Diane Davidson - Sticks & Scones

I checked my watch. I had thirty minutes before Julian would start to worry. Undoubtedly breaking all rules of labyrinth-walking, I sprinted across the tiles to the storage room and hauled out the ladder. It was one of those extension affairs that creak horribly and feel rickety as the devil. Nevertheless, after five minutes of struggling, I wrestled the thing open and laid the top just above the center of the rose window. I took a deep breath and started climbing.

Outside, the wind whipped around the chapel walls. As I ascended, I could hear the cold air whistling through tiny cracks in the glass. Finally I reached the fourth rung from the top. I peered into the center of the rose window, which was actually a pocket of pink glass soldered inside a metal circle. What I saw there didn’t make sense. I was looking at - torn tape, paper, and plastic.

I reached in and gently tried to remove the paper and tape. It was not easy. The paper had become wedged underneath the soldering, and all my attempts to scoot it out were unsuccessful. At length, I had the bright idea to reach into the adjoining pocket of enclosed yellow glass and coax the paper the other way. Ten minutes of scraping and pushing later, the scrap of paper slipped free.

I examined it, hoping against hope that it wasn’t just an invoice from Bill’s Stained-Glass Repairs, left as a joke.

What I held in my hands was not a bill. It was the torn half of an envelope. I reached into the envelope and pulled out a small, plastic case. Inside the clear envelope was a stamp. I gasped and grabbed the rung to keep from toppling off the ladder.

The color: red-orange. The printing around the sides: One Penny, Post Office, Postage, Mauritius. And in the center, the profile of a woman: Chubby cheeks. Severe hair. Grandmotherly eyes.

Queen Victoria.

-23-

I hastily tucked the paper envelope with the plastic case and its eight-hundred-thousand-dollar stamp deep in my apron pocket. After a few heart-stopping teeters on the ladder, I finally reached the bottom, rattled the ladder down, and scooted it back to the storeroom. Then I pulled out the envelope and dropped it into a clean brown paper bag - Tom had taught me a thing or two, such as, try not to muck up evidence - before serenely transporting it out to the van along with the trash.

No one was in the Hyde Chapel lot, but I tried to act normal anyway, just in case I was being watched from somewhere, anywhere. I relocked the chapel, deposited the key in the lockbox, and revved my van up the service road, to the edge of the moat, by the castle Dumpster. I heaved in the lunch trash, hopped back into the driver’s seat, and called Sergeant Boyd on my cellular.

“Part of the loot, eh?” said Boyd, who sounded either amused or skeptical, I couldn’t tell which. “In the middle of a stained-glass window, way up high? Uh-huh.” Skeptical, definitely.

“Listen, would you?” I gulped down the impatience I in my voice, trying to remember Boyd was just doing his I job. “The Lauderdales and John Richard and Viv Manini all came into the chapel this morning right after you guys pulled off your detail. Maybe this is what they were looking for.”

“That’s an awkward place to check, without a bunch of witnesses noticing. You know - how do you disguise the fact you’re pulling out a twenty-foot ladder?”

“Sergeant!”

“Yeah, yeah, okay. Stay where you are. I’ll send somebody up to get the evidence from you.”

“I’m not staying on this service road, thanks. I just finished a catering event and I’ve still got to prep for another one tomorrow. Tell your people to meet me at the Aspen Meadow Library in twenty minutes.”

“Gee, Goldy, our homicide guys will gladly work around your catering timetable. Especially since we’re dealing with evidence worth close to a million dollars and connected to three homicides and a cop-shooting.”

“One more thing,” I said, unfazed. “Did your guys find anything in Hyde Chapel, after you took Andy’s body from the creek?”

“Nope, it was clean. In fact, that chapel brought a whole new meaning to the word clean.” He sighed. “I thought you were in a hurry to get to the library.”

I signed off, realized I’d neglected to close the lid on the Dumpster, rushed out and whacked it down, then raced to the library to meet the deputy. A uniformed young man with red hair and a red mustache unceremoniously plucked the bag from my hand and roared away.

I waved at Julian in the castle driveway. He was coming out as I was headed in. He rolled down his window and yelled that I was over my ninety-minute limit.

“I’m just an old lady caterer who can’t move as fast as you young folks!” I hollered back.

“As fast as us young folks?” Julian yelled gleefully. “Check this out!” He clanked the Rover into reverse and backed up the icy driveway. As if that weren’t enough, he then gunned the SUV backward across the causeway, over the moat. I watched from the far side, shaking my head. One error of steering, and Julian would be sleeping with the fishes.

When I caught up with him at the gatehouse, I said, “That’s not a quick path home, Julian, that’s a quick path to drowning.”

He grinned and pressed the buttons for entry to the gatehouse. Once inside, I glanced overhead into the space above the murder holes. No one appeared to be in that empty room next to Michaela’s kitchen. But in the remote event that my paranoia was translating into imagining hidden electronic eavesdropping devices, I decided not to tell Julian about the stamp.

In the kitchen, a note from the Hydes was propped up against the toaster. The luncheon had been fabulous, Sukie wrote, but utterly exhausting. She went on to say that she’d felt so sorry for me, she’d washed all the serving dishes. Now she and Eliot were eating dinner out, and we were to feel free to scrounge whatever we wanted.

“Ah, speaking of going out to dinner, Goldy?” said Julian. “Arch asked me to take him to McDonald’s, after his fencing practice. I know, I know, even the salads aren’t up to your culinary standard. But I figured, what the heck, give the kid a break from the gourmet stuff for one night.”

I smiled, paid Julian for his afternoon of work, and gave him some extra money to treat Arch and himself. Then I asked about Tom.

Julian shrugged. “I don’t know. When I looked in on him, he said he was going to change his own bandage. I have to run to Boulder to get some books before I pick up Arch, so I’m taking off. Why don’t you bring Tom some tea with fixin’s?”

Julian quickstepped away. I looked at my watch: just after three. Tea, goodies, and puzzling over an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar stamp I’d found in Hyde Chapel … was Tom up to it?

Half an hour later, I had baked a fresh batch of steaming scones and set them on a tray next to a plate of dewy butter slices, a jar of Eliot’s chokecherry jelly, and a pot of steeping English Breakfast tea. Making my way up to our room, I noticed that the courtyard looked magical under its fresh blanket of snow. If I lived here, I decided as I disarmed our door, I’d turn it into a school. A cooking school, where we ate our cookies and cakes out in the courtyard, while black-suited butlers served tea and sherry.

“I was just about to ring for all that,” Tom commented as I sashayed in with the tray. He was sitting in one of the wingback chairs doing leg-extension exercises. “I missed you today, Miss G.”

I set the tray down and gave him a careful hug. “Poor Tom. Sorry I had to work. Want to hear about it?”

And so I ran through the whole thing for him, from the early intrusions of Buddy, Chardé, John Richard, and Viv, to discovering the stamp from Mauritius in the center of the window. He whistled.