'I've come to take you to church," Jane announced. "Though why we're fool enough to go out on a night like this is beyond me."
Anybody else might have said, "I'm sure we'll be all right," but Nora Bonesteel never said things like that. People were likely to take it as a guarantee. "Well, I like to hear the singing of the carols," she said at last. "Were the roads slick?"
"They're tolerable. Half an inch fell, but it's stopped for now. My son Spencer put snow tires on my car last week, though, so I didn't have any trouble. I knew you were expecting Laura Bruce to pick you up, but I told her she had no business being out driving tonight in her condition. She said she'll see you at church, though."
Nora Bonesteel closed the door behind her.
"Aren't you going to lock it?" asked Jane.
"No."
Although Jane Arrowood couldn't have been more than a dozen years younger than Nora 190
herself, she held the older woman's arm in a protective grasp and guided her down the porch steps to the yard, where the brown grass drooped beneath a dusting of snow. Up the hill in front of them, Jane Arrowood's gray car sat with its engine idling, and above it, just visible in the twilight, the pines on the mountain crest were wreathed in snow garlands. A few feet from the porch, Nora suddenly halted. She put out her hand to touch the bark of a sapling, its bare limbs silted white.
"Is that your chestnut tree?" asked Jane.
"One of them. I reckon it'll be all right. It's so hard to tell if things will make it through the winter." She wiped a line of snow from one of the slender branches and walked on up the hill.
Will Bruce's church was a white spiral in the darkness, illuminated only by the lights over the gravel parking lot. It had been built by the church members themselves in the 1890s, with solid oak floors and hand-carved pews. The builders had been craftsmen, but not wealthy people, so they had constructed a steeple to make the church look "fitten," but there was no bell to toll within its wooden frame. The church had two stained-glass windows; the rest were simple glazing. The picture of an angel hovering over two children on a bridge had been given by the local doctor in the thirties in memory of his wife; and the congregation had raised money for the other one in 1945, Jesus in Geth-semane, in memory of the boys killed in the two world wars. The stone walkway between the yew hedges was crowded with latecomers,
packing into the sanctuary in ever-tightening rows.
Jane Arrowood pulled into one of the few vacant spaces left, at the end of the lot farthest away from the church. "I'm afraid we're going to have to walk a bit," she told her passenger. "I must speak to the grounds committee about reserving some handicapped spaces."
"I wouldn't want you to take one on my account," said Nora. "I used to walk the whole way here not too many years back." She pushed open her door and stamped her feet into the thin crust of snow. "Ready if you are, Jane."
"I am, but I warn you, Miz Bonesteel, if there's standing room only in there, I'm going to pull age and rank on some of these young pups and get us seats. You see if I don't!"
In the darkness Nora Bonesteel smiled. "We-elll."
The last strains of "The Holly and the Ivy" were just dying away as the two women entered the darkened sanctuary. Two candelabra on either side of the pulpit provided the light for the evening service, illuminating the decorations of ribbon-trimmed pine boughs. The youth choir, a dozen adolescents in white robes, stood in their accustomed place behind the pulpit. Above them hung a red velvet curtain that covered only the white wall of the back of the church, the mystery being that there was no mystery.
True to her word, Jane Arrowood had marched up to two young men in the back row and gestured furiously until they relinquished 192
their seats. The sight of Nora Bonesteel just behind her may have speeded up the process. As the two women slid out of their coats and settled into the pew, Laura Bruce caught sight of them and smiled. Then she motioned for the congregation to stand to share a hymn with her choir.
" 'What Child Is This?' " whispered Jane Arrowood. "It's my favorite of all the carols."
"I heard it sung at a wedding once," Nora Bonesteel whispered back.
In one dazed moment Jane Arrowood realized that old Miz Bonesteel had made a joke, and then she had to hold her breath to keep from giggling out loud. Behind them, the two young men, now standing, exchanged disgusted looks and wondered why old ladies couldn't behave in church.
