Читать книгу Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle - H. Mel Malton - Страница 29

This tadpole has gathered

the reins of my body,

altered my courses,

flicked open the dam of my instinct.

—Shepherd’s Pie

Francy's mother came up from the States for the funeral, which was, to my surprise, organized by the Chapel of the Holy Lamb—the Schreier’s church. Apparently, Francy and John had at one time belonged to the group, although Francy had never mentioned it to me. When I found out, I wondered if Carla had nabbed Francy in the A&P and my friend had been too polite to say no. Anyway, I had known her for three years, and I was reasonably sure that she hadn’t attended during that time.

Francy’s mother was a small, defeated-looking woman with no eyebrows. She had painted them on, which gave her caved-in face a look of unutterable surprise, even when she was crying. Her mourning attire was vintage American trailer-park and her permed hair was pale lavender. I introduced myself to her outside the Chapel and she immediately backed away.

“You’re her, ain’t you?” she said, rather loudly.

“Her? Who her?”

“The witch. The one who led her away from the Lord. Get away from me.” She turned and scuttled past a group of Lamb-ites, disappearing into the interior of the Chapel. Several people turned to stare at me, and I met the eyes of Carla Schreier, who smiled brilliantly, then turned to say something to her stocky husband, Samson. He looked over too, and I couldn’t help feeling that I was the subject of her remark. Could it have been Carla that made Mrs. Delaney so hostile towards me? Had she called me a witch? Why would she do that?

George, who had been standing by my side, touched my arm. “Grief affects people in strange ways, Polly. Don’t take it personally.”

“How could I not take it personally? The mother of my best friend just called me a witch.”

“The mother of your best friend just called me the whore of Satan,” said a deep voice from behind me. I turned and threw myself into the arms of Ruth Glass, the angel-voiced lead of Shepherd’s Pie.

“I thought you were on tour,” I said.

“I was, but Rico called me on the road and told me what happened. I cancelled a booking in Timmins to get back here, so I could pay my respects. Francy was a good friend. I’ll miss her. Maybe you could help me write a song for her, later.” I squeezed her arm and nodded. It would have to be later, though. I wasn’t ready to write about Francy yet. Not until I knew what had happened.

Several of the funeral-goers had noticed Ruth and were whispering and moving in. Ruth gets a lot of press, and she’s a big woman, easy to recognize. Eddie came over to say hello, and once again I felt Carla’s eyes. I looked over and then looked away, quickly. It was a smile, all right, but it wasn’t a very nice one. I wondered what I’d done to deserve it. Maybe someone had reported to her the disparaging remarks I’d made about her baking.

“Hey, Eddie. How are you doing?” Ruth said.

“I’m okay, Miss Glass,” he said. His black eye had faded a bit, but he still looked haunted. He probably wasn’t sleeping well. His face was pale and he looked like he had lost weight. “Thanks for the postcard, eh? I showed it around at school.”

Ruth put a hefty arm around his shoulders.

“Boy, you’re getting big,” she said. “You’re taller than your dad, for Pete’s sake. When are you going to stop growing?”

His face got even paler and he squirmed away. “Soon, I hope,” he said awkwardly and walked back to where his parents were standing.

“Did I say something wrong?” Ruth said to me quietly.

“Well, he’s been kind of jumpy lately. He was pretty involved with Francy and John. This thing hasn’t been easy for him.”

“I guess not. God, everybody’s here, eh?”

Everybody was. Rico Amato, immaculately dressed, leaned on his vintage Caddy, chatting to Aunt Susan. With them was Spit Morton, wearing an actual suit of questionable lineage which made him look like an undertaker from the fifties. Freddy, also in formal attire, stood behind him with a placid smile on his face. I guessed that Spit had decided not to press charges and they had made up. I saw Morrison and Becker lurking in the background, both in civvies, and several other locals who had turned out for the spectacle, although I would bet that they hadn’t known Francy to speak to. People had started to move inside, so I figured that the service was about to begin.

“You’d think that the Holy Lambers would have a thing about suicide,” I said to George, who had taken my elbow to steer me through the crowd like I was a shopping cart. “I’m surprised this is such a public do.”

Otis Dermott, just in front of us, turned to blow a wave of sweet, rye-breath into my face. “We’re all equal in the eyes of the Lord, Polly Deacon,” he said. “Francy Travers may have died by her own hand, but she’s in the arms of the Lord, now.”

