“Say again, Leo?”
Leo was saved from answering; Sadie took over. “He’s right, Pastor,” she said. “Someone needs to protect the church. Case they come back.”
They had a point, and Bristol and I had talked about that very thing over breakfast. “Good thinking, both of you,” I said, turning to Pastor Parry. “What do you think?”
He smiled and held his hands up in front of him. “Your call, Hugh. Your call.”
“Oh yeah, right. Okay, Bristol. What do you think? You certainly can’t continue to watch over the church in this storm, even with me there with you. You haven’t slept, for one thing. Could you use some help?”
“I’ll be fine, but yeah, if the men want to join us, I think that’s a great idea. I think one of us should stay with the ladies, but the rest of us can do what we can to make ourselves comfortable in the sanctuary.” Everybody seemed to be in agreement. “Okay now, let’s figure out who’s going where. We don’t want anybody getting lost in this stuff. And I have an idea about who should stay with the ladies.”
Another ten minutes passed. It was painfully evident that despite Pastor Parry’s willingness to hand the reins over to me, I was not the one in charge. Fact is, it was hard to tell just who was in charge. Sadie? Winnie? Dewey? No, not Dewey—not with Winnie in the room.
Frank sat in the wing chair next to the fireplace with his chin resting on his arms crossed over his chest, snoring. Leo sat next to him, looking antsy. I figured he probably wanted his pipe during this time of unrest and turmoil but was holding to Sadie’s rule not to smoke in the house. I caught his eye, cupped my hand in front of my face to simulate holding a pipe, and nodded slightly. He returned my nod and coolly reached into his pocket. To the casual observer, we could have been exchanging information of national security significance, and to Leo, I suppose it did feel that urgent.
I wished I had something—a pipe, a pacifier, anything—to hold on to besides the knowledge that someone was stupid enough to break into our church during a record-breaking blizzard and vandalize historic walls, get my parishioners all in a tizzy, and turn my little retirement world to chaos. I felt like I was inside a snow globe—with a bunch of crazies.
So I did what I always do in times of great stress. I prayed.
Then I craved jelly beans. I looked around the room at my usual spots—Melanie likes to put candy dishes next to chairs. Nothing. I think Delbert T. Jackson beat me to them. Another good reason not to trust the guy; he was a jellybean-snatcher.
“Folks, folks,” I said as I held out my arms and gestured for them to take their seats. “Let’s do this quietly and quickly, okay?” They barked closing shots at one another here and there. “Okay now, people, what have you decided? Wait. One at a time, please. Please! Let’s start with Dewey.”
Somehow Dewey managed to jump to his feet and get his mouth open before Winnie did. “Do I need a gun?”
A gun in the Lord’s house? That seemed a bit extreme. I exchanged a glance with Bristol; he nodded. “Uh, Dewey, let me get back with you on that, okay?”
Dewey nodded and sat down.
A couple more minutes passed while the men discussed the various calibers of their weapons of choice. This was turning into an armed standoff against someone with a gallon of white paint. Looking over the sea of eager, but wrinkled faces, I almost felt sorry for the paint guy.
Ten minutes and eighteen different conversations later, it was settled. We’d forego shoveling, and Bristol would head straight to the church, while the rest of us gathered the necessary clothing, food, and bedding the men would take over with them. The men would take turns spelling Mr. Jackson, the one we’d decided would stay with the ladies, as the day wore on. After all, he was a stranger. I’d send Joe Rich or Rudy Wallenberg back as soon as I could. Mel headed to the kitchen behind a gaggle of ladies. She looked over her shoulder with a frightened look, and it had nothing to do with a possible killer on the loose. She was fearful for her kitchen, her house, her sanity.
I was alone with Frank now, who by default was assigned to church duty along with the rest of the men. I started to wake him then realized he’d find someplace to fall asleep all over again if we didn’t head out the door immediately. I let him rest until it was time to go. He’d no doubt wake up during that brisk walk to the church. Nothing like fifty mile per hour winds to keep a man awake.