Farther toward the front Joe LeDonne stood beside Martha, balancing a hymnbook in one hand, but not singing. He looked uncomfortable in his dark suit, with the blue silk tie she'd given him knotted at his throat like a noose. You'd think he had been dressed by a taxidermist, Martha thought when she saw him, but wisely she had kept this remark to herself. They didn't go to church very often; for LeDonne, changing patrol schedules made a convenient excuse to be absent, and Martha, who had hardly missed a Sunday as a teenager, discovered that the demands on a working woman's time consumed most of her weekends. By the time she did the laundry (and his laundry), cleaned the apart-193
ment, and cooked a few casserole suppers to freeze for the week ahead, she barely had time to read the paper, much less think about getting dressed up and going anywhere. Once in a while she discussed this privately with God; ten years of reading Billy Graham's daily advice column had convinced her that it would be useless to discuss the matter with him.
The Christmas service was special, though. She wouldn't have missed that for anything. Hearing all the old songs took her back to the days when she was a little girl, with her wish list down like a litany: A BIKE-anda-BRIDE DOLL-anda-PAINT SET-anda-CARPET SWEEPER. What had she been that year, five? That Christmas was the one she framed in her mind, defining the word forever after. The year the tree had been a blur of icicles and colored lights and all the things she'd asked for had really turned up under its branches on Christmas morning. Daddy had been working then. She'd always fast-forward through the other Christmases, especially the married ones, still anticipating the one to come. But it wasn't so easy getting heart's desire after you stopped being a kid.
She stole a glance at LeDonne's solemn features, and smiled a little. They had bought a little white pine tree and decorated it together with ornaments she'd saved from home. Joe had even bought a cassette of country-music stars singing Christmas carols for them to play as they trimmed the tree. At home, the turkey was in the oven, with another three hours to go, and 194
there was a little gold box with her name on it hidden behind the cable box on top of the television. It wasn't a bad Christmas.
Joe LeDonne was watching Maggie Underhill. She was standing in the choir loft next to a chubby redhead, looking as oblivious to the congregation as a plaster angel. When she looked up, which was seldom, her dark eyes fixed on a spot high and to the back right of the sanctuary. Her brother wasn't in the pews; LeDonne had spent a couple of hymns looking furtively about for Mark Underhill, a scrutiny that had forced him to exchange smiles with half a dozen beaming strangers. The only thing that seemed to be in her line of sight was the stained-glass window with the angel. The craftsman who made it must have copied the design from a Victorian print; LeDonne remembered seeing the picture in the home of a great-aunt when he was a child. It was the sort of picture country people liked to hang in children's bedrooms: the pink-robed angel, with the face of a chorus girl and eagle's wings, bending tenderly over two toddlers, brother and sister, as they crossed the river on a swaying footbridge. Such sentimentality had gone out of fashion. You wouldn't find that picture in any modern church. He wondered why Maggie Underhill kept looking at it. The angel didn't look like her mother.
Maggie Underhill herself looked more like an angel than her mother had; more like an angel than the stained-glass kewpie did, for that mat-
ter. Her dark hair curled around a perfect oval face, still young enough not to need enhancing with makeup. LeDonne wondered what she was like beneath the demure exterior. "What Child Is This?" indeed.
