It’s August 1965, and Dot Morgan is finally getting married to the dashing reporter Ben Dalton. Her wedding day, August 14th, promises to be perfect—if only it didn’t follow Friday the 13th. What could go wrong? Planning a wedding with the members of the Camden Chapel, Dot thinks she’s overwhelmed, but then it gets worse when a body is found on the church lawn. Dot decides to focus on her wedding to Ben, but when police reveal the victim didn’t jump from the belfry—he was pushed—she can no longer look away. Her suspects aren’t hardened criminals; they’re the same church members who bring casseroles and ask about her family. With her wedding day fast approaching, Dot must unmask a killer hiding in plain sight, or the secrets of Camden Chapel will remain buried in the summer heat.
Crying in the Chapel is the fifth book in the Swinging Sixties Mystery Series and the book where I finally marry off Dot and Ben. Usually when I write a Swinging Sixties Mystery the process of research can take quite a bit of time, mostly because things were so different back then, from coffee pots to cameras, from phones to fast food.
Crying in the Chapel was different. Before I started writing mysteries I worked part time in a florist shop, a tuxedo rental business, and various churches. I had seen weddings from all sides. These jobs opened me up to the wonderful, if not highly stressful, world of all the things that go into creating that perfect day. Some brides and grooms were very easy to work with while others, I had to wonder what they saw on each other.
I enjoyed inventing the wedding planner who made everything perfect. Have you ever questioned why some people knock themselves out to do everything exactly right? It might mean there is a part of their life they can’t fix.
Dot and Ben are getting married while Ellie, Dot’s cousin, her husband Al, are about to give birth to little Al, Jr. Dot and Ellie have been through so much together in the first four books that these life events have to be lived through together.
So how do you plan a wedding from the 1960s? I looked at Bride’s Magazine from 1965 abd 1966. From that I knew Dot’s wedding would need some daisies and a mini wedding dress. I was inspired by the model Twiggy, but Dot’s big hair is pure Texas!
In Crying in the Chapel I wanted to capture the fun and chaos of weddings, as well as the false fronts characters put up to hide their secrets. Some of these secrets were sad, while others were homicidal.
Here are the Swinging Sixties books in order, but you can read Crying in the Chapel as a standalone.
A Twist and Shout Murder
If I Had a Hammer
Listen, Do You Want to Know a Secret?
I Can’t Get No Satisfaction
Crying in the Chapel
Here’s hoping you stay out of the belfry…Teresa
I entered the empty chapel holding a white leather bridal planning notebook, gifted to me by my own mother. The sturdy three-ring notebook held sections for guest lists, food, and the venue, and in the back pocket, my mother had included a small book from Emily Post, the etiquette goddess, on how to handle anything from duplicate gifts to late guests. Parts of the book were straight out of the Fifties, and things modern people in the Sixties rarely adhered to, but somehow it was good to have a book to tell me where the forks went in a place setting or how to properly plan a big event. Turns out, wedding planning involves a million different decisions, and today, I was working on the flowers. I decided my primary flower would be white daisies with other flowers worked in around them. I wanted the bouquets, the church, and the reception to be bursting with Gerber daisies. The best part was, they would also be on my wedding gown.
The Camden Chapel sanctuary was relatively small and could hold up to one hundred and fifty people. There were classrooms and offices situated on the other side of the church, and surprisingly, there were three floors. It had been a big building project for a town as small as Camden, but hope springs eternal that the heathens from the Dallas area will choose to commute and
live in our bedroom community. My assignment from Vernice was to pick up frames that would hook onto the pews to allow the florist to arrange flowers on the end of each row. After retrieving the frames, I was to deliver them to Lily Salem, the florist. Ben suggested her because he knew her from the private school they both attended. She had recently moved to town and opened Lily’s of the Field at the end of Main Street. For decades, Camden’s only flower shop was Henley Flowers, and they were still going strong. When I worked at the funeral home, I had daily chats with Gertrude Henley, and they were excellent at delivering on time. It would be tough for a new flower shop to get established in Camden, but we hoped our wedding would give Lily’s new business some good exposure.
Up front, standing on a metal stepladder, was Earl Gunther, the church caretaker. Vernice told me to ask him about these contraptions she called pew hooks. Earl was in his late fifties, with a slightly receding hairline that lent itself more to white than grey. He wore brown overalls with black buckles over a tan button-down shirt. He was replacing a lightbulb in the fixture that hung from the vaulted ceiling. His hand rested on the top of the ladder as he turned the bulb in the socket.
