Duck the Halls: A Meg Langslow Mystery (Meg Langslow Mysteries) (7 page)

“‘Watch it’?” I snapped. “You practically knock me down and all you say is ‘watch it’? Where the hell did you learn your manners—a stable?”

“Well, why were you standing there blocking the hallway?” he shouted.

“I wasn’t blocking the hallway,” I snapped. “I was just standing in it. If you weren’t so hell-bent on making sure everyone saw your little temper tantrum, maybe you’d have seen me.”

His eyes narrowed, and he took a step toward me, fists clenched. Out in the vestibule, I heard several people gasp, and I found myself wondering if he’d ever been physically abusive to any of the choir members. I remembered how some of the younger ones almost flinched when he came near them.

But my temper was up, and I had no intention of letting him see me cower, so in spite of the throbbing waves of pain in my shoulder, I took a step forward, too, lifted my chin, and glared right back at him. I didn’t really think he’d try to strike me, but if he tried, in spite of the shoulder and the eight-inch difference in our heights, I was betting I’d come out on top. Working as a blacksmith had made me a lot stronger than most women, and I still hadn’t completely forgotten what I’d learned in several years of martial arts training. Lightfoot, on the other hand, had the weedy, hollow-chested, pasty look of someone who never bothered to exercise and was thin only because he didn’t really care about food.

And just now he looked a little startled, as if not used to people standing up to him.

“Hmph!” he said. Then he turned and stalked down the hall. I watched him barge into Riddick Hedges’s office. Then I turned and saw that everyone in the foyer was staring my way in stunned amazement. Or maybe in accusation—had I just spoiled everyone’s holiday mood?

“I can’t wait to find out,” I said. “Which one of us gets the title role in
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
.”

Not much of a joke, but it broke the tension. People laughed far more than it deserved, and a few even applauded.

Minerva Burke appeared at my side.

“You go, girl,” she said. “I think he’ll get the part, but you deserve a medal. Not many people stand up to old Bigfoot.”

“Probably just as well, since that means he doesn’t dislocate that many people’s shoulders.” I was trying to move my arm—fortunately, the left arm—and feeling a little faint from the resulting waves of pain.

“You’re serious, aren’t you?” Minerva said.

I was fumbling in my pocket for my cell phone.

“I’m calling Dad,” I said.

I pulled out my cell phone, but I didn’t want to move my left arm, and trying to hold the cell phone and dial it with my one good hand wasn’t working too well.

“Here,” Minerva said, taking it out of my fingers. “Let me do that. Let’s get you sitting down someplace. Ronnie! Virgil! Come help Ms. Meg!”

I had to admit, it was nice to be half carried into my temporary office and sit back with my eyes closed while Minerva called Dad and ordered him to come over and see to me.

Next door we could hear occasional bellows from Lightfoot, interspersed with the nasal whine of Riddick’s voice.

With her phone call made, Minerva pulled over a convenient box for me to put my feet on and another to sit on herself. The two of us, by unspoken agreement, fell silent and tried to figure out what all the fuss next door was about.

“—very sorry,” Riddick was saying. “But it’s just not practical to remove the altar rail and the first few rows of pews just for the concert—”

“Then how am I to give a concert in this wretched little sty!” Lightfoot bellowed.

“Some of the choir will just have to stand in front of the communion rail,” Riddick went on.

“I was told we’d get complete cooperation!” Lightfoot shrieked.

They went back and forth that way for several minutes.

“I confess,” Minerva said. “I won’t be sorry to see him go.”

“Go? Lightfoot? You mean he’s leaving?” The news was almost as good as a Percocet.

“Well, he doesn’t know it yet,” she said. “And I’d appreciate it if you’d keep this to yourself, but yes. We voted not to renew his contract. Unfortunately, it doesn’t run out till the end of August, so that means we still have to suffer with him for another eight months. But at least we know there’s an end in sight.”

“You think maybe he knows?” I asked. “And that’s why he’s in such a bad mood?”

“I haven’t noticed that he’s been in a particularly bad mood—for him,” she said. “This is pretty much what he’s like most of the time.”

“Meg, dear.” Mother. She swept in, visibly alarmed. “Are you all right?”

