I got to the school a few minutes early and pulled into the pickup lane. Josh and Jamie could have ridden the bus, of course, but its roundabout route through our rural part of the county made for a long ride. So especially on baseball game or practice days, I liked to pick them up.
While I waited, I called Randall.
“I have a project for you,” I said. “If you’re willing to take it on.”
“Fill me in.”
“Have you seen Matt and Robyn’s house?”
“I was there a week ago, taking over a casserole from my mom.”
“Then you probably noticed the place isn’t child-friendly.”
“It’s not even sane-adult-friendly. That man needs an intervention—makes no sense whatsoever to keep disassembling parts of your house if you haven’t got the time or the skills to reassemble them. And with all due deference to the fact that you ladies like your trinkets and knickknacks, the reverend needs to corral hers with some shelves or cabinets or something. I think the damned things are breeding behind her back.”
“You get the mind-reading award for the week,” I said. “So can you spare a few workmen to finish the unfinished do-it-yourself projects? And maybe even to build those shelves or cabinets? Just let me know how much you think it will cost, and I’ll get Mother to organize a collection.”
“Heck, I’ll donate the materials, and if you just feed my men when they’re over there, with some of that food people keep dropping by, I’ll throw in the labor to boot.”
“Deal. Gotta run; school’s out.”
I could already see Josh and one of the boys’ good friends, Mason, dashing down the sidewalk toward my car. Jamie and Adam Burke had made a beeline for Minerva Burke’s car. Jan, Mason’s mom, seeing where her son was headed, strolled over to join me.
All four boys were pleading for a sleepover together, pointing out that, after all, it was Friday! From their tone you’d have thought Friday was a rare and unpredictable occurrence whose mere existence required a celebration.
Fortunately Jan, Minerva, and I had already foreseen not only the arrival of Friday but also the probability that the Four Horsemen, as we called the boys, would want to celebrate it together. We confirmed that the boys were happy with the plans we’d already made—that after their baseball game, the herd would go home for a Friday night sleepover with Mason, and then sometime around noonish Saturday, Jan would deliver them to Michael and me for baseball coaching with my grandmother and a Saturday night sleepover.
With their weekend arranged to their liking, all four boys boarded the appropriate cars and began loudly pointing out to their wayward adults that we needed to take off now so they could eat and change for the game.
The next two hours passed in a blur. The enormous bag of food Mrs. Wilson had given me disappeared with unnerving speed. The boys went out to the barn with a handful of blueberries as an appetizer for Nimitz, while Rose Noire, before departing for the yoga class she was teaching, prepared a large bowl of organic fruit for his main meal. Despite their disappointment over his inability to talk, the boys had fun feeding the toucan.
Although apparently they still had hopes of turning Nimitz into the world’s first talking toucan. I overheard them working on the project. Though they couldn’t quite agree on what his first phrase should be. Jamie favored “Go Eagles!” while Josh was working hard on “Here, Spike!”
I gave up trying to convince them that their efforts were in vain. Teaching them to feed him properly was enough of a job.
“Josh, the fact that he throws the chickpeas across the room probably means that he doesn’t like them,” I explained. “Just tell Rose Noire not to include them next time.”
“But I think he enjoys throwing them,” Josh protested.
“And are you going to enjoy picking them up?”
“Wow, look!” Jamie said. “His poop is coming out blue!”
“That’s because of all the blueberries you fed him.”
“But that was only a couple of minutes ago. He can’t possibly have digested them already.” Both boys were peering at Nimitz with concern.
“It was fifteen or twenty minutes ago. Toucans have a very short digestive tract so they process whatever they eat pretty quickly.” I said this with great authority, although I owed most of my newfound expertise in toucans to lectures from Dad and Grandfather.
“This could be really interesting on Fourth of July,” Josh mused.
“Or Christmas,” Jamie added.
I reminded myself that with any luck, the bird would be out of our barn before the boys could engineer seasonally themed toucan poop. And changed the subject.