He
hadn't talked to her very much. Spencer questioned the two of them on the night of the killings, but LeDonne remembered the Underbills sitting silently in their colorless family room, watching television, and he'd wondered what emotion they were holding back. It was hard to tell: All strong emotions can look alike; sometimes even the person who has them can't tell which one he's feeling, love or hate, fear or rage. He'd bet against love, though, in the Underbills' case. Not that it mattered. Whatever the survivors felt toward any of the rest of the family, Joshua Underhill had done the shooting, and he was dead. LeDonne ought to be able to dismiss it from his mind, but he couldn't. The Underhill deaths still bothered Spencer, of course, but that was because the sheriff felt sorry for the two beautiful orphans; he was always meaning to drive out to the farm and check on them. LeDonne wondered if he had. He knew that his own preoccupation had nothing to do with concern for the welfare of Mark and Maggie Underhill. He kept replaying the scene in his mind: the dead rabbit that didn't look like any normal butchering for meat, the placement of the four bodies, the spatter patterns—he kept wondering if there was something they'd missed. Something that would make sense of the case. 196
*
On the front pew beside her, Laura Bruce had set her cassette tape recorder, capturing the sounds of the Christmas service for Will Bruce, who was present in spirit. Deacon Guthrie, in his Tex Ritter voice, was reading Scripture. The passage he had chosen was the second chapter of Luke, of course—"And there were in the same country ..." Laura winced as he began it, remembering the handmade Christmas card she had just received from Will. On the card, a sheet of typing paper folded in half, Will had drawn the rounded white village of Bethlehem as it is shown in Christmas illustrations, but above it, on two opposing cliffs, he had sketched two modern tanks, their cannons aimed at each other. One was marked with a Star of David, the other with the Arab's symbol, a star and crescent. Beneath the drawing, Will had written, "And there were in the same country ..." Laura hoped that the tape of the service might cheer him up, although he would receive it weeks too late for Christmas. She had asked the choir to sing the one carol that she knew he was fond of, "I Wonder As I Wander," and she'd included "What Child Is This?" as her own special reminder of their child to come. After the service was over, she'd add a private message of her own, telling him who was there, describing the church decorations, and assuring him that everyone in Dark Hollow missed him very much. Perhaps she ought to make an announcement to the congregation that anybody who 197
wanted to wish Will a Merry Christmas could record a brief message after the service.
She needed to make announcements at the end of the service, anyway. The church was taking up a collection of food, toys, and clothing to take to Tammy Robsart, who lived in the trailer park. Tammy had quit high school to get married, and her twenty-year-old husband was off in the Gulf as well, leaving his wife and three-year-old son to get by on whatever he sent them, which didn't seem to be much. Laura had visited her once early in the fall, but she couldn't think of any way to help the girl. Tammy had no parents to move in with in order to save money, and her father-in-law had been sent to jail for killing his wife in an argument. There didn't seem to be much point in trying to find a job for Tammy. Since she had no skills and no education, she wouldn't earn as much in salary as she would pay in day care. Tammy Robsart was nineteen and her son, Morgan, was three, but Laura Bruce could see not one ray of hope for either of them, regardless of the efforts of "the system." Still, she organized the Christmas drive, because she felt that a charity project would be good for the parish and because she wanted Morgan Robsart to have some kind of Christmas.
Will would like that. She must remember to tell him about that on the tape, too. He worried about Dark Hollow so much more than he did about himself. She knew he missed his home. His letters still spoke of the frustration of exile in the desert, and his feeling that God could bet-198
ter use him somewhere else. Laura tried to reply with cheerful, newsy letters, debating on baby names and color schemes for the nursery, but she said little about Will's depression. She felt that she was hardly the person to offer spiritual counseling to an ordained minister.
Deacon Guthrie finished the reading with a jovial "Merry Christmas—Amen!" and closed the lectern Bible with a thump. Recognizing her cue, Maggie Underhill stood up and walked to the front of the choir loft to begin her solo. The organist turned around on her bench; she would not be accompanying this solo. Instead, Tavy Annis, looking like a bag of bones rattling around in his blue suit, stepped forward and opened his battered violin case. Mostly, when Tavy played square-dance reels and bluegrass train songs like "The Orange Blossom Special," the instrument in the case was a fiddle, but tonight, for Maggie Underbill's solo, it would be a violin.
He rosined the bow, and drew from the strings the first mournful notes of the old song, one of the few Christmas carols written in a minor key. Maggie, her eyes still fixed on the stained-glass angel, took up the melody in her husky contralto. "I wonder as I wander out under the sky, how poor Baby Jesus was born for to die . . ."
