The Hour of Death Read online

  The Hour of Death

  A Sister Agatha and Father Selwyn Mystery

  JANE WILLAN

  To Barbara, my tireless writing partner, for her endless encouragement, brilliant ideas, insightful editing, and Lutheran sensibilities.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Stephany Evans, agent-of-my-dreams, for all her support and encouragement.

  Many thanks to my publisher, Crooked Lane Books, for sending me such awesome editors who care so much about my manuscript, my characters, and my feelings.

  To Jenny Chen and Sarah Poppe for their quick response to my questions and needs. And to Teresa Fasolino whose compelling cover art continues to capture so perfectly the world of Gwenafwy Abbey.

  To Jane Gardner, always available when I needed her, especially during my social-media-learning-curve-crisis (and any other crisis I have).

  To Dr. Anne Nafziger for her expert medical advice on how a person looks when dead and all events that might have led to their state of being dead.

  To my friend and relentless copyeditor, Lanny Hilgar, who recently said to me, “Someday we need to sit down and talk about commas.”

  To the members of the First Congregational Church of Paxton who have embraced my writing life with boundless and characteristic enthusiasm making me the happiest pastor ever.

  And to my husband, Don, who brings coffee in the morning, wine at night, and inspiration all day long.

  Chapter One

  When Sister Agatha slipped through the wrought-iron gate in front of Gwenafwy Abbey and started down the winding lane that led to the village, the sun had barely risen over the tower of Pryderi Castle. She smiled at the sound of the familiar click of the latch as the gate shut behind her. How many times over the years had she heard that gate catch and click as she headed down Church Lane on the short walk to the village? Gwenafwy Abbey, an Anglican religious order of the Church in Wales, with the mountain range of Snowdonia to its east and the Irish Sea a few miles to the north, had been her home for nearly four decades. She had grown up on a sheep farm just a stone’s throw from the abbey and her earliest childhood memory was the gentle peal of the chapel bell calling the sisters to prayer.

  She pulled out her mobile and glanced at it. The library meeting started at half eight, which meant she had just enough time to make the brisk ten-minute walk into the village of Pryderi and to the public library on Main Street. Pryderi, tucked into the heart of the heather-clad summits of the Clwydian Range, had sat at the bottom of a steep hill since before the Norman invasion, as though one day it had tumbled down and then reassembled itself at the bottom. In contrast, Gwenafwy Abbey sat perched at the top of the same steep incline, as though graciously keeping watch over the comings and goings of the small community.

  Although Sister Agatha lived and worked at the abbey, she and the other sisters spent much of their time in the small village with its cluster of shops, farmer’s market, St. Anselm Church and the Buttered Crust Tea Shop. They occasionally dropped by the Saints and Sinners Pub for the hearty Sunday brunch and a pint, or on special occasions, when the nuns felt they needed a bit of fine china on starched white table cloths, they treated themselves to a formal Devon cream tea in the faded grandeur of the old Hotel Pryderi.

  Stopping in the middle of the lane, she took a deep breath, feeling the cold air fill her lungs. She couldn’t imagine living anywhere but North Wales. Even now, with the the sun barely breaking through the clouds, the Welsh countryside held its charms. Brown fields bordered by ancient stone walls formed squares like an unfurled quilt. Clumps of purple heather and flocks of white sheep meandered up to the edges of gray stone crofts whose chimneys plumed smoke into the morning sky. Looking down into the valley, Sister Agatha could just see the spire of St. Anselm Church, built in 1454 by the Normans, as it rose above the slate rooftops of the village. The tower of Pryderi Castle to the east cast its long shadow, while the River Pwy, which formed the western boundary of the village, glinted in the cold sunlight like a ribbon set on fire.

  One could easily walk from the abbey to the castle by following the length of Main Street passing the Buttered Crust Tea Shop, the public library, and St. Anselm Church and ending up at the castle drawbridge—all in about twenty minutes—if one walked briskly and with purpose.

