Liturgical Mysteries 01 The Alto Wore Tweed (16 page)

“Of course, of course.”

“OK, here’s what we know,” I began.

“Are you still using that list?” said Nancy, pointing at it with her pancake laden fork and dripping syrup irreverently across the top of the page, disgust evident in her voice. “I’m really getting embarrassed for you, Hayden. You’re
supposed
to be a professional.”

“Quiet, you. I’m the boss,” I said, as I began reviewing my list.

When?

Willie Boyd was killed on a Friday afternoon. 5:12 p.m.—give or take. JJ saw him around five as he passed through the kitchen. Anverly Green saw him at 5:10 making a phone call to police. He then went up to the choir loft where he had a drink and expired. He stole the wine earlier that afternoon, hid the cases of wine in the trunk of his car and drank from one of the bottles that he took to the choir loft. However, the wine wasn’t poisoned.

Who?

There seems to have been a witness and there’s a possible clue in the form of a cryptic note. I was pretty sure the clue was genuine.

I saw who did it. It’s Him. It’s Matthew.

O hark the herald angels sing;

The boy’s descent which lifted up the world.

All the Matthews (first and last names) in the county have alibis. It’s the last line that puzzles me. We’re still working on it. JJ was the one cooking up the oleander broth. Mother Ryan was in the kitchen with her, but claimed not to remember. What is her reason? I think she’s still the key.

Why?

I had a new theory. I think that Willie’s death was an accident. It was a murder all right, but it was the wrong murder. If this is the case, there may be another.

How?

Oleander poisoning. But it wasn’t found in Willie’s stomach. The poison entered his system through his mouth, absorbed though the oral membranes, but was not swallowed. I suspected it was Mother Ryan’s olive wood cross that did him in. We wouldn’t know until Wednesday when we disinterred Willie.

“What about ‘What?’” asked Dave.

“What what?” I asked.

“You know. When, who, why, how and what.
That
what.”

“Shut up, Dave.”

• • •

At 4:45 the church was abuzz with “wimmyn” priests and reporters. I sneaked up to the choir loft to watch the opening service. I didn’t turn on the lights however, preferring to remain a shadowy specter. There, sitting in the dark, were Elaine Hixon, Beverly Greene and Georgia Wester.

“Shhh,” they hushed me as a group. I locked the choir loft door behind me. “No sense inviting trouble,” I said as I took off my coat and hat and sat in a chair against the back window. Looking down at the back of the congregation’s heads, I tried to pick out which of our own flock had decided to engage in these liturgical shenanigans. I recognized Rhiza and Malcolm Walker right away. He was the Senior Warden and expected to attend. They had ‘their’ pew, of course, which they always sat in and were easy to find. Rhiza’s golden locks always seemed to shimmer. JJ was in attendance, as was most of the altar guild. Bob Solomon and his wife Sandra were sitting back a bit, away from the action. There were a few others, but definitely not a huge swell of support from our own congregation.

The service began with all the wimmyn in their finest priestly regalia, gathering around the altar, whichd been moved out front to make room for the celebration. The priests circled the altar, joined hands—all except two of them who began playing hand drums of African origin, and started a low hum. One of them, the featured speaker of the conference and, I presumed, the “celebrant” for this evening’s event, began speaking.

“Here we taste, see and savor how good it is to be in our bodies.”

The beat of the drums got louder and more insistent.

“As we ReImagine God in our feminine image, please speak aloud any name for God that you wish to use,” said Herself, hands raised, filled with glory. A number of flashes went off as reporters took advantage of the photo op which had obviously arranged in defiance of the St. Barnabas edit against flash photography during a service of
any
kind.

From the circle of women came new names for the deity.

“Moon Mother,” said one woman with a Boston accent.

“Sophia,” said another.

“Mary,” offered the third.

A pause; the drums and the humming; then Mother Ryan.

“That’s wonderful. Any others?”

“Wanda.”

I’m sure my snort was audible because the three ladies in the balcony spun around and glared at me before turning their attention back to the show.

“
Wanda?”
I whispered.

“Shhh.”

Each womyn had taken a glass of milk mixed with honey off the table. Now they sang together “Sophia, Creator God, let your milk and honey flow. Shower us with your love.”

“Our maker Sophia, we are wimmyn in your image. With the hot blood of our wombs we give form to new life,” sang the celebrant.

“Our mother Sophia, we are wimmyn in your image. With the milk of our breasts we suckle the children,” sang Herself.

After each verse came the refrain from all the women “Sophia, Sophia, Sophia, shower us with your love.”

“Our guide Sophia. With our moist mouths we kiss away a tear. With the honey of wisdom in our mouths we prophesy to all peoples.”

At this they all drank their honeyed milk.

“O Sophia, goddess of Wisdom, you are a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path.”

“O Moon Mother...Wanda...goddess of Creation, we enter into community which strengthens and renews us.”

They all sang together “Bless us now and dream the vision, share the wisdom dwelling deep within.”

When the “milk and honey” service had concluded, the wimmyn had a period of briefnnouncements before the evening service began. It followed the standard Evening Prayer service pretty closely with all the music accompanied by an electronic keyboard played by one of the priests. The anthem was a piece titled
As God Is Our Mother
on a text by Hildegard von Bingen, the twelfth-century mystic. They had rehearsed it earlier in the afternoon and it wasn’t very difficult. I know this because I wrote it.

