The Organist Wore Pumps (The Liturgical Mysteries) Read online

  The Organist Wore Pumps

  A Liturgical Mystery

  by Mark Schweizer

  The Organist Wore Pumps

  A Liturgical Mystery

  Copyright ©2010 by Mark Schweizer

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published by

  SJMPbooks

  Tryon, NC 28782

  ISBN 978-0-9844846-0-7

  Prelude

  “How come I’ve never heard of this society?” asked Meg, bouncing lightly on the side of the bed. “If it’s been in existence for over a hundred years, you’d think it would get a little more publicity.”

  I stood in front of the full-length mirror. My fingers fumbled the last miniature button into the collar of my best dress shirt and I silently cursed, not for the first time, the inventor of the “button-down,” and my stupidity in buying a gross of them when I made my first million.

  “The Banner Elk Athenaeum Society does not strive for publicity,” I said. “They strive for literary excellence and the edification of the membership. Toss me that tie, will you?”

  “Hmm,” said Meg, obliging my request. “Why don’t you button your collar after you tie your tie?”

  “My fingers are too big. I can’t button the collar tabs once the tie is on.”

  “I’d be happy to button your tabs,” she volunteered.

  “You’re very kind.”

  “Since this is your first meeting, will there be an initiation? Will you have to kiss a pig or something?”

  “I sincerely hope not.”

  “I’m asking because lips that kiss pig lips will never kiss mine,” Meg said.

  “I’ll remember that,” I said. “No pigs.”

  “And why do they wear the funny little hats?” She picked the cylindrical chapeau up off the bed and giggled.

  I flipped the tie into a tasteful half-windsor and slid the knot up against my Adam’s apple. “The leopard-skin fez has an ancient literary history dating back to film star Peter Lorre when he portrayed Morocco Mole in the television classic Secret Squirrel.

  She stood up behind me, plopped the hat onto my head and surveyed the image in the mirror. “You look like a Shriner on safari,” she decided. “The tassel is kinda cute, though.”

  “You’re just jealous because the Athenaeum Society is men-only.”

  “Well,” she admitted, “quite frankly, I am a little surprised.”

  “It’s tradition,” I said. “When this society started, women were not thought of as ‘literary.’”

  Meg nodded. “That’s true. Well, if you don’t count Emily Dickinson, Christina Rosetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dorothy Parker, or the Brontë sisters.”

  “Right.”

  “Also Jane Austen, George Eliot, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott...”

  “My point exactly,” I said, grinning.

  Meg rested a finger on her chin. “Mary Shelley, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Kate Chopin...”

  “I get it,” I said. “Maybe the guys just wanted a night off.”

  “That’s probably it,” Meg said. “So let me get this straight. You, Hayden Konig, get a secret invitation from the Society...”

  “Yep. Delivered in the dead of night.”

  “Then you have to go to a meeting and present a paper...”

  “No politics, no religion.”

  “Then they vote on you for membership. If you’re accepted, you’re required to attend once a month and listen to other geniuses like yourself read papers they’ve written.”

  “The order of the evening is dinner and drinks, then the presentation of papers followed by acerbic and witty comments, ribald insults, and general literary frivolity. Sounds like a great time, eh?”

  “I’m beginning to understand why there aren’t any women in your group.”

  “It’s like one of your Bible studies, except fun.”

  “Right. So you’ll be speaking on Raymond Chandler?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Raymond Chandler is a hero of mine. So much in fact, that I had procured his 1939 Underwood No. 5 at an auction in anticipation that it might assist my own efforts in the noir detective genre. I’d also managed to purchase his hat—a gray fedora, vintage 1950. According to all available criticism, i.e., Meg and the rest of the church choir, neither of the acquisitions helped my writing proficiency one iota.

  “You have some good quotes ready?”

  “Yep.” I fell into my best Bogart impression. “It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way—but not as far as Velma had gone.”

