Read Liturgical Mysteries 01 The Alto Wore Tweed for Free Online

chiffon and lace kind of guy. And this was that rough kind of tweed that you could strike a match on. So I did. She didn ’ t flinch.
    “ Just for the record,” she growled, “I don ’ t think you did it. You just don ’ t look like the kind of guy who would schedule ‘ Just As I Am ’ as a processional.”
    You know, I didn ’ t like her attitude. She was taking far more for granted than I thought she should. I lit my cigar.
    “ Maybe I did pick it. Maybe I really think that ‘ Just As I Am ’ has a regal majesty combined with just a hint of pietism that makes it the perfect processional hymn for the Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost.” i>
    Laughter escaped her lips as she picked up an open hymnal lying on the desk. I had left it open to “Hyfrydol” with the date penciled in beside the title. Rats.
    “ OK,” I said, grabbing the book from her hand and throwing it back into the corner with all the other denominational hymnals. “Just what is it you want?”
    Pulling up a chair, she sat down gracefully, crossing her tweed-covered legs with an elegance belying the sound of tweed-on-tweed, a sound not unlike forty Amish farmers shucking corn. “I heard you were good with altos and I need some advice. My name is Denver. Denver Tweed.”
    They were always coming to me for advice. I had gotten a reputation over the years. A reputation as a tough but understanding guy. It was a reputation I didn ’ t deserve. I was in it for the money.
    “ It ’ ll cost you.”
    I could tell she wasn ’ t put off a bit as she dropped two C-notes on the desk in front of me and pulled a meerschaum pipe from her pocket. Somehow I wasn ’ t surprised. Tweed and meerschaum. What next?
    “ Someone stole my elbow patches.”
    Like I said before, I wasn ’ t surprised.

    • • •

    On Saturday morning, Meg and I trucked our way back to St. Barnabas to meet with my two cohorts and clean up the choir loft. Nancy, Dave and I scraped some more samples indicative of Willie’s demise, bagged them, and looked around again for any obvious clues. Finding none, Dave and Nancy left Megan and me to the arduous task of making the church presentable.
    Meg had brought enough cleaning supplies to purify the entire church. The only time I had seen her more determined, janitorially speaking, is after I shot that rat under the bed. She scrubbed that bedroom from top to bottom.
    In my defense, I actually tried to hit the rat before it made cover, but it kept running up the log walls and I figured, and rightfully so, that a few more bullet holes would only enhance the look of the old timbers. Still, all good things must come to an end and when Mr. Rattus Norvegicus stopped to catch his breath, Mr. Remington was happy to make his acquaintance. Meg was appalled at the entire episode, even after I pointed out that rats were a fact of life in the woods and being shot was a much quicker and more humane death than being poisoned.
    “I don’t see how getting shot is better.”
    “Poison takes longer. And then the rats die in the walls or behind the refrigerator.”
    “What about a trap?”
    “I’ve got some set out back in the shed, but sometimes it takes days ttch them. Perhaps I should go with a ‘live and let live’ policy. Of course you never know where they’ll show up. The shower...the dresser drawer...”
    “No,” she said with an involuntary shiver. “Shoot them.”
    We spent the better part of three hours in the choir loft. I opened the console of the organ, lifted out each key, cleaned it and made sure the mechanics were unaffected. It was mostly superficial cleanup though. Nothing that I could see had gotten into the works.
    Meg cleaned the floor and the chairs—everything that had an actual surface that she could wipe down. When we were finished, we grabbed a couple sandwiches from The Slab and spent a long, lazy Saturday afternoon at the cabin doing not much of anything that I can discuss without being thought of as a