The Last Suppers

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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 – last 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 cheekboned 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 question 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.

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