  Sister Agatha wrapped her muffler a bit tighter as she rounded a bend in the gravel lane. She stopped short, catching her breath at the devastation in front of her. The beautiful sloping meadow she had walked past almost every day of her life and home to sheep, wildflowers, and birds stared back at her, an ugly chaos of mud, rocks, and debris. A jagged hole the size of a small house gaped open. A backhoe, a forklift, a stack of pallets and other rubble littered the once tranquil meadow. At the far end of the property sat a large gray storage tank with the word WASTE printed on it in huge letters. To Sister Agatha, that tank was like a billboard advertising all that was wrong with the world. A garish orange-and-green sign glared back at her from the edge of the property: “DRM Development and Estate Planning.”

  She shook her head. Progress. To think that the lovely Welsh countryside could be ruined by greedy developers. Cheap houses quickly constructed without a care given to the infrastructure of the Welsh village or to the environment of the small farms struggling to survive.

  After months of battle with the citizens of Pryderi, the construction company, DRM Development, had won, however—and the proposed housing complex was going forward. The villagers had argued that the housing development would change the culture of the village, straining local business establishments, paving the way for huge chain stores, which in turn would squeeze the life out of Main Street. Beautiful countryside that had been home to the flora and fauna of Wales destroyed to make way for car parks and concrete drives. The sisters of Gwenafwy Abbey were heartsick. For Sister Agatha, the destruction of the sheep meadow represented a worse tragedy. Everyone who had grown up in Pryderi knew that the tiny, sloping field was home to fairies. The sheep meadow was a fairy field. Sister Agatha, though a good Anglican, held fast to a few pagan traditions—as did her sisters—and she half-believed that on the occasional moonlit summer night, the fairies danced and sang. Wales was full of enchantments. One needed only to look carefully and listen. And not tromp over them with bulldozers!

  Sister June, a solicitor in Cardiff before joining the abbey, had taken the lead in fighting the housing project and had managed to get a temporary halt of operations by citing that the development company did not comply with the village’s Code of Ordinances. As hopeful as the sisters had felt when the digging stopped, Sister June warned them that it was only a temporary reprieve; big companies such as DRM Industries could easily hire the legal power to get an extension and continue work. But at least, Sister June had said in her matter-of-fact barrister voice, it would slow them down a little.

  Sister Agatha had swelled with pride at last week’s village meeting when Sister June, all five feet one inch of her, had neatly annihilated the arguments of the representative of DRM. Taking her place behind the microphone in the parish hall meeting, she had pointed out to the construction representative that the choice of Pryderi as a location for the housing development had very little to do with improving the economy of the small village but rather was concerned with lining the pockets of developers and politicians. She explained that the development companies were targeting villages like Pryderi because they were on the outskirts of national parks where real estate was lucrative. And as Pryderi sat seventeen miles east of Snowdonia National Park, it was outside government protection for development and therefore the perfect site for someone like DRM Industries to exploit. Sister Agatha and the others from the abbey had cheered the feisty and well-spoken Sister June as she put the
developer in his place.

  The next meeting of the village was this coming Monday, and Devon Morgan, minister for the environment, planning and the countryside, would be at the meeting to answer questions. And, some were afraid, to make a pitch for his upcoming campaign. Word had it that he was a hopeful for first minister of Wales. A typical politician, Morgan would never take a hardline in either direction—for or against building up the countryside around small villages such as Pryderi.

  Sister June, who followed the news more carefully than the others at the abbey, warned that he was in the pocket of the construction companies. And now, this morning, standing before the horrible travesty of mud and destruction, Sister Agatha’s heart sank. All seemed lost. What were things coming to?

  As she headed down the hill to the village, the wind picked up and she was glad that she had worn over her habit her heavy woolen jumper from Sister Winifred. She reached into her bookbag and located the blue wooly hat that she had purchased in Killarney years ago and pulled it down over her short gray hair.

  The sisters at Gwenafwy Abbey wore blue habits that reached to mid-calf and white aprons over their habits. In winter, they all made good use of Sister Winifred’s hand-knit jumpers. Sister Winifred knitted endlessly, churning out receiving blankets for the newborns at the Wrexham hospital, mittens and hats for her many nieces and nephews, piles of mufflers for the jumble sale. A few Christmases before, she had knitted a Hogwarts scarf for each sister at Gwenafwy Abbey, and this winter, a new jumper for every nun, choosing the color that she thought best fit each individual personality—a peaceful azure blue for the Reverend Mother, tranquil green for Sister Matilda, and for Sister Agatha fire-engine red. Sister Callwen, always a bit sharp-tongued but generally spot-on, suggested it was to keep Sister Agatha from getting lost in the crowd.