“Did you know her well, Otis?”

“Knew John better. When they was coming regular to chapel, we used to socialize a bit. Didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to him, though. She sent his body up north, I heard.”

“That’s where his parents are,” I said.

“I know. Thing is, they’re in a home, eh? Barely holding on. Don’t know why she didn’t just bury him here. Would’ve been easier.”

“Maybe it was too painful for her.”

“More likely she knew she wouldn’t get much sympathy as the grieving widow, eh?” Otis leered and winked. I wanted to hit him, but George squeezed my arm gently.

“Steady,” he said in my ear.

“’Course, they married right here, must have been ten years ago. Lot happens in ten years. She was plenty in love with him then.”

“Did they meet at the Chapel?”

“Nope. Francy came up here from the States on a fellowship mission when she was a teenager. Was a nanny to the Schreier’s kid, Eddie. He’s calmed down a lot, now. He was a little demon back then. She met John somewhere in Laingford and when he started courting her, she got him to come to our meetings. Things happened pretty swift after that.”

I was flabbergasted. Francy had told me none of this. I mean, she’d once mentioned that she was a nanny up here, but she never told me it was for the Schreiers. Why not? Was she ashamed of it? More likely, I thought, I’d come on so strongly anti-Christian that she’d just left that part of her life closed to me. I felt a wave of shame for being so insensitive. I’d betrayed her. There was so much about her I would never know, now.

I couldn’t believe that she’d never told me about the Schreier connection, although I suppose I could have figured it out if I’d thought about it enough. Eddie and Francy were pretty close. I’d chosen to see it as something vaguely sexual, though. Some loyal friend I was. I turned to George.

“Did you know all this?” I said.

He shook his head. “I didn’t know her at all until you met her.”

“Francy isn’t related to the Schreiers, is she, Otis?”

“Heck, no. Church connections, that’s all.” We had stopped moving to talk, and we were the only ones left on the steps.

“We’d better hurry or we’ll miss the testimonials,” Otis said. We followed him in.

The Chapel of the Holy Lamb is built in the middle of a grove of pines in the heart of Cedar Falls farm country. Next to the road, there’s a big billboard with BELIEVE IN JESUS written on it in huge black letters. It is not a mild reminder, it’s a command. The building is squat and boxy, sided in pale, peach-coloured vinyl. Gathered around its perimeter are those squat, pointy-headed cedar trees, which Aunt Susan calls Holy Shrubs. The shrubs were painfully well-groomed, flanked by carefully tended beds of late-blooming chrysanthemums, giving off their usual, disconcertingly unpleasant scent. The chapel has a big parking lot. On Sundays, when I’ve driven past it, the lot is usually full.

Inside, there was soft organ music playing, but the service had not yet begun. The place was packed and everybody was whispering. There was the feeling of suppressed excitement and the whispers sounded like wind in a dry meadow just before a thunderstorm.

Aunt Susan had saved us a seat near the back. We slipped into the pew—a rough wooden bench, really, no prayer books or hymnals to be seen. The seat was hard. Being a Holy Lamber, I suspected, was hard too.

On a platform at the front was a casket, closed understandably and covered in lilies. Beyond it was a podium, and behind that a stained glass window of the generic, abstract variety, all surging arcs and crayon colours. Francy would have hated it.

A thin, hot-eyed man with a bushy moustache got up and lifted his hands for silence.

“Brothers and sisters, we are gathered here today to mark the passing of our sister in Christ, Francine Grace Travers, née Delaney. Francy is in the arms of Jesus now, but those she left behind have a duty to mourn her, to share their love for her and to keep Christ alive in her memory.”

In the front pew, Francy’s mother, Mrs. Delaney, began sobbing loudly. Carla Schreier, next to her, put an arm around her and held on. Eddie, on the other side of Mrs. Delaney, hung his head and edged away.

The man at the podium continued. “I will now call on Samson Schreier, Francine’s mentor in the Lord, to say a few words.”

“Mentor in the Lord??” I hissed to George. “Golly.”

Samson Schreier was a short man, powerfully built, with a face baked red by the sun and a belly which hung over his belt like a sack of Shur-Gain. He looked distressed, as if there were an unpleasant smell lodged in his nostrils. He stood slowly and walked to the podium as if he carried a great weight with him. When he turned and faced the gathering, I could feel the tension mount in the room. Samson Schreier had something important to say. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly in a hiss which sounded like hellfire to me.

