Be cool. Don’t overreact. “You do? Who?”
“That lawyer guy Don Forrester.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because last Thursday I was sketching here after school, and I heard loud voices in the crypt. There was a lot of yelling, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Then there was this crash or something, and a few minutes later I saw Don leaving in a hurry.”
“What time Thursday?”
“Five forty-five,” she replied instantly. “I know because I had to be home for dinner at six and kept checking my phone so I wouldn’t be late.”
That would go along with the confidential tidbit Patricia had shared with me earlier about Stanley’s murder occurring the night before I found him. “You’re sure it was Don Forrester?”
“Totally. I’d recognize that bald head anywhere. He’s a deacon at First Baptist, and he’s been to our house for dinner lots of times. Don’s been dating Bonnie, Megan’s mom, too. They’re trying to keep it on the down low, but we’ve seen them together a few times.” Riley glanced at me. “Everyone knows Bonnie used to date Stanley, but then he dumped her. Who knows? Maybe Stanley started sniffing around Bonnie again and Don got jealous and whacked him.”
Or maybe Bonnie found out about her creepy former boyfriend hitting on her underage daughter and lost it. Maybe she told her current boyfriend Don, who’d been ruined by Stanley years earlier and still bore a grudge, and Don finally snapped at this last straw and took care of his former partner permanently.
“Did you tell the police this?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Riley looked down, affecting an absorbed interest in her silver thumb ring. “I didn’t think they’d believe me.”
“How come?”
“I did something dumb and got in trouble last year.” She ducked her head. “Swiped a pair of earrings at the mall down in Sacramento. Stupid. I know. They didn’t even cost ten bucks. It was a one-time thing, but everyone in town heard about it. It was like I was walking around with a scarlet letter T on my chest.” She slapped her sketchbook shut. “Megan’s mom already doesn’t like me very much. If I went around saying her boyfriend killed someone, she’d probably make Megan stop hanging out with me.” Riley checked her phone and scrambled to her feet. “Gotta go. I have to babysit my brother, and Mom has a cow if I’m late.” She gave me a shy smile. “Thanks for liking my drawings.”
As I walked home, I added the information Riley had revealed to what I’d already learned. Don Forrester and Stanley King had obviously had a fight in the crypt, but had that fight ended with Don bashing Stanley in the head with Ethel’s urn? What about James Brandon and his clear hatred for Stanley? I recalled Samantha’s words in the diner. “What if someone finds out?” Finds out what? That she killed her father? Then there was Todd King. Stanley had treated his son like dirt and seemed to take great delight in humiliating him. Had he humiliated Todd enough to the point where his son couldn’t take it anymore and finally snapped?
My head swirled with all the possibilities. Don Forrester. Todd King. Samantha King. James Brandon. Who was the guilty one?
By the time I got home, my head was throbbing. I popped two ibuprofen and gave Bogie his afternoon treat. Then I made myself a cup of PG Tips and sat down at the kitchen table with a pad of paper and a plate of shortbread.
Is this how you plan to lose those fifteen pounds? my dietary conscience snarked.
Shut up. Certain indulgences are exempt. You will have to pry my cold dead hands off my Walkers shortbread before I give it up. Then I thought of Stanley’s cold dead hands and began making a list of suspects and motives. I’ve always been a list girl. They help me organize my thoughts. Seeing things on paper helps me figure them out. As I mused over all I had seen and heard over the past couple of days, one name rose to the top of the list.
Don Forrester.
Chapter Seven
Monday morning found me back at church at eight a.m. This time Father Christopher was waiting for me in his office with coffee and homemade apple strudel.
“Courtesy of Lottie Wilson,” he said, extending a fragrant slice across a stack of papers on his desk. “She makes the best apple strudel in town, much to Marjorie’s dismay.”
“Thanks. That looks and smells delicious. No coffee for me, though. I’m a tea girl all the way.” I held up my portable electric kettle. “Have kettle, will travel.” Looking around for a place to plug it in, I couldn’t see any outlets due to the massive stacks of papers and folders everywhere.
