Hark! The Herald Angel Screamed: An Augusta Goodnight Mystery (with Heavenly Recipes)

by Mignon F. Ballard

  “Just fake it,” I said. “Who’s to know?”

  She made a face. “Cissy.”

  She was right, of course. Our choir director can zoom in on a false note as if she has built-in radar.

  I sat beside her. “Idonia, do you mind telling me what was inside that locket Melrose gave you? It might have something to do with why it was taken.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t see why. It was just an old picture, a photograph of a man and woman. Looked like it might’ve been made back in the twenties sometime. It was rather sweet, really. Melrose said they were his grandparents.”

  “Was there anything else?”

  “No. I don’t know why there should be.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything more about it,” I said.

  “Nothing encouraging, and Lucy Nan, the police have even been questioning poor Melrose—as if he might have something to do with it. Can you imagine? The man wasn’t even there that night!”

  “I guess they have to cover all their bases,” I said. “I’m sure he understands.”

  At that moment we were interrupted by Cissy banging several loud chords on the piano, our signal to take our places, and we spent the next hour or so going over the music for the following Sunday.

  When Cissy was more or less satisfied we were as good as we were going to get, we were told to line up to rehearse the processional.

  “I wish we didn’t have to process,” Zee complained as we walked through the Fellowship Hall and up the stairs to the back of the sanctuary. “Cissy always puts me between two sopranos and I can’t hear my notes.”

  “That’s called harmony,” Ellis reminded her as we lined up to process. Ellis, one of our stronger sopranos, took her place to lead us down the center aisle to the choir loft in the front of the church, and I stepped in line between Idonia, an alto, and R. G. Strickland, a tenor, and tried to remember to start off on the left foot—and the right note.

  Large white candles in feathery wreaths of evergreens were arranged beneath the stained-glass windows on both sides of the sanctuary and a graceful swag of magnolia leaves intertwined with burgundy and gold ribbon scalloped the choir loft behind the pulpit. I thought of all the Christmases the century-old building had marked, of faithful hands, long gone, that had decorated as we still did with magnolia, holly, and pine; of voices, silent now, that filled the church with praise and song. The place smelled of dust and candle wax and cedar, and a little of the spicy scent of R. G. Strickland’s aftershave, and I basked in the warmth of just being there.

  I knew Augusta planned to attend the service Sunday and was looking forward to the music. I hoped she wouldn’t be disappointed.

  Cissy took her place at the great pipe organ and the first few bars of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” resounded through the empty sanctuary. I felt a thrill as I always do at the joy and excitement of it and took a deep breath to begin.

  Ahead of me Idonia took one step into the sanctuary. Glory to the newborn King! we sang. And then somebody screamed. It had to be a soprano because it was shrill enough to shatter glass, and it seemed to go on forever.

  And—oh, God, it was Ellis!

  ad something happened to Ellis? I pushed my way down the aisle through a flock of white-robed choir members to find a knot of people hovering over something or someone in the center of one of the back pews.

  “Is she breathing? Let me through!” Margaret Moss demanded, and we parted like a billowing white sea. Margaret has been Glen Smiley’s nurse for as long as he’s been in practice and we meekly bowed to her authority. I saw Ellis’s face as she stepped aside to make room for her and if she hadn’t blinked, I’d have thought it was carved in marble.

  “She’s not moving.” Zee reached out a tentative hand.

  Who’s not moving? I couldn’t see over the snowy mountain of shoulders.

  “Don’t touch her! Somebody call nine-one-one!” Margaret barked, and I maneuvered my way to a pew in front of her to see the nurse feel for a pulse on a limp wrist. Behind me I heard Cissy calling for help on her cell phone. Margaret soon abandoned the wrist and began CPR by breathing into the patient’s mouth. It wasn’t until she tilted the injured person’s head back that I saw who was lying on the pew in such a twisted manner. It was Opal Henshaw!

  Jo Nell crowded against my shoulder. “Oh, my goodness! What happened? She’s not dead, is she?”

  By the way Margaret, her face set in a grim expression, continued with her chest compressions, I thought it very likely that was the case.

