Tangled Roots

by Marcia Talley

  At least my brother-in-law hadn’t died intestate. What a mess that would have been.

  ‘I feel like I’m living somebody else’s life,’ Georgina said after a bit. ‘Why would anybody want to kill Scott, Hannah?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied, ‘but once the police figure out the why, I’m sure they will quickly get to the who, or vice versa. We’ll just have to wait for them to finish their investigation.’

  ‘Hah! What’s the Baltimore solve rate? Fifty percent?’

  Most of those victims, I knew from reading the Baltimore Sun, had been young, male and black; the solve rate for white victims was much higher. But, I knew better than to argue with her. The police had taken Scott’s computer and business records, Georgina had said, so they must be working on the theory that the crime was related to his business, or maybe his crazy club, or maybe both. Scott had been a social guy. There could be a lot of crossover.

  Georgina set the wine glass down. It was empty. ‘Besides, they’re way too busy questioning Julie,’ she said.

  ‘But they questioned you and all your children, didn’t they?’

  ‘Two times,’ Georgina said. She pinged her wine glass with a flick of her fingernail. ‘Dear me. It seems to have sprung a leak.’

  The police had questioned Julie twice? That was news to me. Then again, of all the Cardinales, Julie’s alibi had been the shakiest. The medical examiner estimated that Scott had died on Friday afternoon between two and four o’clock. After his dental appointment, Colin had been back in school, Georgina zonked out on Imitrex, the twins hanging out at the ocean with six friends and a keg, while Julie was home alone. The fact that she’d recently clashed with her father was an open secret, yet I found it impossible to believe that she had bludgeoned her father to death in the afternoon, then calmly cooked up chicken nuggets for her little brother at dinner time.

  ‘Did Scott have any enemies?’ I asked, sounding, even to myself, like a standard issue television detective.

  Georgina rolled her eyes. ‘Are you kidding? Everybody loved Scott. You saw all the cards, flowers, food.’ She swept her arm around the kitchen. Her expansive granite countertop was littered with baking dishes, aluminum foil pans and Tupperware canisters, including the blue and white Corning Ware dish that held my own famous turkey tetrazzini. I wondered why I had bothered. It was like carting sand to the beach.

  ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with it all,’ Georgina whined. She wrapped a hand around her wine glass and struggled to her feet.

  I plopped a bag of somebody’s homemade dinner rolls on top of my turkey tetrazzini and headed for the basement door. ‘Deep freezing things before they spoil would be a good start.’

  ‘Go for it,’ she slurred, and disappeared into the dining room with her wine glass.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I’m ashamed to admit that the first time I set foot in my sister’s church, it was to attend Scott Cardinale’s funeral.

  A lifelong Episcopalian, I preferred small parish churches like St. Catherine’s in West Annapolis where my longtime friend, Eva Haberman, served as pastor.

  Nothing prepared me for the Church of the Falls, an ultra-modern megalith that sprawled over a forty-acre site just north of the Baltimore beltway. Its spire, a twisted aluminum needle several hundred feet tall, seemed to pierce the sky.

  ‘Jeesh,’ said my sister, Ruth, sitting next to me in the back seat. ‘It’s even bigger than it looks on TV.’

  Hutch glanced at his wife’s reflection in the rear-view mirror. ‘This guy’s on TV? Like the “Hour of Power” or something?’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ Ruth said. ‘I saw a show on PBS about the architect, some Swedish guy with lots of diacritical marks in his name. He’s famous.’

  I dipped my head, trying to get a better view of the spire out of the car window. ‘So famous you forgot who he was?’

  Ruth laughed. ‘I remember he had a mustache and wore funny-looking square eyeglasses.’

  ‘With a steeple like that,’ Paul commented, ‘they could broadcast Sunday services to Mars.’

  ‘Maybe that’s the plan,’ I said.

  Hutch steered his BMW off Padonia Road and into a paved lot the size of the satellite parking lot at BWI airport. An elderly gentleman carrying a clipboard and wearing an orange vest and matching ball cap greeted us at the entrance that was controlled by a turnstile sitting in the up position. The funeral home had provided us with a numbered card for our dashboard that said ‘Family’. The attendant squinted at the permit, made a checkmark on his clipboard, then directed us to a parking place in a row of spaces marked Reserved nearest the sanctuary. ‘Sorry for your loss,’ he said, almost as an afterthought.

