A Sounding Brass (27 page)

“You’d better hope no one at the police station is listening to the radio.”

She was hoping that, as a matter of fact. “Oops. Song’s ending. I have to go.”

* * *

TWO HOURS LATER
, Claire had exhausted the contents of the CD caddy and had had to raid the library. She wasn’t familiar enough with popular
music to know what she was doing, but she recognized enough of the artists’ names to fake it fairly well. Luke had a list
of the prayer requests in an open document on his computer, so every fifteen minutes she read one of them, feeling like a
complete fraud.

Well, the listeners had paid to have their prayers read, hadn’t they? Despite what had happened to their money, she could
at least give them what they’d paid for.

The exterior door slammed around four o’clock, and Claire looked up from her play list as her heart jumped in her chest.

Ray?

But it wasn’t.

Toby Henzig opened the studio door and closed it behind him, collapsing into the plastic guest chair as if he’d just expended
his last reserve of strength. Claire finished back-calling the last fifteen minutes of songs, announced the next band, and
started the CD player. Only then did he speak.

“I thought you didn’t want to have anything to do with this,” he gestured around the booth.

“I didn’t have a choice. And you wouldn’t believe what changed my mind.” She yanked the headphones off and tossed them on
the turntable that no one seemed to use. “Where on earth have you been?”

“You wouldn’t believe me, either.”

“I’d believe a lot of things today that I wouldn’t have believed yesterday. You heard I was arrested, right?”

“Oh, I heard. Luke told me the whole thing in great detail last night before his show, with a lot of hand-wringing and crocodile
tears over how misled he was about you. I told him that was impossible and a huge mistake, which I assume the police have
now realized, since you’re sitting here.”

“It’s a mistake, all right. Everything that guy has done or said since he got here has been a complete lie. He’s been embezzling
the listener donations for weeks and set me up to take the blame for it.”

Toby stared at her with a lot less astonishment than she would have expected. “So your friend Derrick told me.”

“He called you, then?” Bless Rebecca for getting her messages through. That made two people in the world that Claire could
count on.

“Oh yes, he called. That’s where I’ve been all this time—at an emergency assembly of your folks down at the mission hall.
You have a very efficient phone-tree system, I must say.”

“You?” After they learned they’d been duped by Luke Fisher, Claire wouldn’t have been surprised if the Elect had risen up
and stoned any Outsider who would have dared set foot in the mission hall. “What happened?”

“It seems Derrick has had his suspicions about Luke from the beginning. I had reservations myself, but he seemed so sincere
and so—let’s face it—successful that I thought I was just being narrow-minded and maybe a little jealous. So, when Derrick
got your message to come and talk to me and we both realized we’d had the same misgivings, it didn’t take much to decide that
the whole church needed to know. I’ll be speaking to Hamilton Falls Community Church tonight.”

“So, everyone knows it wasn’t me, right?” If she could come out of this a free woman, that’s all she would ask. She’d never
think badly of her mom again. She’d never roll her eyes at her dad because he loved to watch
Seinfeld
late at night. They’d had it right all along and she’d been an insufferable, self-righteous prig who thought she was better
than they were because of how she looked. As soon as this was over, she’d have her parents over for dinner and beg their forgiveness.

“Not many people knew you had been arrested, and when they heard about it, no one believed that you did it anyway,” Toby assured
her. “Some still can’t quite believe Luke could have done it. Owen Blanchard took it as quite a blow. I understand he and
Luke had become friendly.”

“Together they were our leadership team. So, then what happened?”

Toby smiled his gentle smile. It held neither malice nor triumph, only a tired kind of satisfaction.

“I invited them to church.”

C
LAIRE BLINKED
and stared at Toby, not certain she’d heard correctly. “You what?”

His gaze was direct, though there were lines of exhaustion around his eyes. He lifted a hand, palm up on his knee, and let
it fall. “Let’s be honest, Claire. Your group is not going to survive in the form it has been all these years. The leadership
is faulty, the doctrine is unsound, and now that people see they’ve been mistaken in their faith a second time, it might be
the wake-up call God has been trying to give them.”