  White-faced, Cissy hurried toward us. “The rescue squad is on the way,” she said, and then caught sight of poor Opal knotted pretzel-like in the pew. “Dear God in heaven! What happened to Opal?”

  Ellis glanced at the balcony above us. “She must’ve fallen from the balcony. You know how she is about having everything just so. The swag up there is way off-center. Opal probably went up there to put it right.”

  “But it was perfect yesterday when I was here going over the music,” Cissy said. “Opal was putting on the finishing touches and she seemed pleased with everything then.”

  “Do you suppose somebody moved it?” Jo Nell asked in a small voice.

  Why would anyone do that? No one spoke it aloud but I could guess what the others were thinking. Although Opal Henshaw wasn’t well liked, I couldn’t imagine why anyone would wish her dead.

  Nettie turned away from Margaret’s attempts at resuscitation. “That’s a long way to fall. If only Opal had just left well enough alone! She probably went up there to make one last adjustment and lost her balance—bless her heart.”

  “Looks like it was her last adjustment, all right,” Zee muttered.

  “Isn’t she breathing yet, Margaret?” somebody asked, breaking what seemed like eons of silence. But Margaret didn’t answer.

  In one of the pews across the aisle I saw Opal’s familiar green jacket and the large wicker basket she usually carried that contained extra ribbon, tape, wire, and scissors among other items used for decorating.

  Somewhere somebody started to cry and I moved as far away as I could get and sat near the front of the church. My legs gave about as much support as those pine boughs in the window and I didn’t feel so pert myself.

  “Maybe we should pray,” Jo Nell suggested. That made sense to me, but at the sound of the approaching EMTs Margaret looked up and bellowed for us to clear out and wait in the choir room.

  “Poor Opal!” Ellis sighed, plopping down beside me. “I can’t imagine how helpless she must have felt when she fell.”

  “She was usually so careful,” Cissy said. “Opal always had someone with her when she was decorating the balcony. It doesn’t make sense that she would go up there and try to adjust things on her own.”

  “Who?” Ellis asked.

  Cissy frowned. “Who what?”

  “Who was with her when she hung the swag in the balcony?”

  “Oh … different people.” Cissy paused for a minute. “This time I believe it was Preacher Dave.”

  “Opal’s seemed a bit despondent since Virgil passed away so suddenly from that heart attack last summer,” Idonia said. “You don’t suppose she—”

  Zee pulled off her choir robe and tossed it over the back of a chair. “If Opal Henshaw wanted to kill herself, I doubt if she’d jump from the church balcony.

  “Besides,” she whispered, “everybody knows that sorry husband of hers flirted with every woman in Stone’s Throw. She had to have known it, too.”

  “Virgil Henshaw was annoying, but harmless,” I said. “Still, I doubt if Opal would deliberately end her life over him.”

  “At least not until she’d straightened that lopsided swag,” Ellis said.

  Jo Nell dug in her purse for a tissue to stem her tears. “I don’t see how you all can be so catty and hateful with poor Opal squashed like a melon out there in our own church—and right here at Christmas, too!” And she blew her nose with a loud blast.

  Cissy s
at facing us on the piano bench, her cell phone still open in her hand. Now she flipped it shut. “She used a cane,” she announced. “Opal used a cane.”

  I had never noticed her needing one. “I didn’t know she’d been injured,” I said.

  “No, no! I mean she sometimes used a cane to reach down from the balcony and center the swag on the hooks,” Cissy said. “That was how she made adjustments without having to lean over so far.”

  “Then where is it?” Nettie asked.

  “Maybe we should look for it,” Idonia suggested. “Not that it matters now.”

  Margaret came in a few minutes later to tell us the medics hadn’t been able to save Opal Henshaw. “Her neck was broken. They said she’d probably been dead several minutes before we found her.” Margaret shook her head and eased into a chair on the first row. “I was afraid of that all along, but I had to try … I just had to try.”

  We all sat silently for a while, not knowing what to do or say, and I, for one, was depressed. What would Augusta do?

