by Angela Hunt
“Don’t seem to be. He’s just sitting there. A minute ago there was a pack of gulls pestering him for his doughnut, but they’ve mostly left now.”
Edith pressed her hand to her forehead for a long minute, then opened her eyes. “Leave him be,” she said, lifting her gaze toward the ceiling. “If he’s not hurt, he’ll move on when he’s ready.”
“You sure?”
“Yes. And thanks, Vernie, for calling. Let’s keep this between us, okay?”
“You know best, hon.”
Edith murmured a soft good-bye, then hung up the phone and stared at the floor. What was Winslow doing? He had left the house in high spirits, and after their talk yesterday she had begun to think he had come to his senses. But if he was really sitting on the ground outside the bakery . . .
She could go get him . . . or she could trust him to work out his own problems. And trust the Lord to show him the way.
Without another moment’s hesitation, Edith knelt beside her bed, propped her elbows on the mattress, and began to pray. “Lord, help my man. I don’t know what he’s thinking, but you do. Send the help he needs, Lord. Please.”
As the clock beside her bed tick-tocked the minutes away, her prayerful plea rose to heaven.
Winslow stood beneath the branches of the pine tree and stared up at the brown furry patch on a limb twenty feet overhead. The tall tree had no low branches to serve as handholds, but Vernie might have an extension ladder at the Mercantile he could borrow.
Of course, only last week he’d read about a man in Ogunquit who’d gone up a tree to rescue a cat. The kitten had only scrambled further away, and the man had fallen to his death, a victim of good intentions. So yes, climbing a tree was dangerous, but his toupee wasn’t likely to scurry away as he approached . . .
A breath of wind moved in the top of the tree, but though the green boughs overhead swayed, the patch of hair on the lowest limb did not.
Winslow sighed. What had he done to deserve this disaster?
Gavriel received the urgent message only seconds after Edith began to pray. An invisible angelic messenger delivered the order, and within moments Gavriel was knocking on the door of the Baskahegan Bed and Breakfast.
Cleta Lansdown answered, and her eyes brightened when she saw a stranger on her front porch. “Are you an overnight guest or a day visitor?” she asked, taking in his appearance with one swift glance. “We only have the one guest room available, it being off season. All the other rooms are being painted and freshened up a bit. We had a nasty drip from one of the upstairs showers—”
“I’m not here for a room.” Gavriel took off his cap and held it in his hands. “I’m here for your husband. He’s the fire chief, right?”
Cleta’s hand went to her throat. “Is there a fire? My goodness, I’ll bet the bakery ovens have overheated again. And I was just there—”
Gavriel put out a reassuring hand. “There’s no fire. But the minister has lost something in a tree, and I know your fire truck has one of those blueberry pluckers.”
Cleta’s forehead knit in puzzlement. “Come again?”
“The device.” Gavriel gestured toward the nearest tree. “The little bucket in which a person may ride up to the top of a tall object—”
Cleta couldn’t control a burst of laughter. “The cherry picker! Of course! Come on in, and I’ll get Floyd for you.”
Gavriel followed her into the ornate foyer, then grimaced as the petite woman stuck her head around the corner and bellowed like a foghorn: “Flo-yd!”
Coming back into the foyer, she gave Gavriel a sweet smile as she plucked her coat from a hall coat tree. “Did Pastor send you over here?”
Gavriel twisted his hat in his hand. “He doesn’t know I’ve come. But I saw his predicament, and I’m afraid he’ll try to climb the tree if we don’t hurry.”
Cleta nodded in understanding, then turned toward the house again. “Flo-yd! Shake a leg! Emergency!”
Smiling again, she opened the front door. “After you,” she said, with all the gentility of a Victorian schoolmistress. Gavriel had no sooner stepped back outside than Floyd burst through the doorway, one arm in his coat, one out, and a length of toilet paper clinging to his boot.
“Where’s my keys?” he shouted to his wife, though she stood only six inches from him. “I had ’em this morning when I went out to turn the engine over.”
Cleta crossed her arms across her thin chest. “They’re where they always are, Floyd. Unless you didn’t put them back.”