Chapter Eleven
Over the years, I’ve come to rely on Melanie’s womanly intuition when it comes to dealing with those who are hurting. She has an uncanny way of carefully uncovering the pain and talking a distraught person off that imaginary cliff. According to Mel, if ever a person teetered over an abyss, it was Emma.
But Mel had other things on her plate just then, so it was up to me to try to help. Father, be with me, I prayed as I started up the staircase. I wanted to repair whatever damage I’d caused to our relationship the night before by dragging her from her home to stay with us. And I needed to find out what drove her to the cliff in the first place.
The Jefferson Room was at the top of the stairs and three doors down on the right. I could see light coming from the open door and cleared my throat as I approached to give her some warning. I knocked on the doorframe. “Mind if I come in for a minute, Miss River?”
Emma was sitting in the old rush-seated rocking chair on the far side of the Jefferson Room, moving slowly back and forth. She was staring out the window and seemed deep in thought.
She looked up at me and just stared, no emotion, no flicker of life in her face. Her eyes were swollen, her nose pink, her cheeks flushed. She stopped her chair and said, “I suppose you may as well, Mr. Foster. You’ve come this far.”
I walked in slowly and stood beside the bed nestled into the wall. “Emma … may I call you Emma?”
She nodded.
“And please call me Hugh. I thought I’d come up here and keep you company if that’s all right with you. I’d like to make up for my boorish behavior at your house last night.”
She just sat there and stared at me as though I were a wayward first grader in need of a good stare-down.
“I’m not usually so … forceful,” I said, “but I was freezing out there, and it was important that you come with me, that I move you someplace safe from this storm.” I motioned out the window, but she said nothing. “That’s no excuse, I know, but it’s the best I have. I’m sorry I intruded on your privacy.”
She broke her gaze, thank goodness, and looked back at the window. I couldn’t be sure if it was the snow she saw, or if she was envisioning me at some time in the future breaking and entering her home. Finally she said, “Thank you. I didn’t appreciate being forced from my home, but I suppose you thought you were doing what was best.”
I nodded. “Thanks for understanding. I do respect your privacy, you know.”
She snorted. A minute passed then without looking away from the window, she said, “You’re lucky, you know.”
“In what way?”
“Your wife. She’s a lovely woman.”
I nodded. “I couldn’t agree with you more. I am indeed a lucky man.”
She swung her gaze from the window back to me. “And she has a beautiful voice.” She seemed to sigh. “As you can well imagine, I don’t hear many voices in my home. None, for that matter, unless the people I occasionally hire to clean the house or work on my lawn talk to me for a moment.” She took her hands from the arms of the rocking chair and folded them neatly in her lap. They were small and I could see the feathery traces of veins drawn across them in faint trails of blue. They had once been beautiful, but like the rest of her, they seemed used up, certainly past their prime, and frail. Very frail. “And then it’s only to settle up the bill.” She looked up at me and gave a little half-smile. “Thank goodness for money. Otherwise I’d never hear anyone’s voice but my own.”
I was out of my element but not about to end this conversation prematurely. Mel would kill me. “Emma, is it really that bad for you up ther
e at Rivermanse? That lonely? Why haven’t you said something before this?”
“And you’d have done what, young man? Taken pity on the old woman everybody in town despises and talked to me once in a while just to make yourself feel good? I don’t need your pity. Not yours and certainly not anybody else’s.” The rocking started up again. The runners creaked against the pine-planked floor.
I breathed deeply and plunged in. “I know you’re going to accuse me of prying and I am, so let’s just get that out in the open right now. But I think you know that my prying is out of Christian love for you, don’t you?”
Silence.
“Emma, please answer me. You do know that, right?”
