The Preacher

by Ted Thackrey, Jr.

  The front door opened and a low, feminine voice that I took to be Dana’s finished Jake’s mini-lecture for him.

  “And he did it himself,” the voice said. “Never could get him to hire anyone for that particular job. He said he enjoyed it. God knows why…”

  But the speaker wasn’t Dana.

  The woman in the doorway was an inch or two taller, with darker hair and a residual puffiness near the eyes that spoke of recent tears, a still-fresh mourning that the rest of the face had now consigned to those hours of night when sleep wouldn’t come and time wouldn’t pass.

  “I’m Marilyn Prescott,” she said. “And you must be the Preacher Helen and Dana have been telling me about.”

  “Lies,” I said quickly, turning it into comedy. “All lies! I absolutely did not set fire to my grandmother. The dear old lady simply burst into flames one day, you know, and people jumped to conclusions because of that insurance money.”

  “Don’t believe him,” Jake chimed in. “He used that money for his first poker stake and never looked back.”

  Marilyn Prescott laughed—I had a feeling it might have been a while since she’d done that—and stepped back, moving the door with her.

  “Grandmother or no,” she said, “if you two don’t get inside I’m locking you out. They can talk all they want about sun-drenched New Mexico…it’s cold this time of year!”

  The main doorway to the Prescott house was set into a small closet-equipped entranceway that opened on two very different rooms. To the right, I glimpsed a spacious chamber that I tentatively identified as a formal living room, something like the old-fashioned “company parlor” that my grandmother opened only for Sunday callers. Remembering what I’d seen and what Jake had said outside, I guessed that it was part of the new wing. But Marilyn ushered us to the left, into an older and more comfortable world cluttered with children’s books and an array of bright Mexican blankets, all dominated by a fireplace that I decided must once have been the principal heating and cooking plant for the original ranch dwelling.

  “This was the kitchen and main room of the original house,” Marilyn said, catching the direction of my gaze. “A girlfriend of mine lived here—it was a real working ranch twenty years ago, long before they built houses on the land—and I always loved the way it felt, warm and welcoming in winter or summer. So it was vacant when Pres and I needed a house, and I couldn’t bear to change this part when we needed more space.”

  “Didn’t the cooking make the room awfully hot in summer?” I asked.

  Marilyn shook her head. “Not really. It was hot close to the stove, of course. Had to be. There was a fire inside. But most of the heat took itself away through the chimney after it did the cooking, and the rest of the room stayed cool because of the thick walls and the way the roof keeps all the windows shaded. We have air conditioning now, but it’s really just for the new parts. In here, you can still stay cool just by opening the windows and letting a little breeze through.”

  “It was seeing this place and others like it,” Jake said, “that made me decide I wanted to build a church of adobe when we finally had enough money to begin construction.”

  “And what Father Jake wants, he gets, never doubt it.” Marilyn smiled. “Until I met him, I always thought men of the cloth were gentle souls who breathed thin air and smelled flowers.”

  “I’ve sniffed an occasional cactus blossom,” Jake said.

  “And made it curl up in shame if it dared point a sticker at you.” She turned to look at me. “Was he always like that?”

  “He was!” I said. “I gave up trying to cheat on examinations about a month after we were assigned to the same dormitory room in college. Son of a gun would never tell the proctor, or even say anything to me. But I never did figure out a good way to handle all the sad-eyed disappointment.”

  “So he gave up and became the class valedictorian.” Jake grinned, needling me in an exposed area.

  “I’m impressed,” Marilyn said.

  “And so was I until I got to know him better,” said Helen, joining the party, very brisk and businesslike, from a corridor that seemed to lead toward the rear of the house. “Dana tells me there’s no chance in the world that you’ll be hungry, because you’ve both eaten two breakfasts that would fell a farmhand. If so, then shame on you both, because we’ve fixed a meal that ought to be on the cover of Gourmet magazine.”

  Her eyes dared me to change the subject and berate her in front of Marilyn Prescott.

  The smile I gave her was my very blandest model.

  “Did you know,” I said, turning back to Marilyn, “that Helen, here, studied high cuisine under no less a teacher than the celebrated matriarch of the d’Este family?”

  “My goodness, did you really?” said Marilyn.

  “No. Not really,” Helen said. “And not at all. The son of a bitch is just showing off and being nasty, as usual, because he remembers that my college major was in history.”

  Marilyn’s polite but puzzled nod said she didn’t understand at all, so Helen was stuck with the punch line.

  “The matriarch of the d’Este family,” she said, throwing me a glance that would have sliced bread, “was Lucrezia Borgia.”

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  Yet, grace notes are not the music.

  They do not, in themselves, satisfy. And a life devoted exclusively to the pursuit of material success and acclaim and enjoyment leaves the pursuer hollow at the end…

  SIXTEEN

  Lunch at the Prescott house was friendly, quiet, and even better than promised.