  ‘What flavor is this church?’ Hutch wanted to know as we joined a line of mourners in the antiseptic foyer, waiting our turn to file into the sanctuary.

  ‘Evangelical,’ I whispered. ‘Where any liturgical tendencies come to die of neglect.’

  Paul’s elbow found my ribs. ‘Shhhh.’

  ‘Scott must have been popular,’ Ruth mused as we accepted our programs from a young woman dressed entirely in white. Another young woman, identically clad, led us down the center aisle to our seats, our footsteps muffled by the dense blue carpet. With its raked, theater-style seating and overhanging balconies, I estimated the church could seat around a thousand. It was already half full.

  Georgina and her children were seated in the left front row. Her glorious Titian hair hung long and loose, as I knew it would, ‘the way Scott liked it’. Julie’s stark black tresses, pulled back in a high, sleek ponytail, stood in sharp contrast to her mother’s and the sandy, Scott-like heads of his three sons.

  While the usher waited respectfully, we hugged our family one by one, shedding fresh tears, then slipped into our assigned seats in the row directly behind. A few minutes later, just as a female vocalist launched into a cringe-worthy rendition of something, as best I could determine, entitled ‘I Will Rise’, Emily, Dante and our three grandchildren arrived to occupy the seats just behind us.

  Once at a family dinner, Georgina had given me an earful about music at Church of the Falls. It’s fair to say that Georgina, a former church organist at All Hallows Episcopal in Baltimore’s upscale Roland Park, was unimpressed.

  ‘Honest to God, it breaks my heart,’ she had said as she described a music program being led by a praise team that included a singer and an eight-piece band. ‘I don’t know where they’ve stashed the hymnals,’ she said. ‘They display the lyrics on flat screen Jumbotrons suspended from the ceiling.’

  I looked up. Georgina had been right about the Jumbotrons. As the vocalist warbled and swooped her way through the song, its lyrics scrolled by on massive screens at the front of the church, flanking a colorful stained-glass window that depicted Christ’s ascension into Heaven. ‘Five years ago, a wealthy parishioner donated a brand-new Rogers Infinity pipe organ to the church,’ Georgina had reported. ‘It’s got four keyboards and more than ten thousand pipes. Most organists would kill to play such an instrument. But that was before everybody was bashed over the head with guitars and pan flutes. It’s hardly ever used, now.’

  The vocalist had wrapped up her last Worthy-is-the-Lamb, when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned to see who it was and sprang to my feet. ‘Daddy!’

  I hugged my father, leaned back and mouthed a silent ‘thank you’.

  ‘Wrapped everything up as fast as I could,’ Dad whispered. ‘Had to put the birdwatching on hold, but Neelie thinks she can reschedule.’ He released me, leaned across Paul to grasp Ruth’s hand then focused his attention on Georgina, who nudged everyone over a seat to make room for him on the aisle. Dad sat down, slipped his arm around the back of her chair and drew his youngest daughter close. My heart lurched when Georgina rested her head on his shoulder.

  Twenty years before, when her children were young and a decade before the happy surprise that was Colin, Georgina’s sick fantasies had nearly torn our family apart. Sc
ott had stuck with his wife, shepherding his family through the dark days until her recovery. If he seemed a little overprotective at times, well … Looking at my sister now, sitting strong and straight with her children around her, it all seemed worthwhile.

  The praise band – guitar, electronic keyboard, flute, violin and drum kit – began to massacre the classic hymn, ‘Old Rugged Cross’. In self-defense, I studied the program. The cover featured a color photograph of Scott lifted from the church directory. For his official mugshot as church treasurer, he’d worn a dark-blue suit and a yellow tie, which made him look more like your friendly, neighborhood real estate salesman than a highly-paid certified public accountant.

  R.I.P. March 2, 1964 – August 18, 2018 was centered under Scott’s picture. I swallowed hard. Just seeing the dates laid out in black and white made my brother-in-law’s death seem more real.

