No, I had to agree, I would not.
For the rest of the night I sat by my front window with the house lights off, drinking coffee by the gallon, waiting for Phil Shatsky to return to his house on the good chance he’d come knocking at my door.
He didn’t. His car never pulled into the driveway.
Ada. Esther. Ruth. Martha.
What did it mean?
At six a.m. on the dot, I called Martin’s bakery. He was working again, sounding as bleary and depressed as I felt.
“Oh, hi, Bubbles. Is this the big day?”
“Tomorrow.” I rubbed my eyes, trying to stay awake. “You hear anything from Sandy?”
Please say yes!
“You’d be the first to know if I had,” he said.
Damn. Now what?
“How about you?” he asked.
“Ditto, though, listen Martin. Tell Sandy I ran into the medical technician who found the glue in her private toilet. Apparently, her prints aren’t on any of the stuff.”
“I know,” he said.
“You know?”
The bell in his store tinkled. “Yeah. Found out the other day. If Sandy had been here, I could have told her. Shoot. I got a customer. I gotta go. Do you think she’s okay?”
“Sure,” I lied. “Just scared. But you know Sandy, always responsible.”
Wheeling around town on six peppermint schnapps.
“Promise you’ll call if you hear anything.”
I promised and hung up. I should have made Sandy phone him last night. It might have been the last time they spoke.
Okay, I had a whole day ahead of me and no sleep to keep me going. Tonight I had to walk down the aisle in Lehigh University’s chapel in preparation for the Big Walk on Saturday. I had to sit next to Dan at the rehearsal dinner and pretend all was hunky-dory.
As for Stiletto?
Cripes. I couldn’t think about it. I was barely functioning as I was. Plus, I was about to throw up from all the coffee.
I went upstairs, took a long, hot shower, went in to my room and promptly passed out on my bed. I woke to a muffled knock at my door and drool puddling at the corner of my mouth. I had no idea where I was or the date or why my hair had dried into a tangled mass or why I wasn’t at work.
All I knew was that it was snowing pretty heavily and it was almost a quarter after noon and that I was half naked, wrapped in a towel.
“Mom?”
The door opened a crack. I got up and gathered the towel around me. And then I remembered. It was Friday. I wasn’t at work because I’d been fired. So why was Jane home?
“Why aren’t you at school?” I roared.
“Because I don’t have school,” Jane said, coming in quietly, carrying what looked to be a newspaper. She was wearing a black T-shirt that said in gold letters CAL-IBAN that at first glance I misread as TALIBAN. “It’s the Friday before Christmas. We have vacation.”
I slapped my forehead. I was a bad, bad mother. Dr. Caswell had been right. I couldn’t keep track of my kid’s vacation. I even let her wear T-shirts advertising terrorist groups.
Jane sat on the corner of my bed and eyed me with alarm. “Were you passed out?”
“Yes! I was so tired.”
“You mean, you got wasted on shots like Grandma?”
It took me a while to figure out what she was saying. “No, no. I stayed up all night spying on Phil Shatsky. I didn’t have anything to drink, well, except for a couple of pots of coffee. I had to stay awake to see if he came home.”
“Oh.” Jane seemed confused, though I couldn’t imagine why.
“Have you heard from Sandy?”
“No. Where is she?”
“Good question.” I pointed to the newspaper. “Is that today’s?”
“Wednesday’s. I wanted to read Debbie Shatsky’s obituary.” She folded it to the obituary section and pointed to a paragraph. “What does this mean, Order of the Eastern Star?”
I took the paper. “Hah! This is why Mr. Salvo taught us in Two Guys journalism class never to abbreviate on the assumption the reader always knows. For example, you shouldn’t write ACLU on first reference. It’s the American Civil—”
“Mom. What
is
the Order of the Eastern Star?”
“It’s one of those secretive Masonic women’s organizations. Genevieve knows all about it, being a dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy theorist. Don’t get her started. She’s got this map of Washington, D.C., that shows how the Pentagon, the Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol and the White House make a Pentagram and the Masonic sign.”
Jane stared at me. “How much coffee did you say you had?”
“A lot. What do you care about the OES?”
“I don’t know. Those four biblical names kept me up all night. G and I were working on them.”
“G?”
“He knows a lot about codes, actually. From playing video games. They’re all about codes.”
