Рита Браун - Cat's Eyewitness

"Why isn't it safe? I'm going up there to tear that goddamned Prior a new one!"

"No. Don't. Calm down. Uncle Thomas is dead, and so is Nordy Elliott. Okay We didn't care about Nordy like we cared about Uncle Thomas, but, Susan, those deaths were connected. I know it. I just know it. You don't want your name on the list."

Susan felt the cold air on her left cheek. "All right."

Once in Susan's kitchen, the two sat down at the wooden table. Susan poured a cup of tea for each of them.

"Look, Susan, I have no idea what's going on up there. The usual motivations for murder don't seem to apply, or if they do, I haven't figured them out. Love, sex, and money seem in short supply."

"I'm not sure about the money." Susan stared into Harry's eyes. "When G-Uncle was here for Thanksgiving, he told me he had willed me the Bland Wade tract, all fifteen hundred acres of it."

"Jeez Louise."

"Worth a great deal of money both as real estate and for timber."

"I'll say." Harry, like most Southerners, loved the land and felt one could never own enough.

"He said that the monastery life was dying. But I don't know as he would have given it to the Greyfriars anyway. In his way, he had a sense of family, even though he was separate from us much of the time."

"Who knows?"

"Ned. Brooks. Danny. The will hasn't been read yet, so I don't know if Brother Handle knows."

"Fifteen hundred acres in Albemarle County might be pretty good motivation to kill someone—if you thought it was coming to you."

"Me?" Susan's hand flew to her heart.

"No, silly, Brother Handle."

"Now I'm doubly upset. Rick is going to ask me all kinds of questions. I'll be a suspect."

"That's his job. He's been sheriff a long time. He's got a sense of who kills and who doesn't, according to the circumstances."

"That's reassuring," Susan said sarcastically.

"Relax."

"Easy for you to say."

"Look, something is going on on top of that mountain. We need to find out what the hell it is."

"Look what happened to Nordy. Maybe he found out."

33

When Nordy Elliott got up that morning, he didn't know he was going to die." Herb Jones's deep voice filled his office, a simple, beautiful room, windows overlooking the exquisite quad of St. Luke's Lutheran Church.

His two cats, Elocution and Cazenovia, lounged on the back of the leather sofa, eyes open, appearing to drink in every word.

"Keep going, Poppy, it's good," Cazenovia, the long-haired calico, encouraged him.

"He rose, as do we all, filled the time with the daily chores, then drove to work. How could any of—no, wait, that's not right." He stopped, scribbled on his papers.

"Yo ho."

"I'm in the office, Harry. Come on in."

She trooped in, shedding her coat as she walked down the hallway, hanging it on a peg just outside his door. Mrs. Murphy, Pewter, and Tucker accompanied her.

"Rev, you look divine in your spectacles."

"Very funny." He removed his glasses, got up from his chair, and walked to the sofa. "Before I sit down, coffee, tea, sherry?"

"Nothing for me."

"Well, I need fortification. This service for Nordy—" He shook his head. "Can't find the right tone."

"Didn't his parents ship his body back to, where was it, Michigan?"

Herb poured himself a small glass of port, then joined Harry. The four cats squeezed around the two humans, while Tucker plopped in front of the fireplace filled with crackling applewood.

"I think so. Pete thought we should have a small service for those who knew him. But I hardly knew the man. A pushy sort." Herb shrugged. "I don't want to stand up there and mouth platitudes."

"You could never do that," Elocution praised him.

"He's the only reason Mom comes to church. She wants to hear Herb's sermons." Mrs. Murphy noted the large walnut trees outside the window. The birds fluttered on the branches, because Herb had placed a large bird feeder in the tree nearest the window.

"Maybe Pete can help," Harry suggested.

"Pete wasn't overfond of him." Herb smiled slightly.

"Everyone was a launching pad for Nordy's career, especially Pete, I guess."

"I suppose a reporter needs to be aggressive, have a big ego, but I think Pete thought Nordy wasn't half as smart as Nordy thought he was." Herb sipped the delicious fortified spirits. "God bless the people who invented port."

"Dionysus."

"Wine."

'Well, isn't port fortified wine?"

'It's a balance of wine, which is fruit, after all, and brandy. Port, at its best, is regal," Herb answered.

'You feel about port the way I feel about orange pekoe tea." She smiled. "When it's right, it lifts me right up." She snuggled down in the deep leather cushions, where many a rear end had parked over the decades. "Aren't you going to ask me why I've come calling?"

"You'll tell me when you're ready, but I know it isn't about any issues before the vestry board."

"How do you know that?"

"You're usually armed with papers or you're in tandem with Tazio Chappars."

"Don't you want to worm it out of me?" she teased him. "Take your mind off the eulogy."

"Nordy." He leaned on the large curved arm, a needlepoint pillow behind his back. "Pete may have sold him short. Nordy was like a terrier, he wouldn't give up. I suppose I could comment on his persistence. Persistent in more areas than his career, too, so I've heard."

"True enough, but he was barking up the wrong tree with BoomBoom—to continue your terrier image."

"Terriers are mental," Tucker flatly stated.

"They're just scrappy, Tucker, not considered and reasonable like you," Elocution purred.

"But some have tails." Pewter giggled.

"The good ones don't." Tucker barked.

"Tucker, you're not part of this discussion," Harry reprimanded her corgi.

"You don't have to listen to Pewter's insults," the dog said.

"A simple observation isn't an insult." Pewter's voice was syrupy.

"You all can talk all you want, but if any cat opens the closet containing the communion wafers, there will be a serious blessing," Herb's voice rumbled.

Harry laughed. "People will be telling the story of the cats eating the communion wafers when we're all resting in the graveyard." She stopped as the word "graveyard" prompted her toward her subject. "The real reason I'm here, apart from enjoying your company, is to ask you about the Greyfriars. You probably know the men up there better than the rest of us do."

"Some."

"Over the years you've formed an opinion of the Prior, of Brother Prescott and Andrew and poor old Thomas."

"I have."

"And?"

He sipped the deep red liquid, Cockburn 1987, a decent enough year, although Herb had laid away a case of 1983 and was just waiting for 2010, when he thought it would peak. "The religious life, on the surface, appears benign, noncompetitive. Factor in a group of men who have retreated from the world, and it would seem an easy life. It isn't. A ministry is difficult, because if you truly tend to your flock, if a priest, pastor, reverend has a church, you deal with birth, death, marriage, divorce, disappointments, betrayals, the whole human range of emotions. You have financial woes, as you know from serving on the vestry board. You have politics." He inhaled. "You get two human beings together, honey chile, and you got politics. So the brothers have many of the same problems the rest of us do, and in a funny way I think that makes it all the harder for them."

"Why?"

"Because they withdraw to the contemplative life believing it will succor them. At least, that's what I think. And because they have no women. Women sweeten life." He held up his hand. "I don't mean that in a loose way. I mean female energy changes a man. Look at how we work together on that vestry."

"Sometimes I think it's a lot of hot air."