Clueless, or Nothing to See Here, Folks

In a line as a straight as a sharpened pencil, a party of concerned, horrified, and exploitative individuals made directly for the chapel.  Leading the way in her black-as-pencil-lead robes was
Mother Deborah, behind her fretting and sobbing the nun who had announced the theft, then Geoffrey and Andreas with their unspoken suspicions about certain visitors to the Oh! Noel Lightfest, then a couple of holiday makers who thought that this was all part of the fun, and finally a lawyer waving her business card to anyone who would take it since there had been too much wrong-doing going on not to get in on the action.

The lighting within the chapel to Blessed Charles of Austria and the Servant of God Zita of the Exarchy of Blainesville lacked that festive gewgawgerie that was bringing in the customers outside.  Rather, a gentleness and serenity which many a modern eye could only find frightening if not terrifying pervaded the little room, making the chapel at once inmate and unbounded.  The light of so many tiny flames played about and gilded the carved and painted wood like the glow of the beginning of the world.  From tier upon tier of red candle glasses, flames like the eyes of cherubim quivered and quavered before plaster statutes, while before icons of saints with painfully serious expressions ascetic tapers in sandboxes were melting into self-abnegation.  How could anything unpleasant or criminal happen in such a serene and lovely jewelbox of a setting?

Well, something apparently had, since one corner of the shrine struck the viewer as rather empty--which was quite a feat, given that the place was chock-a-block full of pictures, candles, banners, carved wood, ex votos, and even a pamphlet racks in the back.  But this evening the front left corner (near the exit, convenient for one needing to make a quick getaway...) offered the eye a sort of black hole, or more accurately a walnut-stained square.  This was the stand on which something had been lying but was now empty, save for a border of store-bought flowers, holly, rosemary, and ivy.

The sundry players (most of whom would have fallen under et al. in a standard stage play) trailed along behind Mother Deborah and en masse swirled about the stand like an anxious tide around a rock in the middle of the sea.

"The icon is left!" repeated the nun in heavily accented wailing.  "Be looking!  Blessed Symeona is left us!"

She went on in this plangent vein for several more seconds, when Andreas, as if seizing the bridle of a runaway mare, slipped up to her, placed thick Thuringian hands tight about her upper arms (this was probably a venial sin, but as a hoary old Lutheran he probably did not believe he had any choice) and after fixing her startled eyes said, "Wodajće prošu. Kak Wy rĕkaće?"

After a momentary flutter she swallowed, "Rěkam Elisabeta.  Rěčiće Wy serbsce?"

Andreas gave her a steady, "Haj.  Wjeselu so," and a bit of back-and-forth ensued.  At the end of it, though, there came only a brief chaste embrace to comfort the poor lady, who then wandered off into the luminous darkness.  Andreas said, "She knows nothing."

"What was that about?" asked Mother Deborah, speaking for the group.

"The little sister was speaking Upper Sorbian, as the peasants around my castle during childhood spoke," and then he turned away, no doubt nostalgically remembering fields of swaying flax and sunflowers.

But Geoffrey, recognizing his longtime companion's jaunt into the long-lost past, stepped forward and muttered something, along with a few swipes of his fingers, like a hypnotist bringing a patient from a trance.

Before Geoffrey could finesse a straight answer out of him, however, Mother Deborah sidled up and said, "What do you mean, she knows nothing?"

The holiday-makers who had come along to the so-called "crime scene" said, "Oh, I get it, we're supposed to solve the crime now, right?"

And the lawyer said, "This is the time for you to get superior representation.  Let's just talk right over here."  ("Right over here" was inside the sanctuary.)

Andreas related, "She entered the shrine to initiate preparations for the revelers.  Inside this shrine, she beheld that the image had departed."

After taking a second and a half to translate this thesaurian English into everyday speech, Mother Deborah muttered oaths which probably might have landed her in hot water (or some other hot place), but the fallible folk around her were ready to forgive.  Nonetheless, rallying quickly, she ordered everyone, "Out, out, out.  The boys in blue will want this place tight as a drum."

A brief shudder rippled through a few of those present, since in Merryweather they had strategically gutted all males from the police force in a self-imposed display of embracing equity and diversity.  (They had even done a puff piece about it on The View.)  But if Andreas' multiplicity of adjectives and nouns could be tolerated, then they had to forgive the old lady her knee-jerk statements.  So, they shuffled through the carven wooden door and out into the realm of half-domesticated camels.