The Advent of Murder (A Faith Morgan Mystery) by Martha Ockley Page A

lanterns,” Faith added, plaintively.
    “Oh dear!” Sue responded. The three of them paused, gazing at one another a moment.
    “I know. The Spicer wedding!” Clarisse exclaimed.
    Sue nodded approvingly.
    “Good thought! The Spicer wedding.”
    “The Spicer wedding?” echoed Faith, lost. They linked arms with her, one on each side, and marched her off toward the organ.
    “Last year. Very posh. Loads of money,” Sue said, rolling her eyes.
    “They didn’t want the decorations – they left them behind and we put them in the loft,” Clarisse explained. “The theme was purple.”
    “Dark purple and cream. Very fitting,” Sue pulled a face of clownish approbation. Faith laughed out loud. They stopped at the ladder leading up to the roof space behind the organ. “Clari can show you. I don’t like ladders.” Sue looked up at the nineteenth-century turned rungs with distaste. They look sound enough, Faith told herself, a mite dubiously.
    Clarisse shimmied up the ladder with surprising ease. Faith followed her with less grace. Her knee was protesting. She paused at the top of the ladder, looking about. She’d never been up here before. Fred had always fetched anything needed from the loft.
    The loft space was a shelf of floor above the rear of the church, inconspicuous from the ground. Faith looked out, admiring the bird’s-eye view of her church. Clarisse pulled acord and the yellowish light of a bare bulb revealed a space continuing much further back than she would have guessed. There wasn’t enough head room to stand up straight. Clarisse crawled ahead of her down the narrow space left between stacks of boxes.
    “I am pretty sure the Spicer box isn’t very far back.” Her voice came back to Faith deadened by the overfilled space. “I remember helping Fred put it up here. By the way…” Her slim brown hand pointed to a tobacco-yellow canvas trunk under the eaves of a tilted board at the left-hand margin. “The principals’ pageant costumes are in there. We should get them out in the next day or so. Make sure they are OK.”
    “So what exactly are we looking for?” Faith asked.
    “There were thirty or more pairs of dark plum satin bows for the pew ends, tied off with cream-coloured sprig arrangements. As I remember, it was quite effective. If we light lots of candles, it’ll look fine, you’ll see – and, best of all, we can put them up and take them down in half an hour.”
    The front half of Clarisse was absorbed in shadows. Faith thought that even at this angle she looked as if she could be posing for a magazine cover.
    “How’s Pat doing?” Clari’s question came to her out of the dark.
    “Well, I suppose, as a vicar you learn to cope with the business of having to work ahead of where you are spiritually at this time of year,” Faith answered, thoughtfully. “But it is more difficult for laity, especially careful, faithful ones like Pat.” Clari craned her head around to stare at her.
    “What? I meant about her nephew. Wasn’t he supposed to be coming to see her this morning?”
    “What nephew? I didn’t know Pat had a nephew.” Faith was startled and then appalled. Not something else she hadmissed! Perhaps she hadn’t been spending enough time on her parish. That’s what happens when you go nosing into police investigations that don’t concern you any more…
    “Her estranged sister’s boy,” Clari was saying. “There is some family split. Fred’s the one who knows the details. Pat’s sister did something unmentionable and they stopped talking to each other years ago. The boy grew up without knowing anything about Pat. Then, just recently, he sent her a letter. I think he was tracing his family tree or some-such. Said he wanted to meet her. Pat was excited about it.”
    How shaming. For all her occasional quirks and annoying habits, Pat was a stalwart of the parish. As her vicar and pastor, how could Faith have missed something so important?
    “You didn’t know?”