  Tea, of course. In emergencies like this one, Augusta would brew hot, bracing tea. We kept a large electric percolator and a supply of coffee and tea bags in the choir closet. At least I could do that much. I rose abruptly and almost stumbled over Ellis’s feet.

  “Where are you going?” she said. “To make tea, of course.”

  “Good,” Margaret said. “We had to notify the police about Opal, and I look for them any minute. I expect we’ll be here for a while.”

  “What about Opal?” I asked. I would never be able to look at that pew again without thinking of Opal Henshaw’s unfortunate tumble.

  “Well, they couldn’t move her yet—not until the police get here,” Margaret said. “We had to leave her where she fell.”

  “I don’t suppose you noticed a cane?” Cissy said, explaining about Opal’s method of decorating from the balcony.

  Margaret nodded solemnly. “You’re right. I’ve seen her use that, too, but I didn’t notice it anywhere around. I think she usually keeps it in that little alcove behind the last pew in the balcony.”

  A couple of the other choir members who had served on the decorating committee with Opal said they, too, had seen her put the cane away in there.

  Then why hadn’t she used it today?

  I was dismayed a few minutes later to hear the grating voice of Stone’s Throw’s Police Chief Elmer Harris, and the irritating squeaking of his shoes as he approached from the hallway outside the choir room. Thank goodness Ed Tillman, a childhood friend of Roger’s and a lieutenant in the Stone’s Throw police, came along as well.

  “Miss Lucy Nan, Miss Ellis, Miss Nettie,” Ed began, acknowledging most of us by name, “why don’t we step into the classroom next door for a few minutes while Chief Harris talks to some of the others?”

  We clamored to follow him, leaving the chief to growl his questions to the remaining choir members. And I must admit, Ed didn’t seem at all surprised to see us there.

  As Ed made notes, Ellis began by telling him how she had first discovered Opal’s body, when she led the procession down the aisle.

  “And prior to this, did any of you see or hear anyone in the balcony or anywhere else in that area?” Ed asked, pausing in his scribbling.

  “I guess we were so busy rehearsing—and talking, too,” Jo Nell admitted, “we probably wouldn’t have heard anyone if they’d been there.” She frowned. “Why? Surely you don’t think somebody pushed Opal from that balcony, do you?”

  “For heaven’s sake, Jo Nell, he’s just being thorough,” Zee said. “I mean, I suppose you have to cover all possibilities, don’t you, Ed? And I for one find it the tiniest bit peculiar that nobody’s seen hide nor hair of that cane Opal used!”

  Ed, of course, was not aware of the cane or its purpose, and everyone tried to explain it to him at once until he insisted, rather sharply I thought, that we speak one at a time, and then only when called upon.

  After Ed was satisfied with our answers, we were told to wait in the choir room while he and Chief Harris searched the balcony and the sanctuary for any sign of the missing cane. Meanwhile, we were relieved to learn that Opal Crenshaw’s body had been removed.

  “This is awful!” Ellis said as we sat sipping a second cup of tea. “It’s hard to believe this is really happening.”

  Zee groaned. “Leave it to Opal to take all the joy out of Christmas.”

  “I’m sure she didn’t die on purpose, Zee,” Jo Nell said. “But at least she’s gone to a better place.”

  I supposed that was true; at least I hoped it was, but to tell the truth, I couldn’t think of a better place than Stone’s Throw, South Carolina. I had been raised in this church and Charlie and I were married here, as were my parents and grandparents before me, and now Opal Henshaw had gone and bashed herself in the very pew where my great-aunt Edith and great-uncle Davis had worshipped for at least forty years.

  Finishing my tea, I was startled by the sudden racket of three loud chords on the piano. “Come on, everybody and take your seats,” Cissy directed. “We might as well use this time to go over the music.”

  We had just finished the “The Cherry Tree Carol,” our third selection, when Chief Harris squeaked back to announce they had been unable to find Opal’s cane.

  “Could this be it?” Hugh Dan Thompson, our baritone soloist, returned from the men’s room just then waving a wooden walking stick with spiral carving.

  “Sure looks like the one,” Cissy said. “Where did you find it?”