The anthem was written about two years ago for a competition that invited women composers to submit an anthem utilizing a text by a prominent woman poet. I sent it in under the name Dame Marjorie Wallace. It didn’t win. At least I never saw any prize money. The reason it didn’t win, I figured, was probably because of the fictional biography of Dame Marjorie that I wrote to accompany it. When I opened the service bulletin I almost choked on the cigar I had been chomping angrily since the milk and honey ceremony.

Our anthem this evening, “As God Is Our Mother,” is by the esteemed composer Dame Marjorie Wallace. Dame Marjorie has had an interesting and varied career. First coming to national prominence as a member of the 1968 British Olympic Bicycling Team, she also held a position as one of the Queen Mother’s premier hat makers, stunning the fashion world with her bold and innovative hat designs. She retired from Haberdashery after losing her left leg in a horrible accident involving a terrorist attack on the Queen Mother in the form of an exploding hat wren—one of the stuffed birds her employer insisted on decorating her hats with in the early 1970’s.

Not being able to perform her duties due to psychological implications involving a newly formed diagnosis of explodornithophobia, she took her disability pension and turned her considerable talents toward music composition and bassoon playing and immigrated to Canada. Long an advocate of wimmyn’s rights, she incorporated her love of art and bicycling with her culinary expertise and opened the first bicycle shop/tea room in North America. She subsequently founded a feminist artists’ community in 1972 in Saskatchewan called Lesbian Actors, Composers, Tea and Truffle Enterprises (LACTATE). Her ambitions in the choral arts saw the founding of the wimmyn’s chorale “Lactate Dominum.”

Dame Marjorie, along with being a composer of considerable note, is also the inventor of the “monoped” bicycle and holds several international patents. She lives with her long time companion and life-partner, Ms. Alice Carpenter.

I got to my feet after the anthem, went down the stairs, out the front doors and onto the lawn. Bev, Elaine and Georgia joined me a few moments later closing the doors behind them.

“Isn’t that the piece you wrote last year? We sang it in the choir,” said Elaine.

“I don’t remember,” I said with a grin. “It sounded familiar though.”

“Are you going to tell them?” asked Beverly.

“I think not.”

Just then the front doors opened and the wimmyn processed out the fronors of the church to the sound of drums, bells and finger cymbals, the conclave of reporters and onlookers following closely. We ducked around the corner of the church, keeping the group in sight.

As the drums became silent, Herself raised her hands, resplendent in the fluorescent glow of the streetlight, and said, “Together we have given birth to a ReImagining Community that extends to every corner of our world.”

The drums and cymbals began anew with restored vigor to the refrain “Sophia, Sophia, Sophia, shower us with your love.” As they chanted together, their collective voices straining to a frenzied pitch, suddenly one of the womyn screamed and pointed to the sky. They all glanced heavenward and there, framed by the full moon which was still low in the sky, was the goddess Sophia herself. She hung there for a just moment, transfixed in naked beauty, before drifting into a power pole and landing against a transformer.

The resulting explosion and shower of fire that rained down on the wimmyn priests was enough to convert most of them back to orthodox Christianity. Four of them checked into the hospital with “severe emotional distress.” Six got into their cars and went home immediately. The goddess Sophia met her untimely end amid the fragrance of electrical conflagration and burning latex.

The girls and I just stood and watched with disbelief.

“The Lord works in mysterious ways,” said Georgia thoughtfully, “but Arlen won’t be very happy.”

The transformer was totally destroyed and electricity in a two-block area was out for two days until another one was installed.

The church was closed and the rest of the
ReImagining God the Mother in the Twenty-First Century
conference was moved to Greensboro. The reporters went home and the pictures never made the local papers. I figured that was the Bishop’s doing.

Chapter 11

Visions of Amber Dawn, Personal Trainer, melted away like Brie in an Episcopalian
’
s microwave as the alto currently in my office stood and swept the shotgun across my desk.

“
That
’
s enough reminiscing,” she said, breathing hard, the buttons on her tweed vest straining to the bursting point. “I want answers and I want them now.”

“
Well, ask me the questions and I
’
ll sing like Pavoratti in a lasagna factory.”

She slumped back into the chair, the wind going out of her ample sails and her buttons breathing an audible sigh of relief.

“
It
’
s the Bishop.”

I nodded. It was always the Bishop.

“
He
’
s gotten a judge to put a restraining order on our publishing company.”

“
Why would he do that?” I asked feigning interest. I was still more interested in the shotgun.

“
We were going into production of our latest product. A new series of Scratch-N-Sniff Anthems.”

Now I was interested and I perked up quick as Mrs. Olsen
’
s septic tank as Denver Tweed went into her marketing spiel. She pulled out a sheet of paper and started reading.

“
We understand, psychologically speaking, that certain responses are triggered within our subconscious by either visual, aural or olfactory memories. That is
--
sight, sound or smell. And this is precisely why we were about to introduce this new product, which we think will be quickly adopted by all concerned congregations.”

I nodded. I could see where she was going with this. I mean, who wouldn
’
t want to be singing “O Tannenbaum” and actually be able to smell the scent of the piney woods? Or “Lo, How A Rose” while the familiar odor of rose petals wafts through the air. And this was only scratching the surface, so to speak.