The rector’s ears turned rosy. “Sorry. I’m a bit of a pack rat. Ethel used to keep me in line, but since she passed, the piles keep growing. I can’t seem to find anything.”
“That’s okay. You are looking at the organizing queen. I’ll have this sorted in no time. Meanwhile, I can set the kettle up in my office instead.”
“Um … well … we’ve kind of been using your office as a storage room.” His ears turned pinker. “I meant to have it cleared out before you came, but with one thing and another, that didn’t happen.” Christopher’s cherubic face brightened. “There is a credenza in the reception area, however, where Ethel always kept coffee and tea supplies for visitors.” He bounded out of his chair and I followed, strudel and kettle in hand.
The credenza was hidden beneath boxes and more mounds of paper. Christopher shifted a few boxes to the floor and transferred some of the stacks of paper to Ethel’s old desk. “Aha!” he said, triumphantly holding up a dusty box of Lipton with fake creamer packets peeking over the edge. “What’d I tell you?”
Good thing I brought my own tea and milk. I wiped off the credenza and plugged in my electric kettle. While I was setting up my tea things, I told Christopher about my encounter with Riley Smith and how taken I had been by her drawings.
“She let you see her sketchbook? I’m impressed. It took me weeks before she’d show me any of her art. Riley’s usually pretty private.”
“It’s a girl thing. By the way, when we were talking, Riley mentioned she had some problems last year with shoplifting?”
“Typical teenage stuff. High school girls daring each other to see what they can get away with. The other girls managed to get away with it, but Riley didn’t. She was mortified.” Christopher looked thoughtful. “I’ve often wondered if maybe she wanted to get caught to show Megan Cunningham—who can be quite susceptible to peer pressure—the dangers of following the in crowd. Riley’s a smart girl. She and Megan are best friends, which makes Bonnie nervous, particularly since Riley covered her entire arm with a tattoo. I told Bonnie not to judge a book by its cover—tattoos have become a form of expression among young people today.” He grinned. “Although most of my fellow old coots in the congregation don’t share my elevated artistic awareness. To them, tattoos still mean Hells Angels, prison, and drugs.”
“Good thing they can’t see mine, then.”
“You have a tattoo?”
I nodded. “A small cross and a bird in flight on my lower back. David loved Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Free Bird.’”
“What a lovely way to honor him.”
“I thought so. He also loved Pirates of the Caribbean, but I didn’t think Johnny Depp’s face on my back—or front—would be quite the thing.”
Christopher belly-laughed. “I’m glad we hired you, Hope. You are exactly what Faith Chapel needs. Some fresh young blood to breathe new life into this dusty old place full of dusty old folks and shake things up a bit.”
“Too bad so many think I shook things up too much by killing one of those same dusty old folks.”
After we finished our tea and coffee, we got ready to head out on the weekly calls to visit the sick, housebound, and lonely.
“I like to do the pastoral calls on Monday,” Christopher explained, “but since you’re now in charge of those, feel free to switch the day of the week to whenever you like. Although I must warn you, our mainly blue- and white-haired congregation is used to Mondays�
�that’s when I’ve done them for the past thirty-three years.” He grinned. “Before me, Father Henry visited on that same day for two decades. The parish isn’t too big on change.”
Ya think?
“I’ll stick with Mondays. I think a tattooed woman priest with a black eye suspected of murder is enough change for now.”
Father Christopher chortled and pulled out a box of Twinkies from his desk drawer. “Our first stop will be the Jacksons, Bethann and Wendell. You’ll like them. They’re a little unusual, particularly Bethann, but very nice.” His eyes twinkled. “They love their Twinkies.”
“I know. We’ve already met.”
“You have?”
I pointed to my eye, now beginning to turn purple and yellow. “Remember? Bethann accidentally bopped me with a garden gnome my first day on the job.”
“Oh that’s right. Which one was it again? Buddy Holly? Bobby Darin?”
“Elvis.”
“Figures. She’s had problems with him in the past. He likes to remind everyone he’s the King.”
I stared at him.
“Don’t worry.” Christopher chuckled. “I’m not going around the bend. Bethann never had kids, so she looks upon her gnomes as her children.”