  As soon as she was sure Helen and I weren’t going to get blood on the furniture, Marilyn led the way into the new wing, bypassing an impressive formal dining room on the way to a warm and cavernous kitchen where Dana and two children, a boy and a girl, were busy moving platters to a refectory table that looked as though it might have served several generations of cowboys before falling into the restoring hands of loving and talented friends.

  “It can seat twenty people easily,” Dana said, noticing my interest, “or more, if they’re friendly.”

  “Then bring on the crowd,” Jake said, glancing hopefully back and forth between his wife and me.

  But his concern was needless. Helen and I had finally found our way back to the competitive but friendly relationship we’d had in a much younger and less threatening world. There was still an edge to it. There had been back then, too. But there was no way we could ever be less than allies.

  My good friend, the critic…

  “This,” Dana said, catching one of the boy’s ears and using it as a handle, “is Orrin Prescott, Jr. Call him Bubba, because he doesn’t answer to anything else.”

  He escaped and scampered to the far end of the table, thumbs in ears and fingers wriggling.

  “And this,” she continued, feinting a swipe to the girl’s left and folding her into a tight hug when she dodged, “is my very favorite niece. And namesake. She thinks her name is Missy, but it’s really Dana Marie.”

  The girl relaxed and returned the embrace with interest.

  “My children are so shy around their aunt,” Marilyn Prescott said. “I really don’t know what we’d have done if she hadn’t been here this week. Or now, for that matter. I’m pretty much back in touch, but for a while I don’t think anyone would have had a meal or gotten out of bed in the morning if it hadn’t been for her.”

  “Everyone sit down,” Dana said, neatly covering the compliment with a move toward the stove. “Soup’s the only hot dish we have, but I’d like to get it into the bowls before it freezes.”

  Appetite is a sometime thing for me. I can go for a day or two with nothing more than a tuna sandwich and a few glasses of mineral water—and I often do, during long games when eating would invite a fatal drowsiness—so the two meals I had eaten that morning were already more than I usually consume during twenty-four hours. Accordingly, I had planned to pick at my plate during lunch, moving food into tight
piles that appeared to have been partially eaten when they had not. But I did nothing of the kind.

  The soup was albóndigas agringadas—with just the right amount of oregano and piñon nuts—and the first spoonful put me into a kind of feeding trance from which I emerged with an empty bowl and deep interest in the contents of the various platters.

  “Tell me one thing,” Dana said when I was half finished with the second plateful. “How do you do that and stay so skinny?”

  “You’re the second person this week who’s called me skinny,” I said, glancing at Helen, who ignored me. “Is it a compliment, or should I be thinking up something mean to say back?”

  “Don’t change the subject,” Dana insisted. “A man who eats the way you do should either be working double shifts at a steel mill or weigh about four hundred pounds. How do you do it?”

  “Clean life and daily devotions,” I said.

  She shook her head, watching with apparent fascination while I coped handily with ensalada de pastor, coliflor fría, and garbanzos encurtidos, dispatching the remains with a single pass of a flour tortilla.

  “Well, whatever it is,” she said when she was sure that I was really done, “if we could find some way of bottling it, all of our financial problems would be solved.”

  “Amen,” said Helen.

  “And speaking of finances,” I said, jumping oafishly into a spot I couldn’t have improved upon if I’d been writing the script, “reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to say ever since I arrived. I hope you won’t mind mixing business with a wonderful meal, but I’d like to get into the bidding on the Prescott helicopter business…if I’m not too late.”

  For dessert Helen and Dana had prepared something special—chongitos, with plenty of cinnamon and vanilla. But it had to wait while I explained.

  The fact that I was an old friend of the Spences’ counted heavily in my favor, of course. Enough to rate an invitation to lunch. But selling a multimillion-dollar business is something else entirely, and I had deliberately chosen to toss the offer onto the table without warning: Hit ’em cold and find out what they’re really thinking.

  That’s a poker player’s play for getting acquainted in a strange town, and it works well enough in other situations, too. Jake and Helen were surprised; I hadn’t yet told them what I thought was happening under the pleasant surface of their town. But they had reason—or thought they did—to trust my intentions, if not always the actions that went with them. Marilyn and Dana, however, had no reason to feel any such assurance, and it was time to find out just how far the sisters were willing to go on blind trust. The play that had been forming in my mind was going to need a lot of that.

  “Have you…talked this over with Father Jake?” Marilyn said when the first moments of startled silence had passed.

  “No,” I said. “And I haven’t talked to a lawyer, either, though I’d like us both to do that later today, if you don’t mind.”

  There was more silence then, and I could see Helen was about to fill it with sound and fury, a long agenda of questions churning and boiling just below the threshold of speech. But I wanted the widow Prescott to do the asking.

  “The price I had in mind,” I said, “was one dollar…plus other good and valuable considerations.”

  That stopped the talk for a moment, and then got it started again on the fast track. Prolonged emotional battering might have left Marilyn Prescott’s morale in bad shape, but there was nothing wrong with her brain, and one look at my face apparently convinced her that I wasn’t trying to be funny.

  “I think,” she said, “that I’d like to hear more about those good and valuable considerations.”