We spent a little less time than usual turning the house upside down looking for their baseball garb, and thank goodness their equipment bags were already in the Twinmobile. I packed overnight backpacks for each of them. After making sure that my own bag contained chewing gum, bug spray, and sunscreen, I herded them into the Twinmobile and set off for the baseball field.
Michael, who was the Eagles’ assistant coach, had come straight from class and was already there. So were all the rest of the team, meaning that once again, even though we lived only two miles from the field, the boys were the last ones to arrive.
I watched as the boys scampered out onto the field to join their teammates. Tory Davis, the head coach, waved Josh and Jamie over to where she was working with two of the team’s pitchers—Manuel Espinoza and Danny Takahashi. Michael was taking the majority of the team through a fielding drill—yes, including Adam Burke. This early in the season, the boys’ uniforms were still pristine, and the red shirts and white pants were vivid against the background of fresh spring grass.
I glanced around and saw the chief standing just outside the chain-link fence on the far side of the home dugout, watching as his grandson practiced. I strolled over to join him.
“Team’s shaping up,” I said.
“It is indeed. Frank would be so proud.”
I nodded. Frank Robinson Burke had been an outstanding college baseball player. His untimely death a few years ago, in a car crash that had also killed his wife, had made the chief and his wife custodial grandparents of Frank Robinson Burke Jr., Calvin Ripken Burke, and Adam Jones Burke, my boys’ buddy. The chief still tended to get a little choked up occasionally at how much Adam favored his father.
Probably a good thing if I distracted him.
“So tell me to get lost if you like,” I said. “But do you have any more next of kin available for me to visit?”
“Unfortunately no,” he said. “I confess that I have not had the opportunity to interview anyone other than Mrs. Washington. Other things have claimed the lion’s share of my time.”
“Other things?” I echoed. “You mean things unrelated to Mr. Hagley’s murder?”
“Unrelated to anything a sane and reasonable person would— Sorry. I should have said that remains to be seen. Do you know Mr. Scott Sedlak?”
“Alas, yes.” And now I understood his outburst—sane and reasonable were the last adjectives I’d have used to describe Mr. Sedlak. “Goes to Trinity. Currently serving on the vestry. The surviving half of the dynamic duo Mother and I refer to as the Muttering Misogynists. Why?” I suddenly wondered if anything had happened to Mr. Sedlak.
“Mr. Sedlak has been filling me in on his theory of the crime,” the chief said.
“And probably doing so at great length, if he’s in his usual form,” I said.
“He seems to feel that Mr. Hagley was terminated—his word, not mine—because of his involvement in Trinity’s vestry. And that he—Mr. Sedlak—is destined to be the killer’s next victim.”
“Who does he think is going to … terminate him?”
“Radical elements who have seized power within the church,” the chief said. “I never knew Trinity was such a hotbed of intrigue. Or could he be talking about the Episcopal Church at the national level?”
“He’s probably referring to the vestry,” I said. “He’s not fond of the Council of Presiding Bishops, but I don’t think he feels personally threatened by them. Trinity’s vestry used to be all male until an embarrassingly recent date. Clearly Mr. Sedlak isn’t happy with the change.”
“Yes,” the chief said. “He seems to find your mother particularly … intimidating.”
“He does have some common sense, then,” I said. “He should be intimidated by Mother. Of course, he’s crazy if he thinks Mother would need to kill him—or Mr. Hagley—to free the vestry from their noxious influence. She already had everything in place for a peaceful change of regime.”
“In what way?”
“She recruited several very nice people to run for the vestry,” I explained. “Much nicer than either of the misogynists, though I suppose it’s terrible of me to speak ill of the dead in Mr. Hagley’s case.”
“So they’d be running against Mr. Sedlak and Mr. Hagley, if he had not been killed.”
“You know, I don’t know,” I said. “Usually the problem is to get enough people to run for the seats in the first place. I can’t recall a contested election since I’ve been there. I don’t know if they would try to talk the misogynists out of running, or put them on the ballot and hope common sense prevails and they lose. Mother would know. Although wait a sec—come to think of it, once you serve your three-year term you have to be off for at least a year, so it’s not a case of defeating them this time so much as making sure there’s no chance of them sneaking back in a year or two from now.”