“Famous children, apparently.”
“She’s a singer, or was, a long time ago. She named her garden gnomes after her favorite singers.” Christopher got a pensive look on his face. “When Bethann first moved to Apple Springs, she told me she got into drugs when she was touring with her girl group in the sixties and had a hard time kicking them. Years later, by the time she finally did, they had scrambled her brain some. As a result, sometimes she gets confused and loses touch with reality. Bethann had a pretty rough life before Wendell,” he said. “If she chooses to cope by sometimes living in a fantasy world, who am I to deny her?”
Who indeed? I knew there was a reason I wanted to work with this man. When I first met Christopher at seminary, his reputation for compassion had preceded him. Since then, I had heard many stories of his kindness and his reaching out to the least of these, as Jesus told us to do in the Gospel of Matthew. “Good to know. Thanks for filling me in.”
As he drove us to our first pastoral call, I said, “I hear the Jacksons had some kind of yard issues with Stanley?”
“Yes. Stanley took great pride in his home and formal landscaping, and Bethann’s colorful eclectic style clashed with his upper-crust taste.” Christopher frowned. “He always called her poor white trash and tried to buy them out a few times, but the Jackson home has been in Wendell’s family for generations, and they weren’t about to leave. Stanley then threatened them with frivolous lawsuits—even had them cited for having a rooster in their yard.”
“A rooster?”
“Yep. The Big Bopper. They also had a couple hens, Tammy and Gidget,” he said fondly. “Bethann was kind enough to share their eggs with me. Apparently, however, it’s against the law to have a rooster within city limits, so they had to get rid of Bopper. Honestly, though? I think it was just a smoke screen for Stanley’s hatred of their Big Mart yard design choices.”
Garden gnomes, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, and plastic flowers would not be my first choice of yard decoration either, but to each his own. The clutter is what got to me. So. Many. Gnomes. My minimalist mother forever ruined me—I can’t abide clutter and mess. Makes me twitch. Like Christopher’s office, for instance. All the church offices, in fact. When we finished our pastoral visits for the day, first thing I planned to do was clean out my office and set it to rights. Then I would begin on the other offices, which made me wonder. “How come you haven’t filled Ethel’s clerical position?”
“It’s hard to imagine anyone replacing Ethel,” Christopher said. “Besides, our budget will only allow part-time.”
“I’m surprised none of the parishioners have volunteered to help out.”
A dull flush crept up his neck. “Uh, well, Marjorie has.” His words rushed out in a torrent. “Except she doesn’t know anything about computers, and Ethel had the Sunday bulletin all set up on the computer. Besides, the altar guild and ECW keep Marjorie pretty busy. I didn’t want to overload her. She is eighty-two, after all.”
What wasn’t he saying? Could it be the old occupational hazard they’d warned us about in seminary? When members of the flock develop a crush on their spiritual leader?
Christopher babbled on. “Thankfully, Patricia stepped up and took over doing the bulletin after Ethel passed. Although she can’t do it next month, since they’re going on a long vacation with their kids and grandkids then.”
I offered to take over organizing and putting together the Sunday bulletin until the requisite clerical help arrived. You would have thought I had offered to donate a kidney the way Father Christopher responded. It all made sense when I later learned that my boss is intimidated by the computer and is only comfortable with email and writing his sermons in Word.
“Well, here we are.” He pulled up in front of the scene of my close encounter of the Elvis kind. As we walked through the metal arbor studded with plastic Technicolor daisies and other fake flowers of a color not to be found in nature, I noticed the King off to one side in the front corner of the yard. Am I imagining things, or did he give me a dirty look? We approached the arched Hobbit-style front door beyond the Grimms’ Fairy Tales yard.
Before Christopher could knock, Bethann flung open the door, clad today in a screaming-orange minidress with white polka dots and the ubiquitous white go-go boots. “Welcome to our humble home, Father Christopher and”—she hesitated a moment—“uh, Mother Hope?”
“Pastor Hope is fine.”
