castle. I emphatically told Julian that he was going to take the rest of the afternoon off. He’d earned it, I insisted.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said, scanning the chapel interior, which still contained remnants of the party. “And what are you going to do if the Lauderdales show up again?”
“I’ll throw the bolt while I’m finishing up,” I said diffidently. “And I’ll park the van right next to the door.”
“Tell you what, boss, I’ll take the ice tubs, the chafers, and the last of the serving dishes. If you want, you can bring the platters and trash.”
“I’ll be okay.” I strode to the door and pointed to the dead bolt. “Charde and Buddy, even Viv, might all have keys. My mistake was in trusting Eliot’s memory that we were the only ones who had one.”
“That guy’s nice,” Julian commented, “but he’s a birdbrain, for sure.”
“I’ll be fine.”
Julian still looked unconvinced. “All right, listen. I’ll take my load up while you finish here. You’re not back at the castle in an hour and a half, I’m coming back.”
I agreed. It would not take me more than twenty minutes to load the platters, then pack the trash and toss it into the castle Dumpster, located on the far side of the moat by a service road. Each time Julian overestimated how long I needed to do a chore, I accused him of treating me as if I were old and decrepit. He never denied it, drat him.
I bolted the door and reflected on what I had not told Julian: that I wanted to have a good look at the chapel myself, as it was awfully close to the crime scene created by Andy’s body and Tom’s being shot. First I applied myself to finishing the cleanup, which took seventeen minutes. I scrutinized the interior space to make sure we had not forgotten anything. The chapel looked spanking clean. Even with Marla’s premature dive into the cake, the luncheon had been a success, and I was thankful.
At that moment I felt as if the shiny stones of the labyrinth were beckoning to me. Pink light from the rose window skipped across the marble, and my skin prickled. What had Eliot said? You walk the labyrinth to arrive at your spiritual truth. I hadn’t been doing too well in the truth department lately, so why not try it before I snooped around?
My mind dredged up a bit of Scripture: I still my soul and make it quiet, / like a child upon its mothers breast; / my soul is quieted within me.
After a few moments, I moved forward, feeling strangely hesitant. As I walked, concentrating on the tortuous path seemed to clear my mind of the questions currently plaguing me - who’d killed Andy and why, who’d shot Tom and why, who’d shot at our window and why, and who’d killed Mo Hartfield after he’d inexplicably stolen our computers. As I put one foot in front of the other, I felt a calming presence. I was moving forward - either into or away from my life, I couldn’t tell which.
Finally I arrived at the labyrinth’s center. I could have sworn I heard my heart beating. Gazing back at the swirls and turns of the flat marble stones, I felt serenity - for the first time in a week. Outside, the sun emerged from behind a cloud and splattered pink light over the path. Eliot’s audiotape as well as his lecture had detailed the mystical significance of distances at Chartres. From the center of the labyrinth to the base of the portal was the same distance as from the base of the portal to the center of the rose window. I looked up at the rosy pattern of stained glass.
Now there was a surprise. Instead of Sukie-inspired cleanliness on the multicolored sections of glass, the center of the rose window looked as if someone had left a blotch of dirt… .
At the center you will find God, the tape had said. Maybe what was up there wasn’t dirt. Maybe someone: who knew the symbolism of the labyrinth had put something else there, something important. Or maybe my paranoia was kicking in again.
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