  As if I didn’t need Scott’s presence – in the form of cremains – to remind me that this day was no dream. Scott’s ashes rested in an urn on a cloth-draped mini-altar centered just below the steps leading up to the chancel. Georgina certainly had good taste, I mused as I admired the ceramic Grecian-style urn. If Scott had been around to make the selection, it might have been a Tardis that launched his soul into time and space like Doctor Who.

  I don’t know who had written the memorial note – certainly not Georgina, who had told me she simply couldn’t deal with it. I suspected one of Scott’s two brothers – one older and one younger – who sat across the aisle from us looking shell-shocked, staring straight ahead. Scott had been born, according to the program, into a ‘Catholic family of modest means’ in Philadelphia, most of whom had predeceased him. I imagined his surviving brothers were having a hard time dealing with the vocalist, microphone in hand, who was roaming the aisle and plowing her breathless way through a tune called – according to the program – ‘Just Save a Place for Me’. I felt nothing but relief when she wound it up and Pastor Robert Thomas Selden stepped up to the pulpit.

  ‘My friends,’ he began, ‘I thank you and the family of Scott Cardinale thanks you for coming here today to celebrate Scott’s life. I especially want to recognize …’

  And the service droned on. And on. And on. As a general rule, Episcopalians discourage eulogies. If multiple speakers are allowed, they are usually limited to two or three minutes each, max. Apparently, no such rules applied at Church of the Falls. By the time two parishioners, a local businessman, three clients, the president of the local Rotary Club and one of Scott’s brothers had finished eulogizing Scott, I pretty much felt like shuffling off this mortal coil myself.

  My spirits revived when Dylan, the older of the twins by three minutes, stepped up to the pulpit. He stared straight into the congregation and recited, without notes and without fault, the Twenty-Third Psalm: The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want …

  As the ancient prayer of comfort continued, Paul’s arm snaked around my shoulder and pulled me close as I let the tears flow. Ruth passed me a tissue from the packet she had half emptied herself.

  After Dylan finished, I was astonished to see Julie ease out of her seat and exchange places with her brother in the pulpit. Taking her pitch from a single D from the instrumentalist sitting at the keyboard, my niece sang ‘Amazing Grace’ a cappella in a pure, high soprano voice.

  The last note died away into total silence, broken only when a woman across the aisle, obviously overcome, exclaimed, ‘The voice of an angel!’

  I had no way of knowing whether Scott had gone to heaven or to ‘the other place’, but if heaven was his destination, I thought as I sobbed, he surely must have heard his daughter sing.

  TWENTY-THREE

  After the service ended, a white-clad usher escorted family members around a pink marble Baptismal font the size of a Volkswagen and out a side door. We followed the young woman down a long, glassed-in corridor that bisected a meditation labyrinth and a well-manicured courtyard abloom with seasonal flowers – coneflowers, asters and mums.

  The corridor terminated at a pair of double doors that opened into a massive fellowship hall; a curtained stage dominated one end and a serious industrial-style kitchen the other. A wall of picture windows framed the neighboring woods like a mural in a budget hotel. Church ladies carrying trays bustled between the kitchen and a line of cloth-covered tables where volunteers busily arranged donations by basic potluck food group: salads, casseroles, breads and desserts with a token section, identified by tent cards, for diners of vegetarian or gluten-free persuasions.

  A smartly-dressed woman – whether representing the church or the funeral home, I couldn’t say – shook her head and silently tut-tutted, making it clear by gentle nudges that Ruth and I were meant to join Georgina and her four children in a receiving line.

  I could think of nothing worse to ask of a grieving widow and her family. By some sort of sisterly telepathy, Ruth and I moved into protective positions flanking our baby sister. While I served as initial greeter, Ruth acted as relief pitcher, keeping well-wishers moving smartly along the line to Scott’s two brothers and finally, to his bewildered children.

  I was half listening to an over-caffeinated woman who had sung with Scott in the church choir – such a gorgeous tenor voice! – when Emily ushered her family into the room and, rather than joining the lengthening queue, sensibly shooed her ducklings toward the food. My stomach rumbled, no doubt in anticipation of the traditional green bean onion bake. I prayed there’d be some left by the time our ordeal was over.