Of course. I knew there had to be some value to playing Super Monkey Ball for twelve hours straight.
“Hold on. I want to get that encyclopedia.” Jane left the room.
I took the opportunity to slip on a pair of jeans and a royal blue turtleneck sweater. I grabbed the pump bottle from my dresser and wetted my hair, pulling it back into a bun. Then I did my eyes in blue with blue mascara and plunked in a pair of blue earrings Stiletto had given me.
I was very blue, in more ways than one.
When I was done, Jane was back, reading furiously. “This is it, Mom, though I have no idea what it means. The star in the Order of the Eastern Star is upside down. The points all mean something: Ada, Ruth, Martha, Esther and Electa.”
“Electa?” I made a face. “Who names their kid Electa?”
“Not to pun but you’re missing the point. Rearrange them. Ada, Esther, Ruth and Martha. Those are the names in the computer file. 1-5-19-14. Those are the numerical equivalents.”
I’d seen that number before, though not in that way. Split up. But where?
“You know what this means, don’t you?” I asked rhetorically, having finally grasped that concept. “It means we have to go to Genevieve. Genevieve will know what this means.”
“That’s okay. I love Genevieve.”
“She’ll be dressed as the Virgin Mary and riding a donkey while selling snow globes.”
Jane swallowed hard. “No one said investigating a crime was pretty. Let’s go.”
Chapter Thirty-five
“O
h,sure.Ada,Esther,Ruth,MarthaandElecta. Should’ve come to me right off. I’m your go-to gal for that bunch of no-goodniks.” Genevieve pushed back her Virgin Mary blue headdress, exposing her white wimple. “I ain’t gonna mince words, ladies. It’s common knowledge among us who keep track of such that the Order of the Eastern Star is a Satanic cult that entices innocent women through the devious attraction of bake sales.”
“Bake sales?” Jane asked.
Genevieve shot her with her finger. “Watch it, you. You’re too young to appreciate the allure of a wellcrafted Bundt cake. They don’t call it devil’s food for nothing.”
Jane snapped her mouth shut.
“Okay. So what is it you want to know, Sally?”
At that moment, there was a lot I wanted to know.
Right off, I wanted to know how Mama and Genevieve had managed to convince seven busloads of senior citizens in the tricounty area that Lehigh could steal Bethlehem’s Christmas business by offering deep, deep discounts on snow globes.
I wanted to know how they managed to turn the courtyard between the library and city hall into a manger with stables, several camels, three wise men, a bunch of arthritic shepherds, eight angels in Depends, a couple sheep and, inexplicably, a Jersey cow.
Mostly, I wanted to know where Genevieve got off portraying herself as a teenage virgin appointed by God to be the Blessed Mother of Our Savior.
But, as time was limited, I asked her the significance of the four names.
“Question numero uno. Where’d you get this info, Sally?” Genevieve asked. “Where’d you find out about them?”
I reminded her of the woman in the veil at Ern’s shiva, the woman who had followed me out into the hallway. The woman who turned out to be Fiona Swyer from Get Together Now! Travel, where Debbie had worked. I told her about how Fiona kept emphasizing that she’d been more than a friend of Debbie’s—she’d been a
sister.
“Did she use any hootchie-cootchie code?”
I tried to think back. “No hootchie-cootchie code that I can remember. She asked me if I had Excel. Then she shook my hand.”
“
How
did she shake your hand?”
“She shook it. That’s all.”
A shepherd went by wearing striped robes over his winter coat. He told Genevieve to go long and then he threw a doll. Genevieve caught his pass like the football receiver she should have been.
“The new baby Jesus,” she said. “We lost the original. Think some kid stole it out of the crèche. Either that or it was drop-kicked by those teenagers on skateboards.”
Jane covered her eyes.
Genevieve tucked the baby Jesus under her arm. “Listen, no one just shakes a hand, not if they’re with the OES. Try me.” She stuck out her mitt.
I put my hand in hers and did my best to re-create the way the woman had pinched the fleshy part between my thumb and forefinger.
“Oh, yeah. There’s some serious OES stuff going on there.” Genevieve checked over her shoulder and led Jane and me around the side of the library to the Japanese garden, placing the baby by a miniature bridge. “You know what the secret phrase of the OES is, don’t you?”