“’Course I put ’em back! Can’t be a fire chief without knowing where the keys are. And I looked on the hook, and they’re not there!”
“They have to be there.” With both hands on her hips, Cleta stood up to her husband. “Look again, Floyd. You’re just aflutter, that’s all.”
“By golly and tarnation, woman, if they’re not there . . .”
Floyd’s heavy bootsteps thumped across the wooden floor, rattling the porcelain knickknacks on the antique table by the door. As her husband disappeared into the back room, Cleta smiled at Gavriel again. “Shall we walk, or would you like to ride in the fire truck?”
“I think I’ll walk,” Gavriel answered, crossing the porch. “I may need to talk Winslow out of climbing that tree before Floyd arrives.”
“Well, don’t you worry about Floyd,” Cleta said. “The second he finds those keys he’ll be on the run for the firehouse. And then it’ll be just a second before he has that machine on the road, looking for the preacher—”
“He’s on Main Street,” Gavriel interrupted, “about a hundred yards south of Birdie’s Bakery. Standing in front of a tall pine tree.”
A suggestion of annoyance filled Cleta’s faded blue eyes. “We woulda found him,” she said, letting the screen door slam.
“One more thing.” Gavriel paused on the lower step. “Ask Floyd to bring the truck quietly, okay? There’s no reason the entire island has to know about this.”
Cleta jerked her chin upward, but nodded curtly and sailed back into the house. “He wants a discreet rescue,” Gavriel heard her call as she moved toward the back room where her husband was probably still searching for keys. “Can you imagine that? These off-islanders are forever telling us how to run things around here . . .”
Leaving Cleta to her rantings, Gavriel walked to the street, then jogged through the Ferry Road intersection and past the Mercantile. Puzzled, he slowed when the pine tree came into view. Winslow Wickam was nowhere to be seen.
Just then the screen door to the Mercantile slammed, and Winslow strode across the porch, carrying an aluminum extension ladder.
Gavriel smiled and waved. “Pastor Wickam! What a surprise to see you here!”
The pastor stopped on the sidewalk, an uncertain smile on his face.
Gavriel thrust his hands in his pockets and jerked his chin toward the ladder. “Painting the church?”
“Thought maybe I’d get up on the roof and take a look around. The place leaks like a basket in a good rain.”
“I’ve heard that.”
An uncomfortable silence fell between them, then Winslow nodded. “Well, I’ll be going now. Have a good day.”
Gavriel waited until the pastor had taken three steps toward the pine tree, then he called out, “Pastor?”
“Yes?”
Gavriel pointed in the opposite direction. “The church is that way.”
“Oh.” The pastor swallowed, and Gavriel could see a tide of dusky red advancing up his throat. “Well, if the truth be known, I was going to use this ladder to get something out of a tree before I go to the church.”
Gavriel crossed his arms and looked toward the tall pine. “That tree, by chance?”
“Ayuh, that’s the one.” Winslow tilted his head back and surveyed the tree, then closed one eye against the sun and looked at Gavriel. “It’s the funniest thing, actually. My toupee is up there. If you can believe it, a sea gull snatched it from my head and dropped it in the tree.”
Gavriel opened
his eyes wide. “Really? I hadn’t noticed it was missing.”
A melancholy frown flitted across Winslow’s features, then vanished. “Really,” he said, and from the tone of the pastor’s voice Gavriel knew he hadn’t been believed.
The minister wasted no more time with small talk, but carried the ladder toward the tree, then braced the top rung against the trunk. The ladder was wider than the tree, though, and didn’t look sturdy enough to hold angels, much less a preacher who had no business acting like a lumberjack.
Gavriel crossed the street to follow Winslow. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
“You can hold the ladder for me,” Winslow said, stepping on the bottom rung as if to test its strength. “I’ll just climb up and reach out. Simple.”
“But the ladder doesn’t quite reach to that branch. So you’ll be reaching way above your head.”
“I know what I’m doing.”
“Do you?”