Claire tried to feel a little indignant, to defend the community in which she’d grown up, but there was no getting around
the fact that he was right. She’d come to the same conclusions herself, some time ago.

“I proposed that the people of the Elect be our guests at our Sunday-evening service tomorrow. I don’t know if any of them
will come. But this town needs healing, and if the members of the body of Christ don’t reach out to each other, it won’t happen.”

Claire couldn’t imagine the Elect going to a service in a “worldly” church. But then, she couldn’t imagine herself being arrested
for larceny, either—or imagine falling for a cop who didn’t believe in God. But she had. And who was to say God’s hand wasn’t
working in all this, leading the Elect away from the mess they’d made with all their rules and regulations, and bringing them,
despite themselves, to a knowledge of the truth?

“Toby,” she said with complete sincerity, “if I’m not back in jail, I’ll be there.”

His smile was the tired grin of an old friend as he slumped in the hard plastic chair. “I hoped you would be. And bring your
friend Ray, as well.”

“That’ll be up to him, but I’ll give it a try.”

“Ready to hand the headphones over to me? Probably no one in Hamilton Falls is interested in the stock reports right now,
but it’s my job to read them anyway.”

She held the headphones out with the air of someone trying to hand over a crate of tarantulas. “Here. Take them. If I never
have to do this again I’ll be a happy woman.”

He slid them over his ears and took her seat behind the console. “Oh, I don’t know about that. You sounded great—as if you’d
been doing it for years. I’ll bet you a doughnut that you start getting fan mail.”

Laughing, she gathered up her piles of paperwork and took them back into her office with a huge sense of relief. Toby was
back. Ray was on the job. She had her paperwork. If you didn’t count the fact that she was illegally at large, all was right
with the world.

As she dumped the pile on her desk, her phone rang—the office line, not the studio line, which meant it was station business
and not a fan making a request or someone calling in to rant about the discount store going in.

“KGHM, this is—”

“Claire, it’s me.” Ray’s voice was exhausted, with anger and frustration making the edges a little ragged.

“Ray! What’s going on? You’re never going to believe what I’ve been doing all—”

“I’ve lost him.”

She stopped, a cold feeling prickling over her shoulders. “Lost him?”

“Yeah. He emptied his post-office box and closed his account, about two hours before I got here.”

“What about the bank?”

“He was there. Made himself real memorable when he tried to cash the check and the teller told him about the fifteen-day hold.”

“What happened?”

“He’s getting frustrated. Had a shouting match with the teller, and they finally escorted him off the premises. He took the
check with him.”

“I had Margot put a stop payment on it,” Claire said. “He’ll look for a bigger town now. Somewhere he can blend in while he
waits his fifteen days. And then he’ll find he can’t cash it anyway.”

“A bigger town in which direction? Boise? Spokane? I’m sitting here at a gas-station pay phone on the interstate because I
forgot to charge my stupid cell phone during all the excitement last night. There are freeways going in four directions and
I have no idea which one he took.”

Defeat hung heavily in his voice. She couldn’t stand it. Luke Fisher had destroyed her church’s faith in itself and had broken
the trust of countless people in five counties. She absolutely would not allow him to destroy Ray’s irrepressible spirit.

“There has to be something we can do,” she said desperately. “Don’t give up.”

“Maybe you should ask God to give us a clue.”

She blinked against the sudden prick of tears. “Ray, please don’t be sarcastic with me. I can’t deal with it. Not now.”

“Honey, I’m not being sarcastic. What I am is out of gas. In a metaphorical sense.”

“You’re asking me to pray for a—what do you call them? A lead?”

“Why not?”

“Because God doesn’t care about things like leads in fraud investigations.”

“Why shouldn’t He? He cares about you and me, doesn’t He?”

There was a note in Ray’s voice she had never heard before. “What’s going on?” she asked again, meaning something different
this time.

“There are a lot of miles between us right now, and a lot of room for thinking. So, I’ve been doing just that.”

