Liturgical Mysteries 01 The Alto Wore Tweed Read Online Free Page A

outfitted with a new state-of-the-art Jansen so system. I didn’t need the big speakers because they were situated right behind my head, but I got them anyway. I flipped over to the Nunc Dimittis . I loved to hear those Russian basses sing that low B-flat.
    “Hayden, when are you going to get a new truck?”
    It was the first thing out of Megan’s lips whenever she had to ride with me. She drove a three-year-old Lexus, courtesy of her ex.
    “I like my truck. It suits me.”
    “You could get anything you want. An Expedition maybe. Or a Range Rover. For God’s sake, you have over two million dollars in your accounts.”
    “Yeah, but this time last year I had about four. I can’t afford a new truck losing two million a year.”
    She laughed at that. “You’re not the only one who took a financial hit, you know. All the stocks took a dive. You know that when we invest...”
    “We’re in it for the long haul,” we both sang together, chanting the mantra of the investment counselor.
    The old truck was on its third transmission that I was actually aware of, and I suspected that this one was on the way out also. But I’d had the truck since ’83 and I wasn’t about to give it up. The odometer said 54,000, but I had put a notch in the hard plastic steering wheel every time the odometer had turned over. Added to that, it had obviously already turned over at least once when I bought it at a police auction with 24,000 showing—so I added one for good measure. Four notches so far. I hoped for at least a couple more.
    “Where are we going in such a hurry that we left the spinach pie for the rats?” Meg asked between bites of her kabob.
    “St. Barnabas. We’re going to St. Barnabas. And I haven’t seen a rat for days.”
    Meg had been concerned with rats in the house since I shot one that was hiding under the bed in the loft. I shifted into fourth and turned onto the main road.
    “We’re going to the church? What for?” she asked, munching away. “I thought we weren’t going to the church supper. I just fixed a pretty nice meal.”
    “Well,” I said, trying to break the news gently. “It seems that someone was found dead in the choir loft.”
    I admit that I have never been good at delivering bad news with a great deal of delicacy, so it was really no surprise that I had to pull over briefly.
    “Who?” she whispered, as we cleaned pieces of the chewed onions and green peppers off the inside of the windshield. “Who was it?”
    “I don’t know,” I replied, pulling back onto the road. “Dave didn’t know either. He and Nancy are meeting us at the church.”

    • • •

    We really do have a lovely, quiet little town up in these North Carolina mountains. It’s sort of touristy for those tourists who know about it, but most of them head for Blowing Rock Boone or even Banner Elk. In the winter months we have plenty of snow, but no ski slopes, so our tourist season happens in the autumn when the colors are at their peak. In October, Mother Nature favors St. Germaine with more adornment than any one town deserves, most of it due to a town ordinance that was ramrodded through a closed council session by the mayor on October 15, 1961 forbidding the cutting of any healthy tree in the downtown area. At the time, the ordinance was viewed as antibusiness and anti-growth, but the $1000 per-tree fine kept most of the old vegetation intact, and since new construction was generally predicated on clearing unused land, most business owners chose to remain in their old buildings and refurbish them—all this at a time when it was much more fashionable to tear everything down and start from scratch. The upshot was that while most small towns were embracing the architectural style of the fifties and sixties, now known as “bad,” and eventually losing their downtown areas, St. Germaine remained pretty much as it had for the last hundred years. I might add that there is now a statue of Harrison Sterling, the old mayor,