“Excuse me,” I said in a quiet voice, not wanting to make him jump and possibly fall off the ladder. At his age, a fall could do some damage. “Are you Earl?”
“Yes, ma’am. How can I help you?” His voice was gentle and measured, like a kindly grandfather.
“Vernice told me you could get some pew hooks out of the closet somewhere?”
He descended the ladder. “Are you the new florist or the bride-to-be?”
I blushed. In the last month, I had picked up a new name. People now referred to me as the bride before they used my name. They grinned at me when they said it and I wondered what they were thinking. “I’m the bride. I’m Dot Morgan.”
“Nice to meet you.” He put a finger to his temple and repeated my name. “Dot Morgan. Why does that name ring a bell?”
“I’m not sure. I’m not a member here. My fiancé is Ben Dalton.”
He shook his head. “No. That’s not it.” He stepped back slightly and focused on my face. Suddenly, he snapped his fingers. “That’s it. I saw your picture in the paper. I have a knack for remembering things. That’s what made me a good patrolman so many years ago. People would say stuff, mostly drunk people who were trying to drive, and then forget what they said. I didn’t forget.”
“You were a policeman?”
“Oh yes. Twenty-five years. I joined the force after a stint in the army. I mostly did patrol. I’ve brought half this town to the drunk tank, and I know about every husband and wife who fight so much that the neighbors call, too. I retired back in ’57. So, how do I know about you?”
As he observed me like a man looking for a piece to a jigsaw puzzle, I shifted from one foot to the other. I was never comfortable when someone connected me to those articles. I had been in the paper several times, mostly having to do with catching killers. The thought of it sounded like something out of The Fugitive on TV. Once people put it together that I was that girl, they treated me differently, and sometimes worse, even acting differently around me. They were waiting for me to find out something they might be hiding. My parents’ mailman once asked me if I knew what was happening with Mrs. Hitchcock down the street. I told him I didn’t really know her, and he laughed and said, “But I hear that when you don’t know, you have a way of finding out.”
Was there something nefarious going on with Mrs. Hitchcock? I had no idea, nor did I want to find out. But the mailman imagined me as a clandestine source of information, brimming with details about the lives of Camden’s people.
“Hey, Earl,” Clarence Shellhammer said from the door. “I need to talk to you about something.” He motioned for Earl to come closer.
“Excuse me,” Earl said. He stepped to the back of the sanctuary, and the two men began to whisper. Clarence looked very bothered and kept pointing to the front of the church. I heard the word “pipes” and then, very clearly, that Earl needed to mind his own business.
Earl nodded and whispered something I couldn’t hear. Then he smiled and patted Clarence on the arm. Clarence pulled away. And then looked over to me. “Sorry for interrupting.”
As Clarence left, Earl turned and pointed a finger at me as he walked back to where we had been talking. “You were involved with that murder out at the lake. From what I read in the paper, you practically solved that case for the police.” He smiled, making friendly creases on his cheeks. “You’re a smart girl. Good to see a young woman who is as smart as she is pretty.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I mumbled out a thank you. He stared at me for a few more seconds and then suddenly nodded, remembering my request. “Right. I’ll get those pew hooks for you, Detective Dot.”
“Although a friend of mine is on the police, I’m not a detective, Earl. I’m just a secretary. An out-of-work secretary, right now.”
Earl’s head bobbed back slightly as a look of surprise came over his features. “You’re too humble. I’m a good judge of character. And as far as just being a secretary, young lady, you just never know what you are capable of until you stop judging yourself.”
As he walked away, I fought rolling my eyes at the moniker Detective Dot. How silly. Plus, I hated to admit how much I enjoyed hearing it.
Teresa Trent has been writing and publishing mysteries since 2011 starting with the Pecan Bayou Mystery Series and followed by the Piney Woods Mystery Series. She presently writes the Swinging Sixties Mystery Series and the Henry Park Paranormal Series. When Teresa isn’t writing novels and short stories, she spends her time creating narrated excerpts on her podcast, Books to the Ceiling, where she gets to use all that community theater experience from her teens and twenties along with a little audio editing she learned from her daughter. Teresa is a former English teacher, but also spent many years teaching music to preschoolers, working with children of all abilities. Teresa makes her home in Texas with her husband and son.
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Thank you for featuring Crying in the Chapel and letting me talk to your readers about planning a fictional wedding!
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