“Brothers and sisters, Francine was an innocent child, easily led astray,” he said. “When she came to us, she came in trust from the bosom of her mother here, and she was as pure white as the first snow, washed clean in the blood of the lamb.”

“Wouldn’t that make her pink?” I whispered to George. Funerals always make me silly. The woman in front of us turned around and frowned at me.

Samson continued. “She tended our boy Eddie with a loving heart, worshipped with us, shared bread with us, and we rejoiced in her young, fresh life.”

Eddie had sunk so far down in his seat that his head was barely visible.

Samson inhaled through his nose, as if he required extra oxygen for the next bit. “Then she met a man of the world, a man who showed her a path that forked, brothers and sisters, forked away from the true path like the forked tongue of Satan that was his master. Oh, he put on the clothes of the lamb for a short time, he pretended to be one of the chosen. He has done this before, brothers and sisters. He married her right here in God’s house. But soon he convinced her that the path of Satan was more interesting, and he spirited her away from us. John Travers was the right hand man of Satan himself. He chose lambs and led them to the slaughter. He led our Francine to her death.”

His voice had risen, he was spitting a little, and the people gathered in the chapel shifted in their seats, as if they were watching an exciting movie. I risked a quick look behind me to the door, where Becker and Morrison were leaning, staring at Samson with narrowed eyes.

“See?” I wanted to shout. “See? There’s more here than you ever dreamed of. Maybe Samson did it. You probably never even questioned him.”

Samson seemed to have talked himself out. His shoulders sagged and he returned to his seat in the front row. The thin man mounted the platform again.

“Thank you, Brother Schreier. Next we will hear from Brother Einarson, who has asked me if he may speak.”

Freddy stood. Freddy? Freddy of the dump, Freddy of the late-night hooch-fests and the gutted squirrel? Freddy was a Holy Lamber? Gosh. Their rules must be pretty flexible. The room hushed for a moment. Obviously, Brother Einarson’s request was a surprise to more than just me. There was a burst of hissing as neighbour whispered to neighbour.

He made his way to the podium and stood, waiting for quiet. He swayed slightly, and I wondered if he had been hanging around with Otis Dermott and the rye-bottle.

“Brothers and sisters in the Lord,” he said. “I have strayed from the true path and I have done many things I’m sorry for. But I’m back now, and I want to make a confession to you, here, while you are gathered in love to send Francine’s soul to heaven.”

At the word confession, everybody sat up a little straighter in their seats. I could feel Becker and Morrison behind me take a step or two forward. Freddy, I thought. Freddy did it. Not Samson. Freddy.

“Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time there was a little boy who was very unhappy. Nobody knew he was unhappy except me, but I couldn’t do anything about it except love him from far away. The people in this little boy’s life were hard on him, always wanting him to be something he wasn’t. Then, one day, an angel appeared. An angel straight from heaven, Francy Delaney. She took this little boy by the hand and guided him. She protected him from the demons that he was doing battle with. She loved him as I loved him and taught him right from wrong. I will always thank the Lord for Francy Delaney and what she did for my son, Eddie.” Freddy, tears running down his cheeks, left the podium and ran out of the room, through a back door which led God knows where. Carla Schreier sat motionless, the stunned eyes of the room on her back.

Samson, to whom this revelation did not seem to come as a surprise, sat still also. Eddie, who had sunk so low in his seat he was almost on the floor, scrambled to his feet and ran for the main exit, where Morrison and Becker grabbed him and hustled him outside. Eddie? Francy’s young friend Eddie? What were they grabbing him for? He wouldn’t hurt a flea, for Chrissakes. I stood and hurried outside myself. Morrison and Becker were putting Eddie into the back of the cruiser and I ran over.

“What are you doing?” I said. Becker shut the door—the one with no handles on the inside. Eddie sat in the back seat, tears streaming down his face.

“I am taking this kid in for questioning, that’s all,” Becker said. His face was grim. “What’s your problem, Ms. Deacon?”

“Don’t you dare call me Ms. Deacon, Mark Becker. What about Freddy? What about Samson Schreier?”

“We think the kid did it, Polly. He probably hated Travers for taking her away from him. Then Mrs. Travers was killed to cover it up. She trusted him. She drank with him. He made it look like suicide.”

“I thought you were sure Francy had hung herself.”