  I greeted choristers, musicians, ushers, flower arrangers, Bible study group members, sound technicians, janitors, cooks, gardeners and day care workers – was there anyone Scott didn’t know? – until my hand throbbed. I had pretty much lost the will to live when a familiar face loomed into view. ‘Dennis!’ I kissed his cheek.

  ‘I’m so glad to see you,’ Georgina said, sounding completely sincere. ‘It’s been a long time.’

  Chesapeake County police lieutenant Dennis Rutherford was married to Paul’s sister, Connie. Although related to Scott only by marriage, they’d grown to know my sister and her husband well at family gatherings over the years. I was wondering what was keeping Connie when Dennis said, ‘Connie sends apologies for not being here. She’s got a sick calf.’

  ‘I understand completely,’ Georgina said with a wan smile. ‘I hope the calf will be OK.’

  ‘The vet’s on the way,’ Dennis said. ‘Some sort of respiratory infection.’ He kissed her cheek. ‘I won’t hold up the line, Georgina, but I hope to catch up with you later.’

  ‘I’d like that, Dennis,’ she said.

  Dennis was followed by a succession of prosperous-looking businessmen – bankers, lawyers, restauranteurs and real estate developers, who according to whispered asides from Georgina, were members of Scott’s ‘stupid social club’. I wondered, briefly, why Cosmopolitan Forum members were coming through in a clump but gathered from casual chit-chat as they made their way past my duty station that they’d held some sort of pow-wow in the hallway following the service. As I smiled and greeted one bigshot after the other, I despaired. If everyone who attended the memorial service came through the receiving line, we’d be standing up shaking hands until Christ’s Second Coming.

  Fortunately, some parishioners were bypassing the queue hoping to get first dibs at the King Ranch chicken casserole or cheesy spaghetti bake. The praise band must have been particularly hungry after their performances because they sidestepped the line waiting to speak to Georgina and made a beeline for the pork sliders.

  I was passing an elderly parishioner down the line and thinking I could kill for a pork slider myself when Emily materialized, seemingly out of nowhere. ‘I’m probably breaking some sort of church protocol,’ she announced, ‘but this is silly.’ So saying, she took ten-year-old Colin by the hand and snatched him out of the line. ‘Let’s get you something to eat, young man. After that, you can go outside and play with Timmy.’

  I could see through the win
dow that his cousin Timmy, my youngest grandson, was already swinging hand-over-hand from a piece of playground equipment that belonged to the church’s day care center. Other youngsters were testing the durability of swings, slides, seesaws, spinners and spring riders. I wished I could join them, but at least thirty more people waited in line. I felt drained.

  ‘Can you fake a faint?’ I whispered to Georgina.

  ‘I can do better than that,’ she whispered back, and precisely on cue, burst into noisy, snuffling tears. Ruth, feigning concern, escorted Georgina in the direction of a round table near the stage, while I turned to those waiting in line and announced, ‘So sorry, but Georgina’s exhausted. I’m sure you understand.’

  Unfortunately, the rules didn’t seem to apply to the pastor and his wife. Five seconds after the receiving line disbanded, Pastor Robert Thomas Selden swanned into the room, aimed himself at my sisters and charged. Under the black robe he’d been wearing when he delivered the homily, Brother Bob wore a dark-blue silk suit, a pale-blue dress shirt and a red tie with a conservative blue stripe. His hair – a deep brown not heretofore seen in nature – was magnificently coifed, but suspiciously immobile. Was that a toupee, I wondered, or did his hair naturally grow that way? I tried not to stare too obviously at his forehead, searching for roots.

  Clopping along behind him in sensible, low-heeled pumps was the minister’s wife, Tamara, equally well turned out in a dark-navy suit and a white silk blouse. Her hair was styled in a no-nonsense chestnut pageboy that reminded me of my tenth grade Civics teacher. I hated her at once.

  Target achieved, Tamara leaned in, her lips brushing Georgina’s cheek, and said simply, ‘Darling.’

  ‘Georgina,’ Brother Bob said, capturing Georgina’s hand. ‘We’re so terribly sorry, uh …’

  ‘For your loss,’ Tamara said.