A New Song (30 page)

She blew on the steaming coffee. “Thank the Lord I never had trouble with depression. Complaining, that’s been my thorn.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” he said.

“I don’t suppose most people confide their thorns. Saint Paul only said he had one. I wish he’d gone ahead and told us what it was!”

He laughed. “You’ll never hear mine from me!” Self-righteousness, he thought, and no two ways about it.

He enjoyed Marion’s company. There was a decided comfort to being in her presence.

“Did you know Janette sews like an angel?” she asked.

“I only know she takes in sewing.”

“She sews every bit as well as Jeffrey Tolson sings,” Marion said with feeling. “Made all our choir robes and banners, makes all her children’s clothes, plus earns a living with it. I guess she’ll have to depend on her calling for support ’til she takes him to court.
If
she takes him to court.” Marion sipped her coffee, looking concerned. “I saw Jeffrey Tolson the other day.”

“Aha.”

“I think he’s living on the island.”

He shook his head. What could he say?

“He thinks this is his church, that it belongs to him because his father and grandfather were members here, as if half the congregation couldn’t say the very same thing.” She gave a mild shudder. “Oh, how I’d hate to see him come back. Some predict he’ll try. It would put us through the wringer.”

“Once through the wringer seems quite enough to me,” he said, meeting her gaze.

“They say the business with Avery Plummer didn’t work out, she left him and went to her mother in Goldsboro.” Marion sighed. “I always felt sorry for Janette, being so plain and her husband so handsome. Some people, I won’t say who, called her Church Mouse. The boy has his mother’s sweet spirit, but looks the spit image of his father, don’t you think?”

“I agree.”

“Jeffrey always reminded me of an apple I took my sixth-grade teacher, Miss Fox. I’ll never forget that apple. I was so proud of it, I polished it on my dress all the way to school; it was the prettiest thing in our orchard. I stood right by her desk and watched her bite into it. I thought she’d say,
Why, Marion Lewis, this is the best apple I ever tasted!
Well! When she bit into it, she had the oddest look on her face.”

“Really?”

“Rotten inside! I was embarrassed to death, just mortified.”

“Aha.”

“We’re all excited about the tea,” she said, changing a sore subject. “I’m taking a day off from the library to help Cynthia, and Sam and I will loan you our nice canvas folding chairs for the garden. At the ECW meeting, we prayed for sunshine. I don’t think that’s too pushy, do you?”

“ ‘Come boldly to the throne of grace!’ ” he quoted from Hebrews.

“Well, no rest for the weary!” she exclaimed, rising from the chair. “I’ve got to clean up under the sink, you never saw such a mess of old vases, there’s enough oasis under there to capsize a ship. Speaking of ship, when are you going on your big fishing trip with Cap’n Willie?”

“Postponed!”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

 

“Don’t be,” he said.

It was nagging him, reminding him of the time years ago when he’d found the lock broken on the church door. He’d found nothing stolen, nothing amiss, and he didn’t report it. Then he’d discovered the burial urn filled with precious stones, sitting innocently on the shelf of the makeshift columbarium in the church closet. . . .

“Rodney? Tim Kavanagh, how’s business?”

“Slow, thank th’ Lord,” said Mitford’s police chief. “How you doin’ down there at th’ end of th’ world?”

“Pretty well, thanks. Listen, Rodney—an odd thing . . . Puny Guthrie, Joe Joe’s wife, you know she’s our housekeeper . . .”

“Right.”

“She tells me something is missing from our house next door to the old rectory. Just disappeared off the mantel.”

“What’s th’ missin’ item?”

“A bronze angel on a green marble base, probably about eighteen inches high, maybe twenty.”

“What’s th’ value?”

“I don’t know. But it’s a fine piece, very fine. I’d estimate three thousand, at least. Old bronzes aren’t cheap.”

“What else is missin’?”

“Nothing. And nothing out of place. But Puny had left the door unlocked by mistake, and there’s work being done on the street out front, so . . .”

“Any suspects?”

“No, and nobody was seen going in or out. No one even knew the door was unlocked.”

“I don’t know what we can do but file a report. No suspects, nothin’ else missin’, no vandalism. That don’t leave much to go on. What we probably need to do is go down and take fingerprints.”

He remembered that Rodney Underwood loved taking fingerprints.

“Wouldn’t it cause an uproar to have your men crawling all over the house? Besides, this was maybe a week or so ago, and Puny dusts pretty faithfully, wouldn’t that remove fingerprints?”

“Don’t you worry about a thing, you let me take care of it! Now, how do we get in?”

Given the excitement in Rodney’s voice, he might have handed the chief the keys to a Harley hog. “Talk to Puny,” he said, half regretting he’d brought it up in the first place.

 

With the newspaper sufficiently dry, he reassembled it and carried it to his desk.

He was surprised to see the gated, well-secluded mountain lodge of Edith Mallory in a photograph. A white arrow pointed to a grove of trees next to Edith’s rambling house.

 

Edith Mallory, he thought, had the ominous persistence of leaking propane. Just when he thought she had vanished forever in Spain or Florida, she reappeared, and always with malice.