“Possible dislocated shoulder,” I said. “And I doubt if I have a temperature,” I added, as she put a hand to my forehead.

“You never know,” she said. “Your father should be here very shortly.”

Just then I saw another figure pass the open door, no doubt heading for Riddick’s office.

“Who was that?” Mother asked, glancing over her shoulder.

“Barliman Vess,” I answered.

Mother uttered a small sigh of exasperation.

“Mr. Vess is a member of our vestry,” I added to Minerva. “An elderly retired banker, a lifelong Trinity parishioner, and Mother’s particular bête noire.”

“He’s not my bête noire, dear,” Mother murmured. “He has good intentions, even if he is sometimes a little trying.”

“This is ridiculous!” Vess’s high, cracked voice carried easily through the wall, and probably as far as the vestibule.

“I can handle it,” Riddick said.

“We’ve already gone to considerable expense to accommodate your unreasonable demands,” Vess said.

Mother sniffed dismissively.

“Likes to think he’s the watchdog over all of Trinity’s financial and administrative affairs,” she murmured. “As if the rest of us were incapable of grasping it all.”

Vess and Lightfoot began bellowing back and forth at each other. I spotted Riddick slipping down the hall, looking back over his shoulder with an angry look on his face. Then he stopped, closed his eyes, took a couple of deep breaths, moved his lips slightly—whether praying or cursing I couldn’t tell—and resumed his customary calm if slightly anxious expression.

“That man!” Mother muttered.

I waited to hear whether she was talking about Vess, Riddick, or Lightfoot, any of whom could possibly have provoked her displeasure.

“I hate to speak ill of someone,” she went on. “Especially at this time of year—but Ebenezer Scrooge has nothing on him.”

That would be Vess.

“‘A tightfisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge!’” I quoted. Thanks to Michael’s annual one-man dramatic readings of
A Christmas Carol,
I could quote Dickens with the best of them. “‘A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.’”

“Precisely,” Mother said. “If he posts one more notice asking who used the church office phones to make an unauthorized ninety-cent long-distance call to California, I may have words with him! And to make it worse, he has the manners of a troll.”

“What’s he done?” Minerva asked.

“Just last week he tried to have the cleaning service fired for not doing a good enough job,” Mother said. “And if you ask me, they were doing a perfectly adequate job.”

Coming from Mother that was high praise indeed—her “perfectly adequate” was equivalent to someone else’s “fabulous.” From Minerva’s nod, I could tell she understood this.

“What he really wanted,” Mother went on, “was to get rid of the cleaning service altogether, to cut expenses, and have the ladies of St. Clotilda volunteer to do the cleaning. We straightened him out on that notion.”

“I should think so,” Minerva exclaimed.

“Wasn’t it him who tried to get the twelve-step groups banned from using the church building?” I asked.

“Yes,” Mother said. “He claimed they weren’t leaving enough change to cover the number of coffee packets they used during their meetings. I realize that in these difficult times we all have to keep expenses down, but to begrudge a few pots of coffee to people who are struggling to rebuild their lives!”

“I completely agree,” Minerva said. “If he keeps it up, tell him that the Baptist Ladies’ Auxiliary would be happy to donate as much coffee as the twelve-step groups could possibly need.”

“I think we’ve already squelched him on that one,” Mother said. “But thank you. And perhaps if I could mention your offer, it would shame him into abandoning that particular crusade.”

“Please do,” Minerva said.

We listened for a few more moments as Vess and Lightfoot bellowed at each other. Vess, predictably, was complaining about the unnecessary expense and trouble the choir was causing, while Lightfoot was bellowing that Vess was a philistine with no appreciation of art. They weren’t even arguing with each other, really, just venting.

“If Josh and Jamie were behaving like that, I’d put them both in a time-out,” I said.

“One of us should go in and break it up,” Minerva said, with a sigh.

“Or both of us,” Mother said, with a matching sigh.

“Let’s hold off for a few minutes,” I said. “At the rate they’re going, I think there’s a good chance that they’ll kill each other off, like the cats of Kilkenny.”

Mother and Minerva burst out laughing.

“Besides,” I added. “The choir can’t begin rehearsing until the Shiffleys have finished whatever it is they’re building, so maybe it’s a good thing someone’s keeping Mr. Lightfoot busy.”