The old woman looked up. “I think you’re prying because that’s your job. But don’t think that prying and changing my mind about this town are one and the same thing.” She shook her finger at me. “Because they’re not.” She put her hand down but maintained her glare. I wondered if the hole she was boring through my head would reach the back of my skull before she turned away again. “And as for Christians”—she practically spat the word out—“you can take the whole lot of ’em and toss ’em in the river, for all I care.”
“Okay, okay, I understand your position. Well, not really, but we’ll get back to that. Now let me do some talking. Let me ask you some questions, and please, if this is going to work, you’re going to have to be honest with me. About everything. Mel and I care about you, and we’re not about to let you suffer alone up there, rattling around in that big old house. It’s time you joined the human race.” Let alone the family of God.
I took her silence as agreement. “Something’s wrong with the way this town perceives you. Too many rumors and stories and that ridiculous feud you’ve got going with Sadie Simms …”
“Nothing ridiculous about it, young man. That …”
“Hugh.”
“Oh, all right, Hugh. That woman …”
“Emma, you promised. Let me finish, okay? I’m going somewhere with this, I promise.” I reached over and took first one, then the other, of Emma’s hands and cupped them in mine. I expected her to snatch them away from me just before she scratched my eyes out, but she sat there and let me hold them. They were soft and smooth, with skin as translucent as ice; her fingers long and graceful. In her youth, they were probably quite beautiful. Age had spotted her skin and her joints were slightly swollen from eighty-odd years of life.
I knelt in front of her chair. “You have beautiful hands, you know that? They remind me of my grandmother’s. She had long fingers like you. And Mel says you were quite the beauty.”
Emma looked down and gave a half-hearted attempt to pull her hands from my mine, but when I didn’t release them immediately, she gave up. It occurred to me that she’d probably not touched another human being for many years either.
“Tell me about those years. Tell me about the young Emma and what made you come to hate everyone in this town. Because I think something happened—something specific—to make you the way you are and you’re too afraid to bring it out in the open, even to yourself.”
A long silence ensued. I watched Emma’s face and could almost hear an argument going on inside that white-haired head. I clasped her hands in mind for assurance—at least I hoped she was taking it as assurance. She was just as likely to think I was trying to break her fingers.
After a while, Emma spoke up. “I suppose you’re right, young … Hugh. I wasn’t always a hateful old woman. Once upon a time, a lifetime ago, I guess, I was young and loving and yes, even beautiful, if you think of beautiful in the physical sense. I never really felt beautiful inside, though.”
She paused as if she’d said too much.
“Take all the time you want.”
She raised her eyes and looked into mine. Hers were a dark chocolate. They had once been the prettiest part of her face, I imagined. “It’s a long, long story. I’m an old woman; I’ve had a long life.” She shook her head. “And to be honest, I’m not sure you’re going to want to hear it.”
I grinned. “We all have things in our lives we don’t always want to examine, let alone talk about to someone else. But I think you’ve suffered in silence far too long. I have all the time in the world. After all,” I said, glancing out the bedroom window at the white maelstrom beyond its panes, “it doesn’t look like any of us are going anywhere for a while.” I fell silent for a moment. “But if you’d prefer talking to Mel instead of me, I’ll certainly understand.”
She appeared not to have heard me at first, but then she shook her head slightly. “One’s as good as the other, I suppose.” She closed her eyes. “I was a twin. You didn’t know that, did you? I had an identical twin sister, born just two minutes after me. It sounds vain to tell you this because we were, after all, identical, but she was such a lovely girl.”
“I’m not surprised. I can still see that beauty in your face. Tell me more. What was her name? And what happened to her?”
Emma hesitated as if it hurt her to utter the words. “We were named Emma and Rachel. She was the quiet one, the thinker. She was … my best friend, an angel.”
I released her hands, gave them a soft pat and scooched across the floor to lean against the side of the bed. “Go ahead. I’m just settling in here, getting comfortable. Tell me what happened.”
Emma turned from the tempest outside, opened her eyes, and looked straight into mine. “My sister died. Rachel’s gone. And I’m the one who killed her.”
