“Karl, I am a Phi Beta Kappa from Michigan State Please….”
“It’s the truth,” he said and lifted his gaze to meet hers. “But not all of the truth. Okay?”
“What’s true? What part?”
“I’m still here because you…we…you know. But the other part is I asked to be here. I am not using leave time. But I would if I had to. That’s what I told Chief Bullock and he said, okay, I should stay. It’s the Krueger business. It’s not as simple as it seems and…anyway, I’m the Agent in Place for now so….”
“You would have stayed anyway?”
“If they let me, yes. Leave is not something you just take, but yes.”
She smiled an enormous smile, a smile that lighted the entire room and even caused a brief, a very brief, pause in the raucous laughter among the Red Hats.
“That’s good,” she said. “That’s really good.”
***
Blake drove up to his house and braked hard in a shower of gravel. He walked to the church and let himself in. He needed to see if Millie had ever come in, and if so, check for messages and mail. The offices were just as he had left them that morning. He slid one closet door open and shut—no sign of any activity at all.
His kebabs started talking to him. He loved Jordanian food but now regretted the choice. He went outside, crossed the parking lot to his house, and let himself in. The light on his answering machine blinked an S.O.S. at him.
“Later,” he said. “You will have to get in line and wait your turn to screw up the rest of my day.”
He wrote a list of people to call. The Mission Board needed to be called. Did they have a lawyer? Did he? Schwartz said he needed one and only half meant it. Now he really did, but not for the reasons Schwartz gave. Would Sylvia Parks take him on as a client? He added her to the list. Philip had to be told. He could be liable too, as could his vestry. He was sure they had an attorney. Philip would know what to do about the Bishop. Who else? He started to hum Santa Claus Is Coming to Town. He was making a list and checking it. The tune was entirely too cheerful. He did not feel cheerful and stopped.
He could not think of anyone or anything else to add. He just hoped he could contain the problem before it went public. The first thing he had to do was find the files. He ran his hand through his hair and listened to his stomach growl. The kebabs had made their peace with his gastro-intestinal system and now he was hungry.
He went to the kitchen, muttering to the answering machine, “Not yet. I’m not ready for you yet.”
He found some cold pizza in the refrigerator. He heated up a cup of coffee in the microwave and sat at the dining room table to eat. His mother would kill him if she knew how he ate. He chewed the cold cheese and pepperoni and tried to think.
By nine o’clock he had managed to acquire some semblance of calm. He realized he had done everything he could. The Mission Board had their monthly meeting the next evening. He would bring it up to them then. What he learned at the meeting would determine if he needed to call Sylvia. In the meantime he would see about the files. He would confront Millie in the morning and get her to surrender them. The threat of jail and lawsuits ought to be enough to get her to cough them up.
The answering machine winked at him.
“Okay, okay, I’m coming, talk to me.”
The first message was from his bank. His checks were ready. Great. He had been in the area nearly three months and finally he had checks with his name and address on them.
The second message was his sister Irene wanting to know how he was, and if everything had worked out all right. Oh, ducky. Everything is just terrific.
The third was Mary.
“Blake,” she said in a little voice that he guessed meant she was crying. “I am so sorry. I talked to Lanny Markowitz and to Philip. I am so sorry.” A pause. “I should not have done that to you without at least hearing your side of the story. I guess I didn’t think your sermon had anything to do with me. Maybe if I had listened….I know you probably don’t want to, and I don’t blame you if you don’t, but would you please call me?”
He paused the machine. Rewound it and played the message again. He felt twenty pounds lighter. He would indeed call.
The last message brought him back to earth.
“So, she told you,” a voice muttered. “That’s bad enough. Why did you have to tell the world? What kind of minister are you? You are supposed to help people, not hurt them.” The voice was husky. It sounded like a woman, but he could not be sure. It might be a teenager playing a joke, an “I saw what you did” kind of joke. “Well,” the message continued. “I’ll settle with her, and you could be next.”
He momentarily forgot about Mary and played the message over and over. Take care of whom? The message made no sense. He sat back and tried to think. Had he heard that voice before? There was something familiar about it, but he might be imagining things. He started to rewind the tape and then, remembering Mary’s call, decided to save it. He ejected the tape and put it away. He spent the next five minutes rooting through the closet looking for a fresh cassette.
He reached for the phone just as the flare of headlights swept across his window and stopped him. He heard a car door slam and a moment later a knock at the side door. Now what?
Ike Schwartz stood on the stoop.
“You have a lawyer, Reverend?” Schwartz said.
“What? You know, it’s funny you should ask, Sheriff. I was just thinking about you and lawyers just now. What brings you here, on an otherwise disastrous Monday, asking me about attorneys?”
Schwartz ignored him and circled the room.
“Can you account for your whereabouts from say quarter to eleven this morning to three this afternoon?”
Blake thought a moment.