At that moment, a low wail split the silence and serenity of Heavenly Daze. The creatures that had been chirping and whistling and buzzing in the brush fell silent as the man-made siren began its slow caterwauling.
Standing on the bottom rung of the ladder, Winslow buried his head in his arms. “Oh, my. Please make them go away.”
“It’s for the best, Pastor.” Gavriel steadied the ladder. “They have a cherry picker. They’ll be able to get your hair back with no trouble.”
Winslow didn’t answer, but made a sound like a strangled gurgle.
A moment later, the resplendent red fire truck rounded the corner at a stately pace, its blue and white lights flashing like a strobe. Riding in the cherry picker like a festival queen, Cleta Lansdown waved to the residents that poured out of their homes to discover the cause of the commotion.
The Hair Rescue was accomplished amid much fanfare and celebration by humans and angelic residents alike. Elezar, a sales associate at the mercantile, brought last week’s popcorn balls out to the front porch and sold them for half-price. Abner Smith gave away free gingerbread men in honor of the occasion (they, too, sorely lacked hair), while Micah, the gardener at the B&B, stood next to the fire truck and repeatedly warned Floyd not to injure the pine tree.
Cleta and Birdie were mystified as to how the Pastor’s hair ended up in the same tree where they’d seen a gull drop a squirrel, and Georgie Graham kept tugging on the minister’s pants and asking what kind of glue he used to make the hair stick to his head.
But no answers were forthcoming. As soon as Cleta caught the flyaway Hair (amid much applause and whistling), Floyd adroitly lowered the cherry picker to within a foot of the minister. He snatched his toupee without so much as a thank-you, tugged it back into place, and stalked away without a backward glance.
“Well, if that don’t beat all,” Cleta told her assembled admirers. “You’d think a man of the cloth would at least convey his thanks to the emergency workers who stood ready to risk their lives to save his hair.”
As he watched the commotion from the shade of the mercantile’s front porch, Gavriel munched on a stale popcorn ball and smiled. God was not finished with Winslow Wickam.
Still on her knees, Edith paused in her prayers when she heard Winslow’s heavy steps on the stairs. Grateful beyond words to have her husband home, she bowed her head as he swept into the bathroom and shut the door.
Smiling, Edith closed her eyes and silently offered thanks for his safe return. She’d heard the sirens, and for a moment she had wondered if Winslow had managed to fall off the ferry dock and get himself swept out to sea . . .
But he was home, safe and sound, though a bit disheveled. And that was fine with her.
Chapter Twenty-two
The fresh afternoon air, bathed in sunlight, carried faint hints of coming winter days, but Winslow didn’t want to think about the future as he strode along the walking path by the beach. He didn’t want to think about the past, either—particularly the recent past. The tops of his ears burned whenever his thoughts turned to the events of the morning, and his humiliation had been complete when he came home to find Edith on her knees, praying for him.
For him?
She should have been praying for the town and for the church. Because as soon as they kissed Winslow Wickam good-bye, they’d have to bring in someone new, and God help Rex Hartwell or whoever they hired if he tried to lead these people in any sort of new direction. They were resistant, these Maine Yankees, and the old-seed folks born and bred on Heavenly Daze were as stubborn as cross-eyed mules. They poked fun at newcomers, even after ten years, they mocked those who tried to improve themselves, and they couldn’t even send a fire truck to the rescue without making a major production out of another person’s misfortune.
No one even seemed to care that he’d been humiliated. No one cared about his feelings at all. Instead, they insisted upon keeping secrets, gossiping about him and his wife, and sneaking around behind a fellow’s back.
Let them bring this Thomas fellow to fill in. Let them call Rex Hartwell to the pastorate. Winslow no longer cared.
But before he left town, he was going to show these people how a sermon should be preached. The topic for Sunday’s sermon was “Habakkuk’s Prayer,” and it was a grand way to close out the series on that minor prophet. He would add sound effects and visual aids, and, by golly, by the time his people left on Sunday, they’d know a little something about God and Habukkuk!