  “Nice.” She spun me around and gave me a kiss. “I’m sure you’ll be a big hit. I’m spending the night at Mother’s. I’ll expect a full report when I return.”

  •••

  My paper on Raymond Chandler was where I’d put it, stacked neatly on the desk beside the old typewriter. I sat down and looked at the new piece of 24 lb. white bond I’d left rolled behind the platen. No sense in wasting some prime writing time, especially since I felt the muse beginning to rise. Besides, I had a few minutes.

  I sat down, cracked my knuckles in the time-honored fashion of all bad writers, replaced the spotted fez with Raymond’s fedora, and gave the keys a try.

  On the dance floor half a dozen couples were throwing themselves around with the reckless abandon of a night watchman with arthritis.

  That one was Chandler. It was a warm up. I smiled and went for one of my own.

  Sophie opened her mouth in a silent scream as she dragged herself up the beach in agonizing slowness, the one-piece bathing suit peeling away from her supple body like the mottled skin of an overripe banana leaving her naked and defenseless as she cursed her misfortune that, despite her tireless efforts to raise herself above her lowly station in life, the salty water of the incoming tide was beginning to eat away her foot since she was, even after all the money spent on plastic surgery, orthodontics, and the best finishing schools, still a slug.

  From: “Sophie Slug Goes to the Beach”

  I was ready. I pulled the page from the typewriter, slipped it into the desk drawer, and fed a new piece of paper behind the roller, clicking the return until a few inches of bond peered out and summoned me to even greater heights of belletristic brilliance.

  The Organist Wore Pumps

  Genius.

  Chapter 1

  It was a cold Friday—a cold Black Friday, so called because it was on this day that all the shops around the country went into the black. Until the Friday after Thanksgiving, purportedly the busiest shopping day of the year, retailers tend to run in the red. All the profit to be realized for the year is made between Thanksgiving and Christmas. This was as true in the little village of St. Germaine, North Carolina, as it was in the metropolis of Boone, our nearest neighbor of any size.

  Each of the merchants located on the downtown square in St. Germaine had signed an agreement with the town. It was called “the Deal.” The Deal stated that if you owned, rented, or operated a shop within the historic district of St. Germaine, you would decorate for Christmas. And by “decorate,” it was understood that by the Friday after Thanksgiving, each shop would be adorned to the extent that Martha Stewart herself might swoon from the vapors brought on by the sheer beauty of the bedecking. The Deal was also one of the reasons that from Black Friday until Christmas Eve there was not a parking place to be found within a half-mile of the downtown square. Shoppers were sho
ulder to shoulder at the cash registers, buying everything they could get their hands on: quilts and mountain crafts, jams and jellies, books and knickknacks.

  Even the town curmudgeon, Dr. Ian Burch, PhD, saw the wisdom of the Deal and festooned his Appalachian Music Shoppe with as many garlands as he could manage before the pine pollen lodged inside his enormous beak and turned his long snipe nose into a glowing trumpet. He’d taken to the bed, but his erstwhile employee, Flori Cabbage, a woman just as strange in her way as Dr. Burch was in his, finished the decorating and was now madly selling all manner of Renaissance musical instruments to shoppers who, all of a sudden, had a desperate desire to give zinks, shawms, serpents, sacbuts, and bladder-pipes as gifts to the in-laws for Christmas. Flori was in her early mids—that is, somewhere between twenty-five and forty-five—although it would be difficult to pin her age down with any accuracy at all. She wore no make-up, but had flawless pale skin, and brown hair worn in a tight bun. Her flowing skirts hung down well below her knees. Long socks or tights, Birkenstocks and oversized sweaters completed her daily ensemble. Had she been wallpaper, she would have been the beige stuff in your grandmother’s bathroom.

  In St. Germaine, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, you could sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo—full price, including the in-the-door ice-maker, the anti-walrus lock, and the three-year service agreement.