“Oh good. I felt kind of funny callin’ you mother.” She let loose a girlish giggle. “I’ve known a few mothers in my time, and you don’t fit the bill.” Bethann ushered us through the door. “Y’all come right on in now.” She led us into the living room, where wall-to-wall bubblegum-pink shag carpet tickled my ankles. Atop the scratchy carpet sat a white sofa covered in protective plastic. Two avocado Naugahyde club chairs sat opposite with a retro blond coffee table between them and a fuzzy pink ottoman off to one side. A garden gnome carhop waitress on roller skates sporting a Pepto Bismol–pink uniform and hoisting a tray with a burger and a shake completed the sixties tableau.
A Pepto Bismol–pink garden gnome. On roller skates. With shades. Oh. My. Eyes. Should have brought my sunglasses.
Christopher handed Bethann the box of Twinkies.
“Thank you, Father.” She kissed him on the cheek. “You’re always so thoughtful. Now y’all make yourselves comfortable, and I’ll be back in a jiff with refreshments.” She disappeared down a hallway covered in lime-green shag carpet.
Father Christopher sat on one of the avocado chairs and indicated I should do the same. Nodding his head to the couch, he mouthed, “Plastic’s slippery.”
Probably stuck to bare thighs in summer too. I sank into the other Naugahyde chair, turning my head to take in the rest of my surroundings. A floor-to-ceiling wall of shelves across the room overflowed with hundreds of record albums, while a vintage TV and hi-fi system took pride of place next to the record wall. Above the TV hung a collage of framed photos, where a grouping of three vintage black-and-white pictures caught my eye. A beautiful young blonde with beehived hair, false eyelashes, and white lipstick beamed back at me. To Wendell, with love, Bethann was scrawled across the bottom. The other two publicity stills showed our hostess standing in front of two other beehived blonde-haired women, her hand on her hip. Across the trio of photos, a banner proclaimed Bethann and the Blondelles.
“Ah see you’ve found my braggin’ wall.” Bethann returned with a plate full of Twinkies and Hostess cupcakes. “Wendell insisted on putting those old photos up.”
“’Course I did,” he said, following his wife with a tray of retro soda bottles: Bubble Up, grape Nehi, Orange Crush, and Coke. “I fell in love with you when the Blondelles played Sacramento in 1966. I will never forget how you signed
that photo for me after the concert and kissed me on the cheek. You smelled like heaven.”
“That was my Shalimar, honey. It’s my signature fragrance.”
“Don’t I know it?” He winked at us and said, “I get it for her every year on her birthday.” Wendell, who was wearing a beige-and-white-striped polo with his ubiquitous beige pants today, set the tray down on the fuzzy ottoman. “Take your pick. Although, Pastor, you may have to arm-wrestle Father Christopher for the grape Nehi.”
“No, she won’t.” Christopher’s hand snaked out and grabbed the purple soda. “Sorry, Hope, I need my weekly Nehi fix.”
“No problem, Father. We all have our addictions.”
Inwardly I groaned. Did I really just say that, knowing Bethann’s history with drugs? Thankfully, she didn’t seem to notice. I settled for the Orange Crush, telling myself it was the closest thing to orange juice and a far better option than Tang. “So how did you two lovebirds get together?” I asked.
Wendell handed his wife the Coke, taking a swig from his Bubble Up before answering. “I first saw Bethann in person at that concert.” His eyes took on a faraway look. “She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, with the most amazing voice. I couldn’t believe my luck when I ran into her thirty years later at the snack bar of the G.I. Joe convention in Virginia.”
“G.I. Joe convention?” My head swiveled from one to the other. “I didn’t know there was such a thing. What were you doing there, Bethann? Do you collect Army figures?”
“Pardon me, Pastor,” Dell interjected in a professorial tone, “but Joe wasn’t only Army. The military years ran from 1964 to 1968. Although we think of Joe as a soldier, all figures and uniform sets were either the Action Soldier, Action Pilot, Action Marine, or Action Sailor. In 1969 they started transitioning away from the military background of G.I. Joe to the Adventures of G.I. Joe and then the Adventure Team.”
Hope, Faith, and a Corpse Page 7
