalls, and sparkling lakes. Little towns are nestled all along the range, but most of the land is still undeveloped, much of it being part of the National Park system. If Pete could take a pig into the parks, and if there were truffles to be found, he might just get lucky.