Chapter Twelve
All righty then. I was shocked into silence.
“I don’t know why my mother and father ever had children,” Emma continued. “It was made very clear to us after my mother died that we were an accident, and a double one, at that. I think my mother loved us. In fact, I know she did. But my father? If he did, he wasn’t very good at showing it. His world revolved around high finance and the farther away from us he could get, the better.”
Emma looked out the window, and I followed her glance. The snow was dancing with the wind, first flirting, then twirling, finally whirling away in a flurry of powder. I shivered, but I wasn’t sure if it was from the storm outdoors or the coldness of Emma’s story. For a while I wondered if she had said all she was going to say. Frankly, that would be enough revelation for any human being at one time.
“That really didn’t bother us, though. He was lost to us years before,” Emma went on, “as both father and husband, I would imagine. I don’t remember a time when my mother and father got along.” She sighed and looked away from the window and then at me. Her eyes penetrated mine and for a split second, I imagined I could feel her pain—a long-simmering, deep-in-her-gut soreness that nothing could soothe, least of all me. “I suppose they loved each other at the beginning and maybe they stayed married for the sake of propriety. That was a long while ago, you know, and back then divorce wasn’t as commonplace as it is today.”
She patted the arms of her rocking chair with the palms of her hands, lost in thought then rallied and said, “But for reasons known only to them, they stayed married.”
I nodded, but didn’t say anything. I sensed that this fragile line of thought was stretched as tight as it could be drawn and any interruption would snap it as surely as an earthquake would shatter our surroundings and scatter our thoughts.
“My father was seldom home and when he was, he was civil, but aloof. By today’s standards, he would be considered, what do they call it? A workaholic?” I nodded and she continued, “And of course, that’s exactly what he was. Everyone considered him the perfect husband and a sterling example of fatherhood. Even at my tender age, though, I knew my mother missed having a husband and I knew he wasn’t the kind of father my other friends were blessed with.”
She fell silent again. The only sound in the room, aside from the wind knocking on the window and the insistent clicking of ice crystals against the glass, was the creaking of that blamed rocking chair. Screek, scrawk, screek, scrawk. I watched the storm and lis
tened, mesmerized, to the rhythmic, hypnotic screeching of the chair runners. Emma’s voice was barely above a whisper when she spoke again. “We had a live-in housekeeper, Lydia, who always treated us kindly, but eventually even she knew enough to keep her distance. After my mother fell ill and died, my father’s older brother, George, and his wife, Louanna, came to live with us.” She suddenly stopped rocking, sat up straight, and drew both hands into fists. “He was a cruel, cruel man. Oh, how I hated him.”
The room fell silent. The old woman shook her head as if to clear her mind of ugly thoughts—of George, a lost mother, a cold father. “Anyway, because my father couldn’t seem to stand the sight of my sister and me after my mother died—maybe he blamed us for some unknown reason, I don’t know—he left for England.” She stopped, and I thought she might have thought better of spilling family secrets.
Not so. “I saw him just once after that, at my sister’s funeral. For all practical purposes, Aunt Louanna and Uncle George became our parents when Mother died. Just like that. One minute we had two parents; the next, we were orphans. I think the thing I blame my father for—more than deserting us, more than spending all his time on business, more than all his other shortcomings—was letting his brother fulfill his obligations as our father. As absent and cold as he was, at least our father was tolerable in our presence.”
Emma took a deep breath as if gathering steam for the difficult voyage ahead. “But Uncle George was not. He was an abusive, violent man. And moody, unpredictable. And my father must have known that. My aunt certainly did, but she and Lydia both stayed quiet about his violent rages, as all good family members and loyal employees did back then, you know.” She sighed deeply. “I never really understood why my aunt put up with it. She could be pretty darned mean herself, but I suppose she had no other way to support herself. She did what was expected of all women in those days. What is it that country singer says? Stand by your man?”
Misstep (The Road's End Series Book 1) Page 7