  She picked up her pace. It had been a busy morning. She had already said the morning office—matins, or morning prayer—with her sisters and followed it with a hearty Welsh breakfast at the long farmhouse table in the abbey’s refectory. Then Sister Agatha had put in a productive hour cataloging a new shipment of books in the attic library. As the abbey librarian, she kept the other sisters supplied with every book they could desire—from romantic comedy to revisionist history, from theology to thriller. She also enjoyed a collegial relationship with the staff at the village library and met with them every Saturday morning to exchange ideas. She liked to keep current with the latest in library science.

  She rounded the second bend in the windy road, aptly named Church Lane, to the village, and the spire of St. Anselm Church appeared over the treetops. Advent was well under way, and she found herself singing softly her favorite Advent hymn from the Anglican hymnbook:

  Come, Thou long expected Jesus

  Born to set Thy people free;

  From our fears and sins release us,

  Let us find our rest in Thee.

  She loved Advent. Better than Christmas. Which most people didn’t understand.

  Advent meant far more than the four-week countdown to Christmas even though it usually began on the first Sunday in December. Most people thought it involved nothing more than the hanging of the greens or the lighting of the Advent candles. But Advent really meant expectation—the expectation of Christ’s coming again. In the gray dreariness of December, when the sun set below the castle tower by late afternoon and the bitter wind rattled the windows of the abbey, Advent offered a welcome light in the darkness—one more candle added each Sunday to the Advent wreath in the chapel and to the one on the dining table in the refectory. Advent was a time of hope and grace, of looking forward to a better tomorrow and back to the rich traditions of yesterday.

  This year, however, the expectation of Advent meant something even closer to the day-to-day than the arrival of the Christ child. It meant the arrival of something else far more tangible. An enthusiastic group of young nuns from a convent in Los Angeles were joining Gwenafwy Abbey in January—the first new sisters to join in a very long time—except for Sister Gwenydd, who had arrived at their doorstep in a rather unconventional way—on the lam, fleeing because she thought she had accidentally murdered her boyfriend. It had all worked out in the end fortunately, and now she served as the abbey’s incredibly talented chef as well as its newest and youngest member.

  Suddenly a horn blasted and Sister Agatha jumped back, crashing into a gorse bush. A battered blue car roared past, spinning gravel as it headed up the hill away from the village.

  Good heavens! She got to her feet and started back down the hill, pulling a sticky gorse thorn from the red wool of her jumper. What was wrong with people these days? Well, no time to dilly-dally. Her Saturday meeting with the other librarians started in less than ten minutes. After the meeting she hoped to entice Father Selwyn to join her for a mid-morning Welsh cake at the Buttered Crust Tea Shop. Father Selwyn, vicar at St. Anselm, had been one of her closest friends since primary school. Some people in the village had thought they had been more than friends when they were young, but then, at the age of twenty, Sister Agatha surprised everyone by taking orders at Gwenafwy Abbey. That same year, Father Selwyn had gone off to seminary.

  She knew Father Selwyn would be enthusiastic for a morning stop at The Buttered Crust. The Buttered Crust Tea Shop was on Main Street in between the Pryderi Post and the Just-for-You Florist shop. It was the villagers’ endless source of fresh scones, fragrant tea, and crusty oat cakes.

  She crossed the stone footbridge over the River Pwy, pausing for a moment to gaze into the noisy brook, frigid water from the glacial peaks of Snowdonia gurgling in the center, ice crisping at its edges. She stepped off the wooden bridge and onto the cobbled stones of Pryderi’s main street just as the sound of sirens split the air. Their high-pitched blaring shattered the peaceful morning. Clutching the brim of her blue wooly hat, she jogged down Main Street in the direction of the sirens and found the front entrance of St. Anselm Church blocked by an ambulance and two police cruisers.

