The Christmas Cantata (The Liturgical Mysteries) Read Online Free PDF

bit...wintry."
    "Wintry, indeed," said Meg. "Whatever you decide to do, you'd better hustle. We only have three more rehearsals before Christmas Eve."
     
    * * *
     
    The cold spell hadn't broken, but by ten o'clock on Wednesday, the temperature had climbed to a balmy twelve degrees. The sun was bright, almost too bright, and there still hadn't been any snow despite the frigid air mass that had settled over our end of the state. Ten o'clock on a December morning usually found the Slab Café packed. This morning, not. The only customers in the restaurant were Nancy, Dave, Meg, and myself. That is, if you didn't count Cynthia, who might be counted since she wasn't actually "on" this morning, but had just come in for a cup of coffee.
    "Cynthia doesn't count," said Pete, gloomily. "She won't be paying for her coffee. So, including you four, that makes five customers this morning."
    "We're not paying, either," said Nancy. "We get comped, remember?" She pointed at her badge. "To protect and serve?"
    It had been Pete's practice to comp the PD's breakfast tabs at the Slab since he'd first been elected mayor some twenty years ago. In actuality, he'd managed to route some city expenditure money into his café coffers under the guise of mayoral/police departmental breakfast meetings. Unfortunately, once he'd been dethroned, we law enforcement officials still expected the courtesy of a complimentary breakfast. If Pete had needed the money, I might have felt sorry for him.
    Pete sighed heavily. "Well, then, if I count Meg, who is not a mooching member of our city's finest..."
    "I'm not," Meg assured him.
    "That brings the grand total to two. Subtract the three free breakfasts I have to rustle up and I'm one in the hole. Usually by this time on a Wednesday in December, I've done $800 worth of business. I haven't done $800 in the last week."
    "Things will pick up," Meg said, in as cheerful a tone as she could muster. "Why, even Hayden is in a better mood."
    I nodded and sipped my coffee. "It's true. I am. And the weather is supposed to warm up a bit tomorrow."
    "Clear up into the mid-twenties," Dave added. "It'll be like a heat wave."
    Pauli Girl McCollough came out of the kitchen carrying a platter of country ham biscuits. "Here y'all are," she said, setting our meal in the center of the table. "This is some first-rate country ham. The biscuits just came out of the oven."
    Pauli Girl was in her first semester of nursing school and home for her Christmas break. She was Ardine McCollough's middle child and the only girl. Her older brother, Bud, was known throughout the county for his wine expertise and was attending college at Davidson. I hadn't seen him since Thanksgiving, but I suspected he was close to finishing his fall semester. Pauli Girl's younger brother, Moose-head (Moosey for short), was still in elementary school and his school's Christmas break was still a couple of weeks away.
    All three of the McCollough kids had been named by their father, PeeDee McCollough, who was, by all accounts, not a nice person. Not only did he name all three of his children for beer, he was not hesitant in disciplining them, or their mother either, using whatever was handy, be it a belt, a walking stick, or a car antenna. It was when he brought home a piece of airline cable he'd found at the dump that Ardine decided that she and the children might be better off without him.
    These kind of "homemade divorces" occasionally happened in the hollers and when PeeDee McCollough disappeared, no one looked very hard. No one except for a certain Miss Charity Porkington, the leader of the unmarried women's Sunday School class at the Baptist church where PeeDee had been a regular attendee and deacon. After several weeks of futile calling, Miss Porkington drove up to Ardine's single-wide trailer and asked her, pointblank, what had happened to PeeDee, then fell weeping on the front stoop until Ardine went back into the trailer and came out with her shotgun. It was