Surely there was some way she could come to terms with the town over this thing.

In the end, had she ever done anything for the benefit of Mitford? Never once, as far as he could remember. Her multimillion-dollar home sprawled along the ridge above the village, looking down on a community of souls who’d been through one tough scrape after another, yet she’d never been forthcoming, even to the library when it was struggling for its very existence.

And hadn’t he been sent knocking on her door when the town museum was trying to pull itself together, and hadn’t she made her usual seductive, albeit fruitless, overtures and sent him packing? The annual Bane and Blessing had long ago given up asking for contributions, not to mention the volunteer fire department.

Of course, she had given fifteen thousand to add beds to the Children’s Hospital, his favorite charity. He’d quickly learned, however, that it was all part of a plan to get him into a bed of her own.

His very skin crawled at the thought of how she’d trapped him in that blasted Lincoln, forcing him to leap from the thing while it was still moving.

He folded the
Muse
and threw it in the wastebasket. As far as he was concerned, the only good news was that J. C. Hogan had evidently installed software with a spell check. Too bad there was no software out there for grammar.

In truth, he was tired of knowing what was going on in Mitford. He didn’t want to hear another peep from that realm for a while.

He was going to do what Mona’s sign said, and bloom where he was planted.

Somehow, he’d managed to turn the ringer off and didn’t hear the phone while he was washing his cup at the sink down the hall.

“I don’t know why I keep missin’ you,” said Emma, when he punched the play button.

“I thought you’d want to know the scoop on Father Talbot, it’s what everybody’s talkin’ about. I didn’t lay eyes on him when he was here tryin’ out, but Esther Bolick says he’s good-lookin’ as anything, and
tall. Very
tall. Oh, and thin, she thinks he exercises, maybe with weights. Esther Cunningham said he walked up the street to her office when he was here, said he just wanted to meet the mayor of such a fine town, wanted to shake her hand, wadn’t that nice?

“He’s comin’ in November, is what they’re sayin’, has a wife that could be th’ twin of Meg Ryan, and two kids, both on th’ honor roll. Anyway, people are real excited about finally gettin’ somebody permanent down at Lord’s Chapel, and from a big church, too, I think it was Chicago. They say they saw him on a video and he preaches up a storm and is funny as heck, he had everybody rollin’ in th’ aisles.

“Let’s see, what else . . . somebody, I forget who, said he sings great an’ has real white teeth an’ looks terrific in . . . whatever it is, maybe his hassock.”

Wears a halo, he thought, has wings . . .

“Oh, Lord, here comes Harold back, he must’ve forgotten his bag lunch.”

 

“Timothy?”

“Walter!” His only living cousin, as far as he knew, and lifelong best friend into the bargain. “It’s been a coon’s age.”

“I thought I’d ring down to the boondocks while I’m waiting for a client to show up. How’s the fishing?”

“I have no idea.”

“Swimming? Doing any swimming?”

“Nope. No swimming.”

“Clamming? Crabbing? Duck hunting?
Anything?
”

“Just the same old stick-in-the-mud you’ve always known me to be.” Darn Walter, he was always looking for some big story, some action. So far, the most exciting thing he’d ever done was marry Cynthia Coppersmith. That was such a big one, it got him off the hook with

Walter for a couple of years, but now his attorney cousin was at it again.

“Listen, Potato Head, I’ve got a new parish to take care of and a yard to mow. That’s all the action I can handle right now. How’s Katherine?”

“Mean as a snake, skinny as a rail.”

“The usual, then!” They laughed easily together. They were both pretty fond of Walter’s wide-open wife, her dazzling laughter and unstoppable generosity of spirit.

“And Cynthia?”

“Busy. Doing another book, reading at the library, tending a three-year-old.”

“You’ve taken in another one?”

“Only briefly, his mother’s in the hospital.”

“How do you like your new parish?”

“I like it. Good people. We’re happy here. When can you and Katherine come down? You haven’t been my way in years, I was there last, you owe me.”

“After you finish this interim, we’ll drive down to Mitford for a week, how’s that? Slog around in our bathrobes and eat you out of house and home.”

“You can’t scare me, pal.”

“Speaking of scare,” said Walter, “we had a little break-in the other night. They took our TVs and my Rolex. We’re surprised it wasn’t worse.”

“We’ve just had an odd thing happen. Remember the angel I once mentioned, the one from Miss Sadie’s attic? It disappeared off the mantel in Mitford. Nothing else was disturbed in the house, no sign of entry, nothing. Just gone, vanished. Very queer.”

“Valuable?”

“Probably three thousand or so, maybe more. Bronze. On a heavy marble base. French, I think.”

“Life has always been too mysterious to suit my tastes. Well, Cousin, here comes my erstwhile client. It’s good to touch base. Love to Cynthia, love to Dooley—how is he?”

“Great!”

“Good. I’ve got a stock tip for you, so call me, you dog, and let’s catch up.”

“Consider it done,” he said.

He’d written it everywhere but on his hand to make sure he didn’t forget. No, indeed, forgetting birthdays and anniversaries did not cut it at his house—nor at any other house, as far as he could tell from his years in clergy counseling.