“True, dear,” Mother said. “And it really isn’t funny: You should have seen that wretched Mr. Lightfoot carrying on! He was actually throwing things around in the sanctuary!”

“The Shiffleys’ tools and your vases and hymnals,” Minerva said. “It’s a disgrace!”

Then they looked at each other and burst out giggling again.

“Kilkenny cats!” Minerva spluttered.

“Well, obviously things can’t be so bad.” Dad appeared in the doorway, holding his trusty medical bag. “What seems to be the trouble?”

Dad agreed with my diagnosis of a possible dislocated shoulder, and he insisted on bustling me down to the Caerphilly Hospital. We nearly came to grief before we even left the parking lot. His van hit a patch of black ice and skidded to a stop against a mound of snow and his medical bag, which unlike us was not strapped in, launched itself out of the backseat into my shoulder, sending more waves of pain through my arm. By the time we reached the hospital, I was mutinous and refused to be taken down for X-rays until they gave me a painkiller of some kind.

Dad and the orthopedic surgeon whiled away the time waiting for the results by trading stories of dislocated joints they had seen in their careers. Since most of the stories involved ghastly complications rather than boringly successful outcomes, after the fourth or fifth story I told them what I thought of their bedside manner and shooed them out of my cubicle.

I was overjoyed when the X-rays finally showed that my shoulder wasn’t dislocated. Very badly bruised, but either it hadn’t been dislocated in the first place, or it was only partially dislocated and something had popped it back in. My money was on our close encounter with the snow mound in the parking lot.

Dad and the orthopedist were more restrained, cautioning me that there could still be muscle and tendon damage and insisting on an MRI. I found myself wondering, briefly, if they were disappointed that they weren’t getting a chance to perform a reduction on me, which I had by now figured out was a euphemism for forcibly shoving my dislocated shoulder back into place. But I had to admit that it was a relief when the MRI showed no serious damage.

Of course, my shoulder still hurt. And I would still need to wear a sling until the abused muscles healed a bit. And even in a small hospital, with Dad urging everyone on, the whole thing took quite a long time. Luckily, while I was waiting my turn in the MRI machine. Michael and the boys dropped by with my laptop. The boys were a little worried until I demonstrated that I had no visible wounds, after which they relaxed and began to explore all the exciting new opportunities for mischief that the ER provided. When they began fighting over who got to ride in the wheelchair and who had to push, Michael and I decided it was time for him to whisk them away to resume their Christmas shopping mission. I whiled away the long wait by finishing up a provisional schedule for relocating all the various church services, classes, pageants, rehearsals, dinners, brunches, and other events. It was a little annoying, having to type one-handed, but still—without my laptop and my cell phone, this would have been an impossible feat.

Of course, in a world without laptops and cell phones, Robyn would have had to find someone else to do the organizing after I’d gone to the hospital. And I could have had whatever pain meds Dad was willing to prescribe, instead of asking him for something that wouldn’t muddle my mind.

When I emerged from the MRI, I found that Dad and the orthopedist and several of the nurses had decided to go caroling up and down the halls of the hospital as soon as they finished treating me.

“You’re welcome to join us,” Dad said.

“I have a few things to do back at Trinity,” I said. “And then I think I’ll go home and rest.”

So Dad took me back to the church, singing “Good King Wenceslas” with great enthusiasm, although he did interrupt himself after nearly every verse to see how I was feeling.

I arrived back at Trinity with my left arm in a sling, feeling extraordinarily cheerful thanks to the tranquilizer Dad provided, which didn’t do much to relieve the pain in my shoulder, but did make me feel curiously detached from it.

I continued to feel cheerful, mellow, and detached for two hours as everyone I talked to picked holes in my draft schedule. In short order I made not one but three complete revisions.

Along the way, I developed a whole new sense of how hard Robyn’s job was. Her study saw a steady stream of visitors. Most of them, from the small bits I could overhear, were well-meaning volunteers who wanted her to make some decision that I’d have made myself. Her voice carried better than most of theirs, so I had a chance to appreciate her patient, gentle attempts to empower them to make their own decisions. Me, I’d have been tempted to just shout “I don’t care! Figure it out yourself!”