"Hello."
"Alicia, Harry, and I will be at Shorty's in half an hour, tops. Come on. I'll buy you breakfast."
"Wait a minute."
The others recognized the voice of Mary O'Brien, a doctor in Staunton.
"She's checking her book." BoomBoom opened her coat, unwound her cashmere scarf.
"I'll see you there." With that, Mary hung up.
As they pulled onto Interstate 64, heading west, BoomBoom stayed extra alert. Within five minutes they dropped down out of the fog that enshrouded the top of Afton Mountain. Below them spread the incomparable Shenandoah Valley, resting under a low gray cloud cover.
"Did you see that chinchilla coat Mary wore last Saturday?" BoomBoom loved clothes.
"Her mother's. Beautiful. You don't see chinchilla much these days." Alicia petted Tucker, who decided attention was better than looking at the Waynesboro exits.
"I always wanted a silver fox." Harry saw the Wendy's sign flash by, a stop for her in the hot weather. She liked the Frosties.
"I didn't know you were interested in furs," BoomBoom said.
"Well," a long pause followed, "I am, kind of, but my fashion sense is limited."
"Not a fashionista." BoomBoom—who was—said this without sarcasm.
"White T-shirt or white shirts, Levi's 501s, my cowboy boots or winter boots, an old cashmere sweater, and Dad's bomber jacket, unless it's hateful cold." Harry listed her wardrobe.
"You wore those two-carat diamond stud earrings at the Hospice Foundation." Alicia liked Harry. " Very becoming."
"Mother's. Kind of like Mary's chinchilla coat."
"Your mother dressed beautifully." BoomBoom remembered the elegant, soft-spoken Mrs. Minor, nee Hepworth.
"You know that show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy?" Harry asked. "I need Queer Eye for the Straight Girl, except I don't think those boys would exactly get a country girl."
"They would. You have good bones and a great body," BoomBoom complimented her.
"You noticed." Alicia laughed.
BoomBoom blushed. "Sure. I've noticed since we were in first grade and Harry and I were forever competing in every sport there was. I'd win at some, she'd win the others."
"Then puberty hit. You got the big ta-tas." Harry giggled.
"You don't want bosoms out of proportion to the rest of your body," BoomBoom simply replied.
"Look, if you want a wardrobe overhaul, tell me and I'll go down to Nordstrom's with you, down in Short Pump. I'm not going up to Tyson's Corner. Wild horses couldn't drag me up there, especially now before Christmas, but I'll go to Short Pump after the holidays," Alicia offered.
"Thank you." Harry didn't mention that she didn't have the money, although the other two knew it.
Alicia, generous to a fault, was thinking to herself how to help Harry without embarrassing her by giving her the money. She'd find a way, just as she'd sent money anonymously to the Almost Home Pet Adoption Center in Nelson County after running into Bo Newell.
"If I took what I spend on clothes each year and put it in the stock market, I'd be a rich woman," BoomBoom mused.
"You're already a rich woman," Alicia corrected her. "You work for it. You might as well spend it. You can't take it with you. Witness Brother Thomas."
"Did he have anything?" BoomBoom asked.
"Yes," Harry informed them. "He inherited the fifteen hundred acres of Bland Wade land. Monks have the right to private property, to income from their labors. Over centuries this has caused abuses. There have been spasms of reform. But Brother Thomas had money. Don't know more than that." Harry paused. "Hmm, I wonder who else knew—about Brother Thomas's financial condition?" Harry stroked Tucker's ear.
"Don't go off on money." BoomBoom laughed.
Once at Shorty's, Tucker had to stay in the truck. Harry brought her sausages, putting them on the floor on paper towels, although BoomBoom didn't really care. Fussy as she could be about her own appearance, BoomBoom wasn't a queen about her truck. She loved animals, accepting the shedding, the little dropped bits of kibble here and there, wet nose smears, and muddy paw-prints on the windows.
The three filled in Mary about events on the mountain.
"No autopsy." Harry jabbed at her eggs.
"That's not unusual." Mary drank a strong cup of coffee.
"You're a doctor; don't you think everyone should have an autopsy?" Harry prodded.
"Not until they're dead," Mary dryly replied.
"I read, I think it was in the Wall Street Journal, about noninvasive autopsies, kind of like Magnetic Resonance Imaging for corpses," Alicia said. She read five newspapers every day.
"It's so expensive. There's no way the staff at Augusta Medical is going to put a, shall we say, ripe corpse in the MRI machine and then use it for a live patient. And there's no way the county can afford an MRI for the dead. The price for this procedure on one corpse is about four thousand dollars."
"Four thousand dollars," Harry gasped. "I could put up a three-board fence in one paddock for that!"
"Oak or treated pine?" Mary asked, blue eyes twinkling.
As they were all country women, they were keenly aware of such costs. The fluctuations in lumber prices affected them a great deal.
"But don't you find it odd, no autopsy?"
"No. As a doctor, I would like to know the exact cause of each death, but for many family members, the procedure upsets them. They think it violates their loved ones, and I can understand that although I don't agree. When the soul leaves the body, that's that. Use the body to learn. I see Brother Andrew and Brother John at the Health Co-op"—she named a clinic for the poor—"and they feel the same way. In this case, the autopsy would need to be requested by Susan."
"Susan feels he should rest in peace." Alicia happily ate her eggs, sunny-side up.
"Harry, why are you obsessing about this?" BoomBoom figured she knew the answer but asked anyway.
"Well, what if he didn't die of natural causes?"
"I knew it!" BoomBoom triumphantly said. "Harry, you see a murderer behind every bush, I swear."
16
Arrogant twit." Pewter, her low opinion of all fowl confirmed, had been listening to Tucker recount her conversation with the cardinal.
Mrs. Murphy listened to the cherry logs crackle in the living-room fireplace as she reposed on the wing chair facing the old mantel with Wedgwood inserts. Pewter faced her in the other wing chair while Tucker had plopped in front of the fire.
Harry, at that moment, was opening a can of asparagus. Since she was in the kitchen she missed the conversation—not that she could have understood any of it, but she did listen when her animals spoke. From time to time, she grasped a bit of what they tried to convey to her. She hadn't gone into the basement or she would have instantly grasped the fury both cats wished to convey. They had turned their spite at being left behind on the fifty-pound bags of thistle and wild birdseed Harry stored there. With the bottoms neatly torn open, the tiny seeds spread over the concrete floor, long tendrils of edibles. Satisfied with the mess, the two returned upstairs to await Harry and Tucker.
"Brother Thomas knocked off his perch," Tucker said.
"Birdbrain," Pewter added.
"Brother Thomas, or are you still referring to the cardinal?" Mrs. Murphy sat up to stretch.
"Both," Pewter succinctly replied.
"That's mean, Pewts," Tucker said. "Brother Thomas wasn't a birdbrain."
"Well, he was stupid enough to pray in that bitter cold and blinding snow and then get choked to death or strangled." Pewter, despite her thick gray fur, hated cold.
"He wasn't strangled. The cardinal said a monk put his hand over Brother Thomas's mouth; he saw it through the blowing snow."
"Mmm, if he was strangled it would have shown. Apart from the marks on his neck, his eyeballs would have been bloodshot." Mrs. Murphy, having killed many a mouse and mole, although never by strangulation, had a sense of what happened according to type of death. And being a cat, she didn't shy from this as a human might.