5 - Choker: Ike Schwartz Mystery 5 Read Online Free

rapped on his door and asked if he had a minute to talk.
    “Come in, Mavis,” he said. He assumed she had a personal problem to discuss. He was wrong.
    “Father Blake,” she said, worry creasing her forehead, “it’s the silver cruets.”
    “What about the cruets?”
    “They’re missing.”
    “Missing. When did they go missing?”
    “Well, that’s the thing, you see.” He didn’t. “The first one disappeared two weeks ago.”
    “Two weeks ago?”
    “Yes, but it didn’t seem important at the time. We, that is, I…just substituted the crystal ones instead. But you probably noticed that already. Actually, they are much easier to work with and…You don’t have to worry about which gets the wine and which gets the water when you use them.”
    Blake shook his head. Which cruet received the communion wine and which the water introduced a wholly new concept to him. He didn’t know that it mattered. He reckoned if he thought about it for a while he would uncover yet one more example of a tradition whose origin is lost in time and has now become canon in the minds of altar guilds. “No one said anything about a cruet gone missing.”
    “No. I figured one of the other girls, women, had taken it home to polish.”
    “Just one?”
    “Yes. Now that you mention it, that is odd, isn’t it…to polish just one, I mean.”
    “So, one cruet went missing two weeks ago. You said ‘they’re missing.’ The other one is gone, too?”
    “Yes, just now. Well, I noticed it just now, and since no one seems to know about the first one, I guess it’s safe to assume they may have been taken.”
    Blake stood and accompanied Mavis Bowers into the sacristy. Sure enough, the safe stood open, and only protective cloths lay in the place usually occupied by the cruets.
    “You’ve called around, I assume. No one remembers missing the silver?”
    “No.”
    “Is anything else missing?”
    “I don’t think so. Let me see.” Mavis peered myopically into the safe.
    “Check in the back.”
    Mavis rooted around in the back. “Oh dear! The little cup is missing, too.”
    “Little cup? What little cup?”
    “We were given a silver cup—goblet, I guess you’d call it. Someone thought it could be used as a chalice. We’ve never used it, but…”
    “It’s missing, too? We should call the sheriff’s office.”
    “Oh dear. I don’t know.”
    “Problem?”
    “Well, suppose a guild member has them and…I don’t know. It would be so embarrassing.”
    “But you said you called around and no one knew anything about the disappearance. You did, didn’t you?”
    “Yes, but…Oh dear.”
    “Mavis, something is bothering you. What is it?”
    “It’s just that…well Esther Peepers has been on the guild for, mercy, sixty years and she’s a little pixilated. It would be such a shame if the sheriff came and then…you understand.”
    Blake understood. Esther Peepers qualified as a matriarch. Senior pastors, rectors, and clergy in general, even bishops, learned, usually in the first months of their first call, that matriarchs are never to be crossed. Absent-minded or not, he’d be treading on thin ice if he were to ruffle the petticoats of Esther Peepers. He frowned at the mixed metaphor. He guessed the first symptoms of trivia-stress had arrived. Not that Esther would do anything herself; she sailed through life as a delightful octogenarian ditherer. But her guild colleagues would be upset for her; and he’d have several months of fence-mending ahead of him.
    “Suppose you and I drop in on Esther and ask,” he said.
    Mavis looked doubtful. “What would we say?”
    “Indeed, I don’t know, Mavis, but we have to do something. If the silver has been stolen, we need to notify the police. If, God forbid, it’s lost, we need to call the insurance company. The longer we wait, the worse it gets. Two weeks, you said.”
    “Dorothy Sutherlin would be a better choice to make the call,” she said with something akin to fear in her