  On this Friday—Black Friday—getting a seat at the Slab Café was impossible. Even our special, reserved table had been usurped by tourists. Nancy and I had wandered in, looked at the patrons waiting for an available table, turned on our heels and walked back into the sunshine.

  “What do you think?” Nancy asked, squinting against the brightness of the morning. “Holy Grounds?”

  St. Germaine’s Christian coffee shop had opened back up in October under new management after the previous owners had left town. The Slab Café was our eatery of choice, ably run and owned by Pete Moss. It was the quintessential town diner, complete with a black and white checkered linoleum floor, red vinyl table cloths on the four-toppers, an eating counter adorned with several covered cake plates, each clear glass globe advertising a different dessert-du-jour. There were eight stools fixed to the floor in front of the counter and a refrigerated pie case on the far wall. Three waitresses hustled the meals from the kitchen to the tables in short order and turned over the tables with great efficiency, but it wasn’t for us. Not this morning.

  “Holy Grounds sounds okay,” I grumbled. “I guess I can get a bagel or something.”

  “At least the coffee’s good, Chief,” said Nancy. She took her sunglasses out of her breast pocket, put them on, then squared her shoulders and rested her hands on her hips, taking the time to adjust her gun belt and nudge the butt of her pistol out of the way. Nancy was always in uniform while on duty. I wasn’t. In the winter, I tended toward flannel shirts, khakis and a leather jacket that Meg had gotten me for my birthday. My own weapon, like Nancy’s, was a 9mm Glock. Unlike Nancy, however, I kept it in the organ bench at St. Barnabas Church.

  I kept it there originally for the rats in the choir loft. But then the church had burned and been rebuilt, and there weren’t any more rats. Still, I’m a creature of habit and as long as the tenors knew the gun was there, I felt as if I had a little more control over the choir. Being the part-time organist and choir director at St. Barnabas was the profession I’d trained for. Police Chief was the job I’d stumbled into when I realized that church musicians were paid just slightly more than janitors. Actually, a second Master’s degree in criminal justice didn’t do my vitae any harm when it came time to hire the new police chief of St. Germaine some ten or so years ago. As far as my salary at the church was concerned, I didn’t really need to worry about that either. I’d made a couple million selling a little invention I’d come up with to the phone company some years ago. Meg Farthing, my investment counsellor, brokered that sum into quite a few million, then got me out just before the market crashed. I was so grateful, I married her. She was so grateful she decided to take my name. Mrs. Hayden Konig. The most beautiful woman in Watauga County.

  Nancy and I walked across Sterling Park, currently, being late November, devoid of the leaves that formed the canopy over the park in the spring and summer. The lawn crew had gathered the piles of leaves a few weeks ago and now the landscape was clean and bare and tourist-friendly. The park gazebo had been covered in white Christmas lights which, along with the streetlights boasting garlands and bows, would light the entire park as soon as the sun settled behind Grandfather Mountain. As we walked across the stiff, brown grass, I waved to Billy Hixon, the Junior Warden of St. Barnabas, who was on his knees cleaning up the flower beds in front of the church. He waved back, then buried his head back into the garden, yanking up dead chrysanthemums and flinging them behind him like a badger gone berserk.

  We walked beside the church and down Maple Street, past the flower shop, and up the steps of Mrs. McCarty’s old house, now the Holy Grounds Coffee Shop. The turn-of-the-century house was an American Foursquare, two stories tall, covered with white clapboard, and freshly painted. The porch stretched across the front of the house and welcomed customers into one of the four rooms downstairs (each one square, of course), while the upstairs had been converted into living quarters for the new owners—Biff and Kylie Moffit. The Moffits had moved to town after buying the coffee shop, and from all appearances, were now doing well. I hoped they didn’t spend all the proceeds. January and February were pretty slim in St. Germaine and business wouldn’t really begin picking up again until May. Biff and Kylie had joined St. Barnabas, being cradle Episcopalians, but had declined my invitation to join the choir. It was an invitation I offered everyone, being magnanimous in my musical mission, but the choir was pretty good and newcomers who decided to join us either held their own or followed the leaders without too much trouble. Either way I came out looking like I knew what I was doing and our choir hovered around twenty-two on any given Sunday. Thirty if everyone showed up, which they never did.