  Treven Preddy, owner of the Lettuce-Eat-Vegan grocery, stepped up to her. “It’s not good, Sister,” he said. Treven wore a parka pulled over his white grocer’s apron. “Not good at all.”

  “Is Father Selwyn …?” she asked. Her head felt light.

  “No, Sister. Not the vicar,” Treven said. “It’s Tiffany Reese.”

  “Tiffany?” Tiffany Reese, a legendary church lady who organized the annual church jumble with tyrannical precision and conducted every Women’s Institute (WI) meeting as though she were Speaker of the House of Commons, ruled as a daunting force in the St. Anselm parish. Her Welsh fruitcake was never dry, her solo on Christmas Eve flawless, her three-tiered lemon cake for the Ladies Devotional Tea always exquisite. Tiffany Reese was so perfect that almost no one liked her.

  The Pryderi Women’s Art Society held their annual Christmas gala in the church parish hall. It opened on the second Saturday in Advent. An imposing sign stood outside the church door advertising its opening at noon that day. Most of the women in the Art Society were amateurs at best, and although Sister Agatha supported anyone pursuing her craft, even she had tired of the endless watercolors of castles, sunsets over the Irish Sea, and baskets of kittens. Tiffany, the recently elected president of the Art Society, had been dropping hints for weeks that her entry was no less than extraordinary. The year before she had won first prize for her painting. Her exquisite and detailed depiction of the “Red-Throated Diver” had stunned the villagers, who had stood mesmerized in front of it. Sister Agatha remembered that the local paper had described the painting as Killian Mullarney meets Audubon. She also remembered how last year she had stood there in the parish hall with the sounds of the art show going on around her, captivated by the depiction of the bird—its speckled back feathers, the red band on its graceful neck, and its snowy-white underbelly. For one moment she felt herself standing on the edge of the cliffs overlooking the Irish Sea.

  Sister Agatha had been more than a little surprised that Tiffany Reese, whom Sister
Callwen had once referred to as the greatest social climber since Cinderella, was so accomplished an artist. But then, Sister Agatha thought, people can surprise you.

  At the sight of the two police cruisers, she automatically reached into her apron pocket for her detective’s notebook and, when she found it wasn’t there, sighed with regret. She had decided to stop carrying her notebook during Advent. It hadn’t been her idea so much as the Reverend Mother’s. Reverend Mother had reminded her that life at the abbey was a balance of prayer, work, study, and rest, not murder weapons, lists of suspects, and chasing down bad guys.

  Sister Agatha was a devoted mystery writer—as yet, unpublished. She spent her spare moments writing, researching, and thinking about murder. That meant that whenever she wasn’t in chapel with her sisters, or fulfilling her duties as the abbey librarian, or helping produce the abbey’s award-winning organic cheese, fittingly named Heavenly Gouda, she feverishly wrote. And when the muse stayed absent, she immersed herself in all the classic murder novelists. Her hope was to glean ideas and skills from their protagonists. Between Agatha Christie’s Poirot and Louise Penny’s Gamache, she felt she was beginning to get her feet under her and had begun to think like an amateur sleuth.

  Unfortunately, she had to admit that sometimes she did cross the line between writing about fictional murder and seeing herself as the actual detective. Consequently, she was rarely without her detective’s notebook. Except today. She shook her head. Armand Gamache would never have been caught without the means to take notes. Even if it was Advent.

  “Has Tiffany taken ill?” she asked Treven.

  “Taken ill?” Treven raised his eyebrows and pulled his heavy parka around his substantial girth. “She’s not ill, Sister. She’s dead.”

  * * *

  Sister Agatha pushed through the front doors of the church, waving off the young officer who started toward her. “It’s all right, Parker,” she said. She recognized him as Parker Clough, the officer who had arrested Sister Gwenydd that horrible day last summer at the Buttered Crust Tea Shop. She wasn’t going to be slowed down by a young man who would arrest a nun in the middle of her tea. In her hurry, she took the stairs down to the parish hall two at a time, nearly falling, catching herself at the last second by grabbing the stair rail.