Marcia Talley - Daughter of Ashes

It seemed unthinkable that such a beautiful and vibrant young woman had had only one more year to live.

‘Often, while contemplating works of art… I have felt entering into me a kind of vision of the childhood of their creators. Some little sorrow, some small pleasure of the child, inordinately inflated by an exquisite sensibility, become later on in the adult man, even without his knowing it, the basis of a work of art… Genius is nothing but childhood clearly formulated, newly endowed with virile and powerful means of self-expression.’

Charles Baudelaire, Artificial Paradises , ‘An Opium-eater, VI. The Genius as a Child,’ 1860

By the time I got back to Our Song from the library, it was after three – too late to pay a visit to the Nightingales, as much as I wanted to. I considered telephoning and had actually picked up my cell phone to do so when it began to vibrate in my hand. I checked the caller I.D.: Fran.

‘Steve and I were wondering if you and Paul would like to come back to the house for a drink after the concert tonight,’ she said.

Concert? What concert?

‘We should wrap up at St Timothy’s around eight or eight-thirty,’ she continued.

‘Right,’ I said as the light slowly dawned. Dang! Did I have to purchase tickets in advance?

‘I’ve arranged for comp tickets. They’re holding them at the door,’ she barreled on before I’d had a chance to embarrass myself by admitting that the event had completely slipped my mind.

‘Thanks, Fran,’ I told her, ‘but I’ll need only one. Should have told you that Paul wasn’t able to come this weekend. Teaching sailing to the plebes.’

‘No problem,’ she said. ‘See you later.’

‘Can I bring anything?’

‘Oh, no,’ Fran said. ‘It’s all taken care of.’

I’ll bet , I thought as I hung up the phone. My brownies probably wouldn’t have passed her rigid ten-point inspection anyway – color, texture, moisture level, quality of nuts and who knows what else.

I took a quick shower and changed into something more appropriate – a sundress with a lightweight jacket – although I wasn’t completely sure what the citizens of Elizabethtown would consider appropriate for a seven o’clock Saturday evening concert.

At six-forty, I parked in my usual spot behind the county courthouse and walked the two blocks to the church, a classic brick colonial with an impressive white wooden steeple. St Timothy’s sat well back on a generous lot with mature trees and well-trained boxwood hedges that only two centuries of loving attention can achieve.

The pews were three-quarters full when I entered the sanctuary and the usher told me they were already out of printed programs. Would I mind sharing? I wandered down the aisle looking for a seat next to someone I knew, close enough to hear the music but not so close that I’d be blasted out of my seat by the trumpet section. Frantic waving up front near the baptismal font caught my eye – Caitlyn Dymond, dressed in black jeans, a white shirt and a festively embroidered Mexican vest was trying to attract my attention. She pointed to an empty spot in the pew next to her and mouthed, For you .

Rather than crawl over the ten concertgoers already comfortably seated in the pew, I headed up the side aisle to join her. ‘Thanks,’ I said as I slid into place next to her. ‘I was hoping there’d be someone here that I knew. They ran out of programs.’

‘Golly,’ she said, ‘I think the whole town is here.’

Caitlyn was right. Once I got settled in I realized there were many familiar faces in the crowd. Councilman Jack Ames, for example, arm stretched lazily over the back of the pew behind his beautiful wife, Susan. ‘Sit any closer,’ I said, indicating the pair, ‘and he’d be past her.’

Caitlyn snorted, then handed me the program.

As Fran had promised when she first told me about it, the concert opened with Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 4 in D major, a piece in three movements being performed that evening by a soloist named Thomas Glass, an eighteen-year-old freshman at the local community college. The piece was only twenty-five minutes long, so there was no intermission before the Mendelssohn, only the longish pause for extended applause while young Thomas took four well-deserved curtain calls.

‘The program says that Mozart wrote that concerto when he was only nineteen,’ I commented in the break between pieces. ‘And the Italian Symphony was begun when Mendelssohn was only twenty. Factor in our eighteen-year-old violinist, and do I detect a theme?’

‘Prodigies,’ Caitlyn whispered. ‘It’s scary. When I was nineteen all I worried about was clothes and makeup and whether the captain of the football team was going to ask me to Homecoming.’ She squeezed my arm. ‘He was gorgeous !’

While the conductor waited in the wings for the orchestra to retune, I noticed that Jack Ames and his wife were taking the opportunity to glad-hand up and down the pews. ‘Tacky,’ I whispered. ‘And where are their children, I wonder? And the dog?’

‘I don’t know about the dog, Hannah, but there’s a nursery in the church basement,’ Caitlyn said. ‘My kids are down there now, probably running their teenage sitters ragged.’

Dwight sat in a front pew with Grace, of course, as the concert was a benefit for the humane society shelter. I was glad to see them; they certainly deserved a break, and Rusty would not be lacking for caregivers at the hospital. Kim Marquis and the young man who must be her steady boyfriend, Will, gave me a wave, as did Penny, the cashier at the High Spot.

I craned my neck to take in the rest of the sanctuary. At the back, leaning against a rack of pamphlets, arms folded across his uniformed chest, stood Sheriff Hubbard.

‘I wonder if they’re any closer to finding out who strangled Kendall?’ I whispered to Caitlyn.

‘Half the people in this room had a motive.’ She grinned. ‘You. Me.’ She jerked her head in the direction of the Ames. ‘Jack, too.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh, they look all lovey-dovey now, him and Sue, but last year at the real estate office there was a huge blowup.’

‘Oooh, tell me about it.’

‘Well, Kendall’s got this tract of land north of town. It’s zoned agricultural, but if she could get the city council to zone it commercial, she’d make a killing. She’s been contributing heavily to Jack’s campaign. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours, you know. She told me a couple of weeks ago that the zoning was in the bag.’

‘The blowup?’ I reminded her.

‘Oh, yeah. Well, Jack had been spending a lot of time with Kendall at the office. One night I was working late putting up new listings in the front office window when Sue barged in breathing fire.’ Caitlyn leaned in and lowered her voice even further. ‘Jack was with Kendall in her office with the door shut.’

‘Were they having an affair?’ I asked.

She shrugged. ‘Who knows? But I hardly think they’d be screwing in there with me in the next office with my ear pressed to the wall. So to speak.’ She paused. ‘I think they used to have a thing going, but that was way back in high school, before Jack even met Susan. I honestly don’t know how she did it.’

‘Did what?’

Caitlyn smiled wickedly. ‘Kendall had the knack for staying on friendly terms with all her ex-boyfriends. Me? I loathe my two exes, not that I ever married either of them. Boyd is my one and only.’

‘Is he here? Boyd, I mean?’

‘My husband? Sadly, no. He’s in the National Guard training recruits up in Elkton this weekend. And there’s another of Kendall’s conquests,’ she said, indicating with a sideways jerk of her head the Chicken à la King who had just entered the church and had stopped to chat with Sheriff Hubbard.