“Fairest Among Thousands, Altogether Lovely,” Jane said. “I read it online.”
Genevieve said, “Read that another way and it spells FATAL.”
I felt a chill and it was not the wind coming up from the Lehigh or the snow that was falling in big flakes. FATAL. That had significance. That
meant
something.
“Fatal,” I repeated, things clicking.
“That’s right. FATAL. Like I told you, it ain’t just bake sales at the OES. Also, the Eastern Star, a direct reference to the star of Bethlehem, is upside down. How’s that for blasphemy? And each of the points represents something. For example, Esther is white. Wheat is for Ruth.”
I grabbed Jane to steady myself.
“Mom?” Jane was staring at me, aghast. “What’s going on?”
“Wheat,” I said. “Fatal.”
Genevieve nodded with approval. “Good girl, Sally. Now you’re catching on.”
“No,” I said. “Debbie’s last words were ‘wheat’ and ‘fatal.’ I’d asked her if she was having an allergic reaction and that’s what she answered. I thought she was saying she had a fatal wheat allergy.”
Genevieve emitted a high whistle. “See, that’s what happens when we let you civilians dabble in matters of which you know not. You’re ignorant, is all. Now, if I’d been there, with my knowledge of the Masons and their ilk—”
Bingo! I realized where I’d seen the numbers 1-5-19-14. “The Masonic temple. I have to go there. Jane, you stay with Genevieve.”
Jane looked pleadingly. “Mom. Please?”
“Now don’t be down, little Sally. I got plenty of funnel cake to keep you happy, just like they make at the Allentown Fair with powdered sugar and everything.”
“Mom!” Jane called again.
I couldn’t stop to listen or worry. Jane would be safe with Genevieve. About ten pounds fatter when I returned, but safe.
It didn’t take much to enter the Masonic temple, where Stiletto and I had made out in the storage room. All I had to tell the housekeeper, a broad woman in a gray dress with poorly dyed red hair and a deep Irish brogue, was that I’d lost an earring there the other night and ask if I could look for it. She held out her hand. I shook it and she instantly warmed.
The secret handshake of the Order of the Eastern Star. How many other doors would it open?
I went up the stairs, trying to remember where Stiletto had taken me. The temple was empty, aside from the housekeeper, who seemed more interested in salting the front steps than what I was up to.
Was it four doors? Five doors? Definitely past the coat closet. I found it at the end of the hall. I put my hand on the doorknob and opened slowly. It was the storage room, all right. File cabinets, easels, folding chairs, card tables, the awards.
Instantly, I was overcome with memories of Stiletto’s kisses, the insistent way he’d forced me in here, the fabulous passion and unquenchable hunger we had for each other.
Mustn’t go there now, I thought, running my hand along the filing cabinets, looking for the plaque I’d seen the night I was here. There it was. Hanging in the same spot, untouched.
It was in commemoration of the OES Northampton County Chapter’s inception on January 5, 1914. 1-5-19-14. Ada. Esther. Ruth. Martha. It was a long shot. Then again, it was too much of a coincidence not to be.
Carefully, I removed the plaque from the wall and turned it over. Nothing but green felt. Disappointing. I shook it. There was no rattle. Damn.
And then I saw it. The thinnest slip of plastic sticking out from the green felt backing. With my superb acrylic nails, I pinched the felt and pulled it slowly to reveal a CD in a thin plastic case affixed underneath.
This, I was certain, was the star file and I bet it opened with Excel.
There were footsteps in the hallway. Most likely the housekeeper coming to check on me. I had to act as if I’d been searching for an earring.
I tossed my purse aside and went on my hands and knees. She would come in and ask if I’d found the earring. I would have to look disappointed and tell her no, but that it was okay. It hadn’t been worth anything and then she’d leave and I’d follow. I couldn’t wait to get back home and see what was on this CD.
The linoleum tiled floor was incredibly dusty. My nose itched and I felt the pressure of an oncoming sneeze.
Ah-choo!
“God bless you,” a man’s voice said right as I felt the hard, unmistakable pressure of a gun on my vertebrae. This was not good.
I glanced over my shoulder and was surprised to find Santa Claus in full costume, the white beard, the bushy white eyebrows, the apple cheeks, red suit and black boots, holding not only the gun, but also my purse.