  “Good morning, Hayden,” called Kylie, when she saw me come in. “Morning, Lieutenant Parsky.”

  “It’s the uniform,” I said, as we made our way to the only free table and seated ourselves. “You’re the authority figure. I’m more accessible. Sort of like Andy Griffith and Barney.”

  Nancy rolled her eyes. “They both wore uniforms. Not only that, they were both called by their first names. Anyway, I think you’re much smarter than Barney.”

  “No, no,” I said. “I’m Andy. You’re Barney.”

  Nancy snorted. “In your dreams.”

  Holy Grounds was doing a brisk breakfast business on this Friday morning, even though the menu consisted only of bagels and muffins. But, in their defense, the coffee was excellent and you could get your bagel toasted if you wanted.

  “What can I get for you?” asked Kylie, brandishing an order pad, at the same time pulling a pen from behind her ear. Kylie, like her husband, Biff, was in her mid-thirties, but unlike her husband, didn’t dress like a perpetual yuppie. Biff was spotted all summer around town with his tennis sweater draped over his shoulders. Kylie preferred comfortable work clothes. Her dark hair was pulled back and held with a scrunchie.

  “Hmm,” I said. “I think I’ll have a Norwegian omelette. Yes. An omelette and a side of pancakes. With the Hollandaise hash browns.”

  “Right,” said Kylie, scribbling on her pad. “Coffee and a bagel.”

  “With extra blueberry syrup,” I said.

  “Toasted,” scribbled Kylie.

  “Maybe a plum duff for dessert. And don’t skimp on the rum sauce this time.”

  “Cream cheese. Got it.”

  “Same,” said Nancy.

  Kylie disappeared into the kitchen.

  “Heard from Dave?” I asked. Dave Vance was the third member of the St. Germaine constabulary, charged mainly with handling phone calls and donut acquisition.

  “He’s on the way back. He called me this morning from R
oanoke. I’d say he’s a couple hours out.”

  Kylie returned to our table with two toasted bagels on small paper plates and a couple of cups of coffee in cardboard cups with hard plastic lids. She smiled and dropped the bill in the middle of the table, then headed for a table of new customers.

  “We’ve got to get our table back at the Slab,” Nancy grumbled. “This just ain’t right.”

  “Maybe we could commandeer a table under the Patriot Act,” I suggested, taking a sip of the coffee. “Hey, this is really good coffee.”

  “Well, it ought to be for two bucks plus tax! But, paper cups?”

  “I’ll talk to Pete,” I said. “Maybe we can make a standing reservation at the Slab for every morning at 8:30.”

  “Pete doesn’t take reservations.”

  “Patriot Act,” I answered with a grin.

  •••

  The church office was closed for the holiday weekend, but I stopped by to view the activity in the nave. The First Sunday of Advent was two days away and the Altar Guild was in full swing. Bev Greene, our parish administrator, had conscripted the services of Mr. Christopher, the foremost interior decorator that Watauga County had to offer. This was quite a coup considering that, according to the local grapevine, Mr. Christopher was about to be offered his own show on HGTV.

  Our priest was there too, lending a hand as well as moral support. Dr. Gaylen Weatherall had become our priest three years ago but then had been elected bishop and moved to Colorado. Last summer, chiefly due to her father’s failing health, she gave up her exalted position and returned to St. Germaine as the shepherd of the St. Barnabas flock. Bev was quick to point out that, even though she’d retired from the episcopate, she was still a bishop and entitled to all the rights and privileges thereto appertaining. These rights and privileges, as far as we could tell, consisted of wearing the silly hat and cape during feast days. Still, she was the Right Reverend Rector of St. Barnabas and everyone loved her. Well, almost everyone.