“And what did you conclude?”

“I’ve concluded that I need help.”

“I’ve concluded that myself.” Propping her elbows on her letters, she rubbed her gritty eyes.

“I thought you already had a direct line to help.”

“I used to think I did, until last night. Then I realized I really don’t know much about anything. I think I have to start
over.”

“Yeah, me, too.”

Claire could do nothing but sit with the receiver pressed to her ear, marveling at the circumstances that had brought them
to this point, connected to each other by the fragile means of a phone line, making the same discovery from completely different
points of origin.

“Claire?”

“I’m here.”

“About that prayer?”

“What, you want me to pray now? Over the phone?”

“I don’t know about you, but I think I need to hear it. You know how I am. Reading about it in the papers later just won’t
do it for me.”

She smiled, despite the fact that her throat was a little closed up. She stared at the invoice on the top of her inbox pile
without really seeing it. Instead, she saw Ray in the late-afternoon light, standing in a phone booth at a nameless gas station,
someplace where two roads met.

“Father, Ray and I have come to the end of ourselves in more ways than one.” She hesitated, then cleared her throat. “We need
help, Lord. You know our hearts, what’s inside us, better than we do. Thank You for showing us that we can’t go on like this,
him depending on himself, and me depending on the Elect, instead of depending on You.

“If it’s Your will that we find Luke and bring him to justice, we pray that You’ll show us that, too. And if it isn’t, help
us to focus on You anyway, Lord, so our lives can please You.” She paused, but Ray said nothing. “We ask these things in Jesus’
name, who gave His life that we could come to You this way without fear. Amen.”

“Amen,” Ray breathed.

A little silence fell, punctuated by a growl in the distance as a diesel rig went past where Ray was standing.

Claire’s gaze fell again on the invoice on the top of her stack. Brandon Brothers, for fifty thousand. A lot of concrete that
was never poured and a lot of pipe that had never been laid.

“I never paid it,” she said suddenly.

“Paid what?”

“This invoice sitting here. Luke yelled at me to pay the balance to Brandon Brothers the day it came, and I got so mad at
him I chucked it in my inbox and never did it.”

“Brandon . . . Brothers?” Ray said carefully.

Oh. My. Stars. Claire, you idiot.

“
That’s
where I heard that name,” she said. “It’s the general contractor in Spokane that we hired to build the worship center.”

“We did, did we?”

“Luke did. Ray?”

“Yes?”

“It’s laser printed, just like the church thank-you letter. And they have a post-office box, too.”

“In Spokane, you said? What are the odds they really exist?”

“Not very good.” Excitement and hope blossomed inside her. “When I called them, a really unprofessional woman answered the
phone. It sounded as though I woke her up. I was trying to get better terms for payment, and she told me I had to pay the
invoice on receipt.”

“Ten to one it was some lady friend of his and he paid her to say a few lines if anyone ever called. What’s the box number?”

She told him, then said, “Ray, I bet he’s going to go west. He didn’t have any success in Idaho and now he’s heading for the
check in Spokane. Except there isn’t going to be any check there because I didn’t pay the bill.”

“So, not only can he not cash the one he has, he’s going to drive all the way down there and find an empty box. That might
push him over the edge and he might come after you. We can’t risk it. I’ll call the OCTF and have whatever investigator is
closest pick him up. Even if I doubled the speed limit I’d never make it in time to do it myself. I’ll alert the postmaster
there, too, so they can stall him until my guys get there.”

“Then what?” She was practically trembling with excitement. Maybe God really had been in that little temper tantrum that had
prevented her from paying the invoice and thus making it easy for Luke to get what he wanted. Maybe He really did work in
people’s lives in this day and age, contrary to what she’d been taught. Maybe prayer really was for something other than continually
asking for the willingness to wear black.

“Ray?” she asked when he didn’t answer right away.

“I need you to go someplace where I know you’re safe,” he said.

“I’m going to Spencer Rodriguez’s office as soon as I hang up.”

“Good plan.” He paused. “And while you’re there . . . keep on praying.”