The Last Suppers

CHAPTER 1 Never cater your own wedding reception. It’s bad luck, sort of like the groom seeing the bride before the service. Death or destruction could result. Not to mention ruined cake. Thirty minutes before I was due to get married for the second—and last, I’d sworn—time, I was trying to check on stuffed mushrooms as I listened to directions from Lucille Boatwright, head of the Altar Guild, about how to walk. Sixtyish, with an aristocratically wide, high-cheek-boned face framed by silver hair curled into neat rows, Lucille made the decisions about how the weddings were run at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, no matter what you read in the prayer book. Sway and pause, sway and pause. Goldy, are you paying attention to me? At that moment, I would have given anything to see Tom Schulz, bad luck or no. But the groom-to-be was not around. Perhaps he’d had a call on his beeper. The Sheriff’s Department of Furman County, Colorado, put great stock in Tom; he was their top homicide investigator. Still, it was hard to believe the Sheriff’s Department would call on him on this of all days. While Lucille yammered on, I longed for a comforting Schulz embrace before the ceremony. Suddenly our parish’s newly hired organist sounded the opening notes of the first piece of prelude music: Jeremiah Clarke’s Trumpet Voluntary. Lucille Boatwright stopped swaying and pausing, whisked the platter of mushrooms out of my hands, and bustled me out of the church kitchen. In the hall, Lucille crisply ordered a group of whispering women back to work in the kitchen. Then she scurried to retrieve my garment bag from the church nursery. The Sunday School rooms had no privacy, she informed me briskly, and the bride traditionally dressed in the church office building, even if that antiquated edifice was undergoing a horrid renovation. And speaking of horrid: I asked if anyone had been able to get into Hymnal House, another church-owned building, where Tom’s and my wedding reception was supposed to be held. Unfortunately, the old house across the street was locked up tight. Lucille’s stalwart body bristled inside her scarlet suit. She shook the perfect rows of silver hair and announced that Father Olson was supposed to have opened Hymnal House this morning. She herself had had to open the priest’s office building when she’d arrived. Imperiously, she pointed to the empty, unlocked office building, ten yards from the side door of St. Luke’s. Goldy! Pay attention! Twenty-seven-and-a-half minutes. Great. No groom, no historic Hymnal House dining room, no food being set up. And no caterer; I was trying to be the bride. Clutching my garment bag, I hopped gingerly across the walkway. Gray flagstones and buckled wooden steps led to the St. Luke’s office, a squat century-old building that originally had served as a stagecoach way station between Denver, forty miles to the east, and points west. Small squares of thick-glassed windows peeked out from the thick paneling of vertical unpeeled pine logs. Now the office building formed part of a national historic district along with the buildings from the once-famous Aspen Meadow Episcopal Conference Center across the street: rustic, log-built Hymnal House and cavernous Brio Barn. I glanced at the higgledy-piggledy boarding-up job that was the only indication of the pipes that had exploded in the office during a hard freeze this February. At the old conference center, Brio Barn was also falling apart, but the office emergency and its renovation had taken priority. Our parish priest, Father Olson, had told me historic districts ate money the way catering clients gobbled hors d’oeuvre. Once I’d pushed through the door to the office, I couldn’t see or hear a soul, much less catch the strains of prelude music, all of which had undergone the required approval of Father “Please-call-me-Ted” Olson. The only noise reaching my ears as I hastily wriggled into my new beige silk suit was from a family of raccoons scratching in the attic over the office. I concentrated on a dozen tiny pearl buttons that made me wonder if I should be serving smoked oysters instead of smoked trout. From a purple satin bag looped around the suit’s hanger, I carefully removed and then snapped on a stunning double-strand pearl choker on loan from an upcoming Episcopal Church Women’s fund-raiser. Marla Korman, my best friend and matron of honor, had somehow convinced the churchwomen that letting me wear the two-thousand-dollar bauble would be great advertising for their upcoming jewelry raffle. When she’d proffered the necklace, Marla had waved a plump, bejeweled hand and boasted to me about the unique advantages of her fund-raiser: easier than a bake sale, and a thousand times more profitable. I looked around for a mirror. Where was Marla, anyway? I sighed; there wasn’t time to worry about what was out of my control. My mind raced over post-wedding details that would have to be altered if no one could find the keys to Hymnal House. If we had the receiving line and photographs at the church, that would still give my helpers enough time to set up the food in the Hymnal House dining room—once they forced their way in. Poking a pearl-topped pin to secure a brimmed hat to my unruly blond hair, I imagined parishioners’ comments on my bridal appearance: Shirley Temple dressing up as Princess Di. I shuddered and visualized the reception food. All the lovely platters and heavy chafing dishes had been hastily left in the church kitchen when the helpers couldn’t get into Hymnal House. Whether the hotel pans would survive the transport across the bumpy ice and gravel of the church parking lot, across the bridge over Cottonwood Creek and Main Street, and up the walkway to the conference center was questionable. One unexpected bump on the gravel, and the smoked trout with cream cheese could spew everywhere. An inept move could send a layer of the carefully constructed cake on a slide into the frigid creek. And if Father Olson droned on about the loveliness