  So I explained.

  Playing one long night of poker with Pres Prescott’s circle hadn’t given me any conclusive answers about whether or not he’d been cheated—though if he had, it must have been by general arrangement; none of the people I’d seen around the table seemed to be able to manipulate the cards well enough to fit the image of a lone mechanic. But talking to people who’d known him and were acquainted with the town had given me the beginnings of a slightly different idea about what might have been happening at the time of his death.

  “If anything was, at all,” I said. “We still have no real evidence that this was anything but a series of normal business reverses.”

  The others drowned me in objections, and I waited for them to quiet down before going on.

  “It was just too sudden,” Jake said. “I’ve thought about it, and it simply doesn’t make sense that everything should go so wrong so quickly, all at the same time.”

  “Other businesses here in town seemed to be doing all right,” Helen agreed. “Why should Prescott Helicopters be the only one in trouble?”

  “And our…personal problems seemed to start getting worse about then. A lot worse,” Marilyn said.

  I waited for Dana to have her say, too. But she was silent, looking at me and waiting to hear my response. I made a mental bet that she could have spoken the words for me.

  “All right, then,” I said. “Let’s go with the idea that there was something more to the business problems than meets the eye. I’ve already got the bloodhounds sniffing around the edges of that, looking for a trail that makes more sense. But it’s possible that we know at least a few of the answers already, without knowing that we know them.”

  This time everyone was ready to listen. I turned toward Marilyn.

  “Dana tells me you’ve had one offer for the helicopter business already,” I said. “Since I’ve already told you that I intend to make an offer of my own, it would be a bit unethical for me to ask what kind of a price was mentioned. But she said it was really not much more than enough to cover the outstanding debts and let you keep the house. That about right?”

  Marilyn nodded.

  “And they wanted the old Prescott wheat ranch acreage around it, wanted it thrown in as part of the deal?”

  “Yes. I wondered about that…”

  “And you were right to wonder,” I said. “Let’s ask a few more questions and then do a little speculating: I understand that the offer came from out of town—some lawyer fronting for the real buyer. Or buyers. Have there been any other offers? Or had there been, before the accident?”

  Marilyn shook her head, but my poker-playing radar picked up a background trace of uncertainty. Not much. But enough.

  “No,” she said slowly. “Just the one, as far as I know.”

  “But…” I prompted.

  “But it seems to me Pres said something—oh, it must have been months ago, way back before all the trouble began—about someone wanting to buy him out.”

  “I don’t suppose he mentioned a name?”

  “No. But the way he talked, I think it must have been someone here in town. Someone he knew.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because he laughed about it. He said he couldn’t believe the person was serious, said they had to know he wouldn’t be interested in making a deal that would put him out of business.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No. He never mentioned it again. Do you think this new offer could be from the same person…right here in town?”

  I certainly did, but it was far too early to say so. Always protect your hole card. “We can’t be sure,” I said. “But the letters Jake showed me, the ones from out-of-town banks that were so willing to set up a line of credit, have made me just a little bit curious.”

  Marilyn shrugged.

  “Can’t tell you much about that,” she said. “I never heard about any of it until the tax man found the papers.”

  “Still, the very fact that those banks were ready to lend money to a business that was already heavily in debt and facing severe reverses tells us that they—and your husband—saw something, some major potential asset that we don’t.”

  “And if they saw it,” Dana said, speaking to her sister but looking directly at me, “then there’s one hell of a good chance the person
making the bid for Prescott Helicopters has seen it, too… and is hoping to make his deal before we figure it out.”

  Marilyn’s shoulders squared. “I’ll call them back,” she said, “and tell them to go to hell.”

  “No!”

  My mouth was open to say the word, but Dana said it for me. We looked at each other and laughed.

  “I gather,” Marilyn Prescott said, indignation momentarily in abeyance, “that there’s some good reason why I shouldn’t do that.”

  Dana glanced at me, but I wanted to make sure we were both thinking the same way. Knowing your allies can be just as important as understanding the opposition.

  “I’m not a poker player,” Dana said when she was sure I wasn’t going to make the explanations myself, “but I’ve watched enough games to know a little about betting…”

  She waited for someone to interrupt, but all the other faces around the table were blank.

  “The perfect situation,” she went on, “is in a game of stud where the first player to the left of the dealer is forced to get into the pot, make an opening bet, whether he has anything in his hand or not.

  “They call this the trapping position, because it keeps him in the pot without having to let anybody know whether he thinks his hole cards are any good or not. If they’re nothing, he can fold or bluff…but if they’re strong and he can pick up the right cards to go with them, he can milk the hand—get other players to bet higher against him than they otherwise might—because they know less about his hand than they do about the others around the table.

  “The offer that was made for the helicopter business and its land was something else, though.

  “It’s like the player who tries to drive everyone out by betting high in the early rounds. And from what I’ve seen, it’s usually a sign of weakness…something you’d do if you liked your hole cards enough to get into the pot, but didn’t get anything to go with them.”