Taw McBryde felt his eyes smart with tears as he watched his old friend play. Surely this was the strangest of ail the songs of Christmas. He hadn't heard it in years. Up north in Detroit they never sang it in church. Christmas was a
happy time—"Joy to the World"—and nobody wanted to be reminded of the sorrow that was present the other 364 days of the year. Easter was the time for dirges. But these strange fey people, seeking out mountains wherever they found themselves, could not forget in their joy of Christ's beginning that they knew how the story would end. The minor-key melody of the song was as sad as any funeral requiem, but it was beautiful, and probably very old. It didn't sound like the other tunes people sang. Taw knew nothing at all about music theory, but he tried to puzzle out how this song was different. The best he could come up with was that the tune didn't go where you thought it would. It went up at the ends of lines, where tunes usually go down, and the end of the verse didn't sound like an ending at all; the notes just hung there in the air, as if the singer had forgotten what came next. It was a strange carol altogether, words and music. It sounded like whoever wrote it had remembered all the things Christmas is supposed to make you forget: that it's the dead of winter and a long time till spring; that peace on earth never did come to pass; and that the Christ Child and every other little baby, so beautiful and full of promise, was born for to die. The dark-haired girl singer in the choir loft couldn't be more than sixteen. She sang the words sweetly, as if they didn't apply to her, but all you had to do was look at the parchment face of Tavy Annis to see the truth of it: It's coming to us all, sooner rather than 200
later. Taw felt the winter in his bones. He looked away from the singer, staring instead at the flickering candles beside the altar, while he waited for them to sing something else.
After the benediction, Laura Bruce thanked the congregation for all their hard work in making the service a success. She was careful to mention each participant: flower arrangers, musicians, even the ladies who cleaned the sanctuary. "I just have one or two announcements," she said to the rows of restless faces. "I wish Will were here to do this, and I guess y'all do, too, but I'll do my best. First, there's a collection box in the front of the sanctuary here; if anybody has brought anything for Tammy Robsart and her little boy, please put it there." Several people stood up, with parcels in their arms, and made as if to head for the collection box. Laura signaled for them to wait. "There's just one more thing. I have a tape recorder up here, and I've taped the service to send to Will in the Gulf. If anybody wants to come up and say Merry Christmas to him on the tape, please do. I know he'd love to hear from you."
Freed at last from an hour's confinement, people struggled into their coats and gloves and surged past her, collecting choir members or dropping their donations into the charity box. As Laura finished thanking Deacon Guthrie for the fine Scripture reading, Nora Bonesteel appeared at her side. Laur
a's face lit up as she saw her. "I'm so glad you came!" she cried. 201
"Mrs. Arrowood absolutely refused to let me come and get you!"
"It can be a treacherous road for those that don't know it," said Nora, "but I'm right glad I came. The singing did my heart good."
Laura saw that the old woman was carrying a wrapped present. "Is that for the Robsarts?" she asked. "Shall I go and put it in the box for you?"
"I brought this for you," said Nora. "Don't put it in the box. A while back you asked me to make you something for your child, and so I have."
"Oh, how wonderful of you!" cried Laura. "Can I open it?" Without waiting for a reply, she tore at the taped ends of the red paper. "Oh, this is so sweet of you . . . and it's such a good baby. I hardly ever feel it kick around in there . . . Oh!" Her voice died away as she opened the box and took out Nora Bonesteel's gift. The red sweater was beautifully hand-knitted, embroidered at the neck with a design of green coiled circles, but it was much too large for an infant. Laura thought that it looked large enough for a four-year-old. She faltered in her thanks, determined not to let her disappointment show. "It's just beautiful," she said at last. She wondered if Nora Bonesteel were getting perhaps a little senile, or if she didn't remember how tiny newborn babies were.
"It's all right," said Nora. "I believe I'll go over and say hello to Will on the tape."
As she turned away, Laura remembered that 202
she hadn't yet told Maggie Underhill how beautifully she had sung her solo, but when she looked about the emptying sanctuary, the girl was gone.
Spencer Arrowood spent Christmas Eve on the Johnson City highway, where the holiday lights were red flares and the flashing sign of the rescue-squad ambulance. A family in a green Toyota, hurrying to get to Grandma's house for dinner, lost traction on an icy curve and slid into the oncoming lane of traffic. They hit a pickup truck driven by an old man.
The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter Page 13