  “It was propped behind the john in the men’s room.” Hugh Dan passed the stick along to the chief. “I remember Virgil Henshaw using this cane or one like it when he had that knee surgery a few years back,” he said. “This must be the one Opal kept in the balcony.”

  Chief Harris turned the cane in his hands. “Then what in tarnation was it doing in the men’s room?”

  “Looks to me like somebody didn’t want Opal to find it,” Nettie said.

  “Idonia’s been awfully quiet,” Jo Nell said as we hung up our choir robes before leaving. “I wonder if she’s feeling all right.”

  “I saw her go into the restroom a little while ago,” I said. “Maybe I’d better go and check on her.”

  Only a couple of days ago Idonia had been close to literally sleeping her life away, and for all I knew she might have passed out in there. I hurried down the hallway and pushed open the door of the ladies’ room, dreading what I might find. Our church had recently benefited from improvements to our kitchen and bathroom facilities and as a result just about everything in the ladies’ room was mauve. I found Idonia sitting in the room’s one upholstered chair, a somber figure against a floral pattern of mauve and green, clutching her pocketbook on her lap. She looked as if she’d been told to make her own funeral arrangements and not to take too long about it.

  “Idonia, what’s going on? Are you all right?” When I drew closer I noticed the tearstains on her face. “Do you want me to call Nathan?”

  She looked up at me with eyes as bleak as the dark December sky. “I don’t know what to do, Lucy Nan. I just don’t know what to do.”

  “About what?” I knelt beside her and took her hand. It was cool and trembled at my touch. “Idonia, I’m afraid this has all been too much for you. You’ll feel better when you get home where you can rest.” I wondered if there was any hot water left in the percolator. “Do you think you might be able to get down some tea?”

  She shook her head and threw aside my hand. “There’s nothing wrong with me! It’s not that—I’m fine.”

  “Then what?” I stood and rubbed the cramp in my leg. She didn’t seem fine to me.

  “It’s … well, it’s Melrose.”

  “What about Melrose?” I wet some paper towels and passed them along to her. “Here, maybe you’ll feel better if you wipe your face. I really think you’re trying to do too much too soon, Idonia.”

  She accepted the towels and made a couple of token dabs. “He was here. I saw h
im.”

  “Melrose? When?”

  “Earlier, when we first got here. I saw him leaving as Nathan and I were walking into the building, and I thought maybe he’d come to watch us rehearse and changed his mind.” Idonia wadded up the paper towels and aimed them at the trash can. She missed. “I called to him, but he didn’t answer. Pretended like he didn’t even see me.”

  “Maybe he didn’t,” I said.

  “You should’ve seen him, Lucy Nan. He couldn’t get away from us fast enough.” Grim-faced, Idonia looked up at me. “And what in the world was he doing here in the first place?”

  ugusta was waiting up when I got home. “I kind of halfway expected you to drop in on rehearsal,” I told her.

  She smiled. “I’d rather wait and be surprised.”

  “You would’ve been surprised all right if you’d been there tonight,” I said, and told her what had happened to Opal Henshaw.

  Augusta’s hand went immediately to her necklace, which caught the light from the fire, and I felt as if I could lose myself in its shimmering twilight depth.

  “And how is Idonia?” she asked, setting down a tray with two glasses and a bottle of red wine.

  “Close to being a basket case, I’m afraid.” I poured a glass for both of us and took a sip. It tasted of wood smoke and cherries and late summer sun—not at all like the inexpensive wine I usually buy at the supermarket, although the label was the same. “Why did you ask about Idonia?” I said.

  “Because this all seems to center around her.” Augusta’s loose garment trailed the floor as she sat on the hassock, glass in hand. “Think about it, Lucy Nan: Idonia’s gentleman friend, Mr. DuBois, is living in Opal Henshaw’s home. The locket he gave her, which may or may not have belonged to the Tanseys’ daughter, has been stolen and Idonia drugged. Now Opal herself has been killed.” She paused to study the contents of her glass, turning it so that it, too, caught the fire’s light. “But that’s not where the trouble began.” Augusta looked up at me as if she expected an explanation.