“How did your misogynists get elected in the first place?”
“Mr. Hagley was elected right after his wife died,” I said. “He was a lot … calmer then. And I suppose people thought, ‘oh, good, serving on the vestry will help take his mind off his loss, poor thing.’ Took him a few months to show his true colors. Mr. Sedlak, now…”
I thought about it for a bit.
“No clue, really,” I said. “From what I hear, he’s spent the last thirty years criticizing everything the previous vestries and pastors have done, even when it was entirely men doing the running. No idea why he decided to stand for election, but I guess people must have thought it would do him good to find out what it was like to be on the receiving end of the criticism for a change. Inside the tent peering out, as it were.”
“And how has that gone?”
“Badly,” I said. “Dad and I have to calm Mother down after every vestry meeting. Mr. Sedlak and Mr. Hagley are the only men on the vestry at the moment, so they think they should do most of the talking. A lot of mansplaining going on.”
“I can imagine how your mother would react to that.” The chief was repressing a smile.
“Yes—as I said, badly! But not homicidally. She says ‘bless his heart,’ a lot in that steely tone that makes it mean just the opposite. So if Mr. Sedlak has gotten the impression that the rest of the vestry members don’t like him, he’s absolutely right. But that doesn’t mean any of them killed Mr. Hagley or want to kill him.”
“His fears did seem a little overblown,” the chief said.
“And even if Mother wanted to kill him or Mr. Hagley, do you really think she’d do it on the church grounds? Shedding blood on holy ground—sacrilege! And with a crowbar? A stiletto, maybe, or a tiny little vintage pearl-handled revolver, or an obscure untraceable poison that causes the victim no pain. But a crowbar?”
“Not quite in character, I admit.” The chief had given up the battle to keep from chuckling.
“And the same goes for any of the other ladies of the vestry, for that matter. Even if they wanted to off somebody, they’d pick a secular scene of the crime. I’m sure some of them are already saying we should schedule doing the Restoring of Things Profaned. Which is kind of like an exorcism, only less drastic, and done for buildings and things instead of people.”
“Sounds like a sensible thing to do,” the chief remarked. “But you’ll have to wait till the crypt’s no longer a crime scene.”
“We’ll probably also have to wait until Robyn’s on her feet,” I said. “I suppose we could have the supply priest do it, but I don’t think people would find it as comforting if it came from anyone but Robyn.”
“Supply priest?” The chief looked puzzled.
“Ecclesiastical equivalent of a substitute teacher,” I said. “Another bone of contention for the misogynists. We’re a small parish, so we only have the one priest. Any time Robyn isn’t available for services, we either have to get the diocese to send a supply priest—which isn’t free—or we can’t have the whole enchilada with communion and all—just a morning prayer service led by one of the deacons. Mr. Hagley and Mr. Sedlak were mutinous about how much money the parish is having to spend on supply priests with Robyn out on enforced bed rest.”
“Wouldn’t that also be the case if a male priest were out on extended sick leave?” the chief asked. “I seem to remember Dr. Womble was on bed rest for several months after his heart surgery.”
“Ah, but that’s different,” I said. “Don’t ask me how, but it is, at least according to the misogynists. The real problem is that they disapprove of the church’s decision to ordain women, and loathe the fact that Trinity now has a woman priest. But since their side already lost that battle, all they can really do is criticize everything we women accomplish.”
“So in your opinion, while Mr. Sedlak is not well liked, it’s unlikely that the vestry members have designs on his person, either individually or collectively.”
“Highly unlikely.”
“Was he speaking figuratively, do you think, when he asserted that some of the women were practicing witchcraft against him?”
“Damn. I hope so,” I said. “But he could be that paranoid. I haven’t seen anyone sticking pins into voodoo dolls, if that’s what you mean.”
“The word ‘paranoid’ did spring to my mind unbidden several times during our discussions. And do you have any idea what the Philadelphia Eleven is? I gather it was some ghastly crime committed against the church. He referred to it several times as if he assumed I would be familiar with it but— Is that funny?”
I had burst out laughing.