of marriage—about which he knew nothing—the Portobello mushrooms would be history. The low door into the slope-ceilinged office building bumped open. “As usual, Father Olson is late,” Lucille Boatwright declared, her ice-blue eyes ablaze. “We can’t keep you over here any longer. If Olson wants to give you the premarital blessing, he’ll have to do it in the sacristy.” She looked me up and down. “Father Pinckney never would have been late. Never in fifteen years was Father Pinckney late for one wedding.” Blandly conservative Father Pinckney, now retired and living in his native South Carolina, had attained hero status among the older generation in our parish. Despite the fact that the charismatic Father Olson had become our new rector three years ago, Lucille and her cohorts had, for the most part, managed to ignore him. She lifted her chin. It was wide and dauntingly sharp, and boasted a shuddering dimple. “The bridal bouquets have arrived.” She narrowed her eyes at the pearl choker. “Did Olson say he was picking up the groom? It looks as if they are both late.” Oh, for heaven’s sake. I bit my lip, then stopped when I realized I was wearing lipstick, not my custom. “I don’t know their transportation arrangements, sorry. I haven’t seen either since last night. We had a small supper after the rehearsal here at the church.…” I did not mention to Lucille that after that supper, Tom Schulz and I had undergone our last premarital counseling session with Father Olson. The session had not gone well, which I put down to nerves. But telling anyone in our church a tidbit of personal information was tantamount to publishing it in the local newspaper. This was especially true if you prefaced your comments with, This is confidential. Lucille groaned at my lack of information and told me to put on my beige wedding shoes. I did; they were even more uncomfortable than I remembered. Then, dutifully, I followed Lucille’s dumpling-shaped body as it swiftly marched back across the ice- and mud-crusted walkway between the old office and the contemporary-style St. Luke’s building. The air was cold; thin sheets of cloud filmed the sky overhead. Rising haze from melting snow formed a pale curtain between the soaring A-shape of the church roof and the ridge of distant mountains. I dodged across the flagstones to avoid the mud. Flickers flitted between the lodgepole pines and the construction trenches of the incomplete St. Luke’s columbarium near the parking lot. Farther down, chickadees twittered and dove between the bare-branched aspens and the banks of icy, swollen Cottonwood Creek. The high, dramatic strains of the trumpet voluntary reached my ears. This is it; everything’s going to be okay. At that moment, in spite of the awful shoes, the locked Hymnal House, and the too-typical lateness of both priest and groom, excitement zinged up my spine. I’m getting married. Our wedding was going to happen despite the threat of April snow here at eight thousand feet above sea level. Despite the fact that it was a Saturday in Lent, when Father Olson said weddings were not traditionally performed. On that subject, Olson had laughingly informed me, the Altar Guild was having a fit about the luxuriant flower arrangements I’d ordered for the altar during this traditionally penitential season. Unfortunately for church procedure, the last Saturday in Lent was the only time Tom Schulz and I could fit getting married into our zany work schedules. We both had to be back in Aspen Meadow by Tuesday so Tom could testify in court and I could cater a three-day meeting of the diocesan Board of Theological Examiners, a church committee to which I’d recently been appointed. Our three-day honeymoon at the Beaver Creek Lodge would be short, sweet, and unencumbered by telephones and food processors. I hopped gracelessly across the last mud puddle and onto the sidewalk. Actually, the most astonishing fact was that I was getting married at all. In spite of everything. For seven years I had been the wife of an abusive doctor. I’d left the disastrous marriage with a wonderful son, Arch, now twelve; the ability to cook; and an emotional scar the size of Pike’s Peak. I had thrown myself into developing a catering business and sworn off marriage forever and ever. But then Investigator Tom Schulz had appeared and refused to leave. Tom had convinced me of his kindness and durability, even if we had argued last night. About the afterlife, of all things. Facing marriage for a lifetime, I’d asked at our last premarital counseling session, who cared about Pie in the Sky By-and-By? At the mention of the hereafter, Father Olson had rolled his eyes and murmured, “Ah, eschatology,” as if it were a truffle. My stint as a third-grade Sunday School teacher hadn’t covered “ ’til death do us part.” Father Olson had said we would have a very long time to discuss it. “Hurry along now,” chided Lucille as she pulled open the side door to St. Luke’s. From inside the church, the high peals of organ music mingled with the buzz and shuffling of arriving guests. She shooed me into the sacristy, the tiny room adjoining the sanctuary where the priest and acolytes put on their vestments before each service. On the counter next to the parish register lay two bouquets of the same type as the disputed altar flowers: luscious spills of creamy white stock and fragrant freesia, tiny pink carnations and white and pink sweetheart roses. There was one for me and one for Marla, who in addition to being best friend and matron of honor, was the other ex-wife of my first husband. Lucille informed me Marla was out in the narthex, “giggling wildly with that jewelry raffle committee, but what else would you expect?” She would send her back. Lucille’s tone signaled her opinion of both the raffle committee and Marla, its chairwoman. Giving me another of her razor-edged glances, she commanded me to stay put. Arch craned his neck around the door to the sacristy. He pushed his glasses up his freckled nose and said, “I know. You’re nervous, right?”