“That was before the post-mortem. There were enough Seconals in her blood to knock out a horse. And besides, the suicide note was a fake. We checked.” Becker was so smug. He had worked it out, and he was bragging, trying to make me realize that he’d had everything in hand, right from the beginning. Too bad he was wrong.

“Eddie got the pills from home,” Becker said. “We know Mrs. Schreier had a prescription. We checked. And the marks on your friend’s neck indicated that she was hanged long after she went off to la-la land.”

“You think Eddie knocked her out with pills, then hanged her? Eddie?”

“Eddie. We found a scrap of that lilac notepaper in his bedroom wastebasket last night, Polly, when we went to question him again about the night of John Travers’s murder. Guy at Kelso’s tipped us off. Said John and Eddie had a yelling match one night. Eddie said he was going to kill him. It all fits.

“He did your squirrel, or he got his real dad, Freddy Einarson to do it. That guy would do anything for his son, eh? We even found a newspaper with the letters cut out of it. As to the note, we know it’s not Mrs. Delaney’s writing. We’ll get the kid to give us a sample of his. No problem. Eddie may have just knocked Travers out with a wrench to begin with, but later he went back to finish the job. Carla Schreier’s statement indicated that she and Mrs. Travers went to bed shortly after Eddie and Francy arrived. He just went out again later. We found his fingerprints all over the Travers’ house.”

“This isn’t right, Becker. There are too many holes. You can’t prove any of it.”

“We won’t have to,” he said, smiling. “The kid has already confessed.”

“What??”

“Just before we put him in the car, he said 'Tell Mom I’m sorry for everything.’ We all know what that means. We’ll get a statement from him soon enough, Polly. It’s over.”

“You’re making a big mistake, Mark.”

“No, you are.”

They pulled away, and I went back inside.

Things had calmed down some, back in the old Chapel of the Holy Lamb. The Schreiers had not moved from their seats and Mrs. Delaney was still sobbing. Nobody seemed to have noticed, or nobody seemed to care that Eddie Schreier had just been taken away in a police cruiser. The thin man was wrapping up the meeting, but I didn’t pay any attention.

“They just took Eddie away,” I whispered to George as I slipped back into place.

“Can they do that?” he whispered back.

“I don’t know, but they did. I’ll have to tell Carla, I guess. She’ll probably start praying all over me.”

After the final words were spoken, the crowd stood and began milling around. I pushed my way through the throng to get to Carla, who was supporting what was left of Mrs. Delaney. For a woman whose infidelity had just been made public, Carla seemed to be bearing up reasonably well. I touched her arm, gently.

“Carla?”

“Pauline. What is it?” Her eyes were clear and very bright. Her voice was even more child-like and breathy than usual, as if she were walking and talking in her sleep. She looked enormously relieved, almost euphoric, and very pretty.

“The police just took Eddie away for questioning, Carla. You should go to the station.”

“Don’t be silly. I can’t go anywhere,” Carla said and giggled. I wondered if she had taken one of those Seconals Becker said she had a prescription for. “I’ve got lots of people coming back to our place for a reception, “ she said. “Eddie’ll be fine. They’ll let him go. Jesus will look after him.”

“Carla, they think he murdered John and Francy. He’s in big trouble.”

“No, he’s not. Don’t you think that Jesus is watching out for him?” she said, still in that dream-like tone of voice. “Eddie’s a good boy, even if his father’s a drunk from the dump.” She giggled again. Then she touched my arm. “Land sakes, I’ll tell you, that’s a load off my heart. Now everybody knows. No secrets in the Lord, you know.” She smiled radiantly. Then she leaned very close to me and whispered in my ear. “Samson always knew, of course. It was a long time ago, before I found Jesus. But now he’s so very happy. He’ll be getting a son of his own.” She patted her belly with one hand, still keeping a tight grip on the weeping Mrs. Delaney.

“Oh. Well, congratulations, Carla.”

“Thank you. And thanks for telling me about Eddie. You’re a good person, Pauline. But I’m sure he’ll be fine.” I headed for the door, my brain so full I could hardly see.

“Polly? You okay?” It was Ruth. “Listen. A bunch of us are going back to Rico’s for a wake. You coming?” I looked back for one more eyeful of Carla.

“I’ll meet you there,” I said. It had just struck me. Nestled between Carla Schreiers breasts was Poe’s gold cross—last seen around the neck of a very happy, very alive Francy Travers.