Moreover—Winslow felt the corners of his mouth lift in a smile—if Rex Hartwell came to church, he’d know a little something about Winslow Wickam. He’d realize that a vacancy in the Heavenly Daze pulpit would leave some pretty big shoes to fill. Yessir, Rex Hartwell could be as handsome as a ten-pound lobster, but after sitting through Sunday’s sermon he’d know that good looks would carry him only so far. To follow in Winslow Wickam’s steps, he’d have to be intellectual and creative and charming to boot.
Winslow stopped on the beach and put his hands in his pockets, turning his face to the sea. Yessir, sometimes people could be unpredictable and churlish, but a man who walked with God had nothing to fear. If Cleta Lansdown and her church committee sent the Wickam family packing, God would protect them until they found another place of service.
But, in the meantime, Winslow had a sermon to prepare. He turned toward the church and lengthened his stride, hoping that no one had moved the box of catalogs he had stored in the basement.
The catalog at the top of the stack offered just what he needed . . . from the Portland Theatrical Company of Special Effects.
On Thursday afternoon Winslow was the first customer to appear after the ferry brought the mail. Beatrice Coughlin’s wide forehead seamed with a frown when she saw the pastor standing at the half-door of her tiny post office. “Hold your horses, Pastor; I haven’t had time to sort the mail yet.”
“I won’t trouble you, Bea,” Winslow answered, leaning over the wooden sill that served as a counter. “But I can see my package. It’s right there, in the second bag.”
A shadow of annoyance crossed Bea’s face. “Two bags of mail,” she grumbled softly, shuffling toward the gray sacks the ferry master had just delivered. “People wanting favors from angels.” She snorted. “You seen any halos around here lately, Pastor?”
Winslow pointed again to the second sack, where he could see the protruding end of a cardboard box. “If you’d be so kind as to get that parcel for me. You can keep the regular mail; I’ll call for it later.”
Gingerly, Bea undid the clasp on the mail sack, then pulled the box out. “Pretty big,” she remarked, sliding it over the floor.
“Yes.” Winslow felt a surge of impatience. “I’d like to take it now.”
Bea grunted to lift the package. “Not as heavy as I thought.”
“Ten pounds, is all. Could I have—”
“From Portland? A theatrical company?” A smile gathered up the powdered wrinkles at her mouth. “You putting on a play, Pastor?”
Winslow tried to smile in return,
but the corners of his mouth only flinched in impatience. “It’s just a little production— a surprise for Edith. So—”
“’Bout as big as a bread box, but only ten pounds.” Bea slipped her hands beneath the package as if testing its weight, then looked at Winslow with one brow lifted. “A makeup kit? The late Mr. Coughlin, you know, directed our community theater in Portland.”
“I believe I’ve heard that.” Winslow abandoned all dignity and hung over the wooden sill, both hands reaching for the box. “May I have my package, please? I’d like to open it before Christmas.”
“Well.” Bea flushed to the roots of her curly white hair. “If you’re in a hurry, all you had to do was say so.”
She took two steps, dropped the box onto Winslow’s palms, then wheeled and moved toward her desk.
“Thank you,” Winslow called to her stiff back. “I’ll look forward to seeing you on Sunday.”
Tucking the box under his arm, he turned and nearly bumped into Cleta Lansdown.
“Well, Pastor,” she said, her gaze lifting to Winslow’s hairline. “Haven’t seen you in a few days.”
Winslow waved and took a step forward, hoping she’d realize he was in a hurry. “Good to see you.”
“Got your hair back in place, I see.”
He took another step. “Yes, I did. Thanks for your help with that.”
“Any time.”
Winslow turned away and took another step, ready to run for the church— “Pastor, wait!”
Winslow stutter-stepped, then halted. Cleta’s voice was like iron when she used that tone; ignoring her was unthinkable.
Slowly, he turned to face her. “Yes?”
Cleta’s eyes were bright with speculation, her smile half sly. “Pastor, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Rex Hartwell, but he’s affiliated with the Maine Council of Independent Churches, and he’s going to be worshiping with us Sunday morning. Of course, he’ll stay at the B&B on Saturday night.”
What was he supposed to do, cheer? Winslow pasted on a look of pleased indifference.