“I have you again, Sheriff. Yes, I can.” He didn’t know if Schwartz was pleased or disappointed. “I went to Saint Anne’s Church in Roanoke this morning. I got there at about eleven. I took old Route 11 instead of the interstate. It would take me at least forty-five minutes to an hour to drive there, I think you would agree, so that meant I had to leave here at, say ten-twenty. The secretary there saw me and will verify when I was there. I spent the day, most of it, in the city. I have proof. Here is my lunch receipt. Kebabs. Note the time stamp. Here is a credit slip for some theater tickets I had to cancel. Again, please note the time. I was there, not here. I have a receipt for a key I had made…time stamp. Do you need more? I parked in a garage and the ticket will—”
Schwartz held up his hand and inspected the ticket and credit slip.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay? Is that all you’re going to say to me? Okay? Aren’t you going to tell me why you are here at least? Why you think I need a lawyer, and why I need to account for my movements today?”
“Millicent Bass,” he said.
“What about Mrs. Bass?”
“She’s dead.”
“Dead?”
“Murdered.”
“Murdered? When? Oh, I see, today sometime between eleven this morning and three this afternoon, right? And naturally, the first person you thought of was me, the murderous vicar, the Philadelphia Ripper, right?”
“Actually no, Reverend. But I wanted to get you out of the way. I have to ask.”
“Okay. You want to fill me in on the details? I’ve got to make an accounting of this to my Board and congregation. My God, poor Millie.”
“A neighbor called about noon. Said Mrs. Bass didn’t show up for a luncheon engagement. Essie, that’s our dispatcher, told her missing lunches were not a police matter. The caller said, she knew that, but Mrs. Bass also missed her dentist appointment. No idea how she knew that—I’ll have to ask. Anyway, she said she went to her house and saw Bass’ Buick in the driveway but when she knocked, no one came to the door. Our dispatch
er sent a car around. Officers banged on all the doors. One opened by itself—don’t give me that look, it did—so they call out, no answer, and go in. The place has been trashed and she’s on the floor. Somebody shot her.”
“What do you mean, the place was trashed?”
“Whoever killed her, tossed her house. Drawers pulled out and dumped on the floor, closets emptied, desk rifled. The place is a mess. We figure she must have stepped out for a minute, maybe started for the dentist, forgot something and came back to find some guy robbing her house. Then he bumped her off.”
“That would mean that the killer knew she had a dentist’s appointment and would be gone long enough to pull the robbery.”
“Or maybe he knew she worked all morning for you. Either way, you’re right, he knew her routine.”
“What if he or she, whoever, was not there to rob her, but was looking for something?”
“What would they be looking for?”
“Dr. Taliaferro’s files. The ones that used to be in the box you found in the back lot, remember?”
“I thought you said kids dumped them in the trash.”
“I said I thought they might have. I don’t think so anymore.”
Blake filled him in on his discovery of the keys and what he thought they meant. He mentioned Philip’s earlier request to find the files. He told him about Millie’s habitual gossiping and the reactions to it.
“She must have gotten hold of those files to use in her dishing the dirt sessions. Someone found out and went to get them from her. She walks in, and the person is caught red-handed, he panics and shoots her.”
“Pretty drastic, don’t you think?” Schwartz said, one eyebrow arched. “Why not just confront her and demand the files, threaten to expose her if she didn’t. Why shoot her?”
“I don’t know. Maybe this will help.” Blake retrieved the message tape from his desk drawer. He replaced the tape in the machine and fast-forwarded it to the last message. Schwartz listened carefully, asked to hear it again.
“You recognize the voice?” he asked.
“No, not really. It sounds vaguely familiar, but no, I don’t.”
“Can I have this?”
“You can borrow it. I want it back, though. There are other messages on that tape.”
“I’ll make a copy of this last bit, and give it back tomorrow.” He got up to leave.
“Can I look at Millie’s house? I want to be sure the files aren’t there.”
“I can’t let you in a crime scene. There are rules, and if you did find something it could compromise the chain of evidence.”
“Yeah, right. I guess you watch too much television, too, Sheriff. Besides, I would just be there to identify and claim church property.”
“Okay, tomorrow, seven a.m., but no funny business.”
He left. Blake looked at the clock. Quarter to twelve, too late to call Mary. And seven in the morning would be too early. He shook his head in frustration. Even in death, Millie Bass could ruin his day.
Chapter Thirty
Sunlight crept through the pines making long slender shadows from their trunks. Hardly anyone would be up this early. Grace Franks loved the early morning when the air still retained some of the night’s coolness and quiet. She twisted a piece of paper and lit it with her butane lighter. It caught and flared. She dropped it into the burn barrel and watched as the rest of the papers lying in the bottom caught and slowly, one by one, curled, turned black, and crumbled into ashes. She stood over her fire, acrid smoke swirling around her head, occasionally stirring the contents of the barrel. She raised her arms. From a distance, with her high cheekbones and tan skin, she looked like one of the witches from Macbeth or a perhaps a slim, pagan priestess officiating at a fire ritual. Morning was a good time to burn things.
Burn barrels were a thing of the past, illegal even. Young people whose memories didn’t include a time when trash was a personal responsibility, not a municipal entitlement, had moved into her neighborhood. They built fancy houses, ran water mains and forced her to cap her well—outsiders and pushy Baby Boomers, or were they Xers? She could never keep them straight. And now there were the Millennials—the M generation. She qualified as a Boomer but had never felt a part of her generation.
