Free Cecilian Vespers by Anne Emery

should approach the people we had come to regard as suspects.
    “Let’s start with the least likely, simply because I know where he is right now.”
    “Who is it? Why do you say ‘least likely’?”
    “Because I’ve known him for years. Fred Mills. The schola is finished for the day, so who knows where the others are. Which makes me ask myself — not for the first time — why the person guilty of the murder would stay around.”
    “Because to leave would immediately cast the person in a suspicious light. I know a couple of students left the program — it was in the police notes Mike gave me — but they were people who had been on the Peggy’s Cove bus trip, so they were above suspicion. The guilty party feels he has to stick around in order to look innocent, but he must find it agonizing to do so.”
    “He or she.”
    “Right. And the person may also feel compelled to monitor events as they unfold here, see how the case against Brother Robin holds up. Who knows? Anyway, let’s go find your ‘least likely’ suspect.”
    “Fred said he was going to watch the children rehearse for the Christmas pageant, so let’s meet up with him there. This is no doubt the first time in his exemplary life that Freddy will have been asked for his alibi.”
    “Maybe so, but we have to check him off the list.”
    The rehearsal was taking place in the basement of St. Bernadette’s Church. Breeze block walls were painted a glossy beige, the floor was a streaky brown, blue, and cream-patterned linoleum, there was a small stage at one end and a kitchen at the other; the room could not be anything other than a church basement. We were nearly knocked off our feet by a little boy with a white and green hotel towel on his head, a shepherd’s crook wielded like a sabre in his hand. He looked up in alarm at Burke and kept on running. Then we were hailed by a trim, athletic-looking man in his mid-thirties, with cropped blondhair and the handsome, friendly face of an all-American boy. He wore a tan cardigan over his clerical shirt and collar. He waved us over to a row of grey metal folding chairs, where the audience would be sitting on the big night.
    “Monty Collins, Father Fred Mills. Fred was a student of mine at the seminary in upstate New York.”
    “Lucky you!” I exclaimed.
    “You should have known him in those days,” Mills said. “Before he mellowed with age.”
    “Let me see if I have this right. You knew a version of Brennan Burke that was less mellow than he is now and yet you willingly came to see him again.”
    “I’m not the only one. Even Billy Logan showed up. Bill was teaching at the sem when Brennan arrived there,” Fred explained to me. “I sent Bill the schola’s brochure with an invitation to sign up, tongue-in-cheek. And he’s here! Well, have a seat. The drama is about to begin.”
    It couldn’t hurt to catch a bit of the show. The alibi would hold for a few minutes longer, if it held at all. A young woman stood beside a cardboard replica of a stable. She called a blue-veiled girl and brown-blanketed boy to their places. “Kayla, come sit by the manger. Zachary, stand beside her. Beside her! Don’t be shy.” The blessed couple moved into place, as half a dozen shepherds abided in the fields of linoleum.
    The names were new — in my day, Mary and Joseph were Mary Eileen and Timmy — but otherwise there was nothing new under the sun. Or was there?
    The woman stood to the side, opened her Bible, and began to read: “The king, the one who they called Augustus, made a rule that there would be a numbering of all the world.”
    “Hold it right there,” Burke demanded. “It’s Mrs. Kavanagh, do I have that right?”
    “Yes, Father.”
    “Was the one whom they called Augustus one of many kings of Rome at the time? Whatever happened to ‘There went out a decree from Caesar Augustus’?”
    “I don’t know, Father. This is the Bible they gave me to use.”
    “Who?”
    “The parish