Read Liturgical Mysteries 01 The Alto Wore Tweed for Free Online Page A

cad.
    Around six o’clock Meg took off to her own hacienda to recharge and to check on her mother. I took out a pad and pen and began to take some notes.
    When?
    Willie Boyd was killed on Friday. Late afternoon. JJ had seen him around five. She was the last to see him, other than maybe the killer. Did that make JJ a suspect? Probably. She was the only one in the church that I know about, except for the person who called 911. I’d get a tape of that call from Boone on Monday.
    Who?
    Someone who knew him? Probably.
    Why?
    Willie didn’t have any enemies that I was aware of yet. He kept to himself and did his job. In November and December he also worked at the Grandfather Mountain Tree Farm selling Christmas trees. Herself did make a complaint about Willie to the vestry, claiming sexual harassment about three weeks ago. But how much of that was true? I would check on this next week.
    How?
    I suspected that he was probably poisoned. We’d have the lab report back on Tuesday.
    What?
    What?! Who came up with the five-question rule anyway? It’s a stupid question.
    I felt brilliant.

    • • •

    The Sunday service went surprisingly smoothly after our tragedy and I noticed that Nancy was back in the congregation. Sometimes she shows up when she’s feeling low. When her boyfriend left town, she was at St. Barnabas for five Sundays in a row, joined a Sunday School, got baptized, and started a prayer group. She hadn’t been too regular since then, but she made one or two appearances a month.
    Maybe the murder had taken the edge off Mother Ryan for a few days. Hope springs eternal. The choir sang The Eyes of All by Charles Wood at the offertory and sang it very well. Communion, though, was a bit harried. The wine, which was always brought from the sacristy, was late. In fact, the Agnus Dei had already begun when one of the lay eucharistic ministers finally returned with the cup. I thought it wasbit odd. I expected such shenanigans from Mother Ryan, but I knew the LEMs were trained better than that.

    Agnus Dei, qui tolis peccata mundi,
    miserere nobis.
    Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world,
    Have mercy upon us.

    We finished communion and followed the sacrament with the final hymn. Complete with a stunning harmonization on the last stanza written by yours truly—including a soprano descant.
    The tradition of St. Barnabas was to meet for coffee and donuts in the parish hall right after services. It was a time for the congregation to “meet, greet and eat” as it was advertised in the bulletin. I said hello to Nancy and left her talking to Meg while I pigeonholed Georgia Wester, one of the servers.
    “What was the deal this morning?” I asked her, disgust evident in my voice. Herself usually managed to get something wrong and it was, as I put it, “a constant grain of sand in my otherwise pearl-less oyster.” Meg pointed out that I should be glad of a pearl and the irritation was just part of the process. I replied that it was never the oyster who enjoyed the pearl.
    “It wasn’t her fault this time,” Georgia explained. “It was mine. I was late this morning. I thought Bev had prepared communion. She thought I had. It wouldn’t have been a problem except that when I went back to get it during the offertory, the bottle was gone. I went into the kitchen, looked in the closet for another bottle and the closet was empty. I had to drive down the street and get a couple of bottles from The Slab.”
    “The Slab? For communion wine?”
    Georgia smiled. “You just have to know who to ask.”
    “Let’s look in the wine closet,” I suggested.
    Georgia shrugged. I motioned Nancy over and Georgia led us through the kitchen to the back closet. It was an old door, made of oak panels and probably original to the building. She pulled a set of keys out of her pocket and inserted an old skeleton key into the lock.
    “It always sticks,” she grumbled, giving it a shake or two and trying to get notches of the key to