Her new neighbors did not approve of her and her barrel. They zealously recycled. They worried about the deer population, the ecology, the ozone layer and generally made a nuisance of themselves. They thought the smoke from Grace’s barrel polluted the air, represented a health hazard, or caused global warming. So now a truck picked up her trash twice a week, a service for which she had to pay a monthly assessment. But Grace still preferred burning things, especially things she did not trust to the trash truck or its nosey crew.
***
Mary stared at the phone. Her eyes, accented by dark smudges, were red from crying. She had not slept. She sat huddled in her pajamas, hugging herself, her robe pulled tight over her shoulders. She watched the sunlight seep through her kitchen window and creep across the tile floor toward her feet.
At midnight, she had acknowledged he would not call, but she waited anyway. Now, at six thirty in the morning, her hopes rose a bit. He might call. If he had gotten home late, he wouldn’t have, but maybe this morning….
She sipped her coffee and watched the minutes tick away. He was not going to call, that day or ever, she decided. She went upstairs to shower and repair her face. She had to get ready for work.
***
Blake met Schwartz at Millie’s house at exactly seven. Schwartz handed him his tape.
“Did you call her?” he asked.
“Who?”
“The lady on the tape, the one who apologized and asked you to call her. Did you?”
“No, it was too late last night and too early this morning. I’ll try later.”
The sheriff stared at him, hands on his hips, and shook his head. “Reverend, you are clueless,” he said. “For all your education and cultured clerical empathy, you careen through life without a scrap of common sense when it comes to women, which, by the way, we already knew from your antics in Philadelphia. But I had no idea that on top of cluelessness, you were also stupid.”
Blake felt his face getting red.
“Look, I’m not stupid, it’s just that—”
“That woman was on her knees to you. My guess is she sat by that telephone all night, and would have taken a call from you at three in the morning. She was in tears. Do you have any idea what it cost her to make that call?”
Blake started to say something but Schwartz put up his hand and waved off his protest.
“Call her.”
He walked back to his car and retrieved his cell phone and called. No answer.
“No answer,” he said.
“What a jerk,” Schwartz muttered, but Blake heard him and his face reddened further. They let themselves into Millie Bass’ house.
As Schwartz said, it had been trashed. Papers were scattered all over the floor. Drawers were pulled out from cabinets and dressers and their contents tossed every which way. The kitchen was worse. Whoever shot Millie had opened canisters and dumped the contents on the floor. Napkins, silverware, and groceries were scattered everywhere. Room by room, Blake took in the chaos. He pivoted around, searching for anything that might look like a file folder. In what must have been a den, he found a pile of manila folders. Their labels, however, indicated they were personal files, photographs, bills and dozens of travel brochures, but no sign of Dr. Taliaferro’s notes.
“If he was after the files, he must have gotten them,” Blake said. His heart sank. Millie’s death was bad enough, but to know the files were still floating around out there somewhere made the day overwhelmingly bleak.
“Satisfied, Reverend?”
“I guess. Say, could yo
u possibly call me Blake? Besides the bad grammar, I really don’t like being called Reverend, Rev. or any variation on it.”
“And you would call me Ike?”
“Well, yeah….”
“I’ll think about it.”
Blake returned to his car and drove back to the church. He programmed Mary’s number into speed-dial and called every five minutes from then on.
Chapter Thirty-one
Grace watched sadly as the last embers of her fire died down. She did not mourn the loss of her fire. She just did not want to go back into the house, and the fire served as an excuse to stay outdoors. Her gaze wandered across to the yard next door. She watched Donald Jenkins’ backside appear in the patio door. He backed out carefully, easing a wheelchair over the small rise created by the doorsill, and then wheeled his wife, Betty, onto the patio. Grace could hear him murmuring to her as he maneuvered the chair into the small gazebo at the edge of the terrace.
He looked up and waved to Grace. She waved back.
“How are you, Betty?” she called.
Betty had ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease. She had been getting worse for years. Donald had taken early retirement and devoted his days to caring for her. Everyone said he was a saint. Betty struggled to lift her head and gave Grace a weak smile. There was a flutter at her wrist that Grace took for a wave. Poor woman. Donald stood behind Betty and held up his right hand with all five fingers spread and raised his eyebrows. Grace shook her head. He shrugged his shoulders and looked disappointed.
***
Blake climbed the short flight of stairs to Millie’s office. Not her office anymore. He would have to find another secretary. Funny thing about that, a day ago he had looked forward to replacing her. Today the thought hung over him like a dark cloud. At the top of the stairs, he glanced to his left and froze, one foot in midair. The office looked like Millie’s house. Papers were strewn everywhere, her desk drawers emptied and the contents of the supply closet dumped on the floor.
The office had been in order the previous evening. He stepped carefully over the mess and peeked into his office. It looked the same. He stared at the supply closet. Anything missing? He let his eyes wander over the emptied and disordered shelves. Then he saw, or more accurately, he did not see—Taliaferro’s box was missing. Who would want to steal his old sermon notes?
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