"Thanks, ma'am." He stepped off the porch and was vanishing into the dusk by the time she had the chance to close the door. She wondered again, for a second, how another local farmer had met up with their church-cleaning boarder. It teased at her, but then Emma started up again with her tirade against dial-up Internet access, and she remembered Russ was waiting, and she thought, How am I going to hide my employees from my brother? And the thought was gone.
XI
Peace be within thy walls,
And plenteousness within thy palaces!
The choir finished. The organ thundered to a close. There was a moment of silence, as the last triumphant notes of Parry's "I Was Glad When They Said Unto Me" reverberated. Then someone clapped, and in a second, St. Alban's stone walls echoed with deafening applause. Clare, whose official duties had been completed after welcoming everyone to the church and introducing the choir, whanged away with the rest of them, amazed, as she always was, that the same group of people she heard grumbling and going flat and repeating a single musical phrase over and over and over in their rehearsals could create a sound of such inexpressible beauty.
The choir bowed, and then the music director, Betsy Young, emerged from behind the organ, her cheeks brilliantly colored, bits of her hair sticking to the side of her face. One of the tenors brought her a hefty bouquet of roses, and she turned an even more spectacular shade of red.
Clare caught Doug Young's eye and slid out of her pew at the rear of the church. Betsy's husband had been pressed into service collecting the "suggested donations," and now it was time to see how well they had done. He scooped up the metal change box and Clare fished the sacristy key out of her skirt pocket. "They were wonderful," she said, as they threaded their way through the crowd to the front of the church.
"They were," he said. "And I am so glad it's over." He flashed her a grin.
Yes, well. Betsy had been a tad caught up in prepping for the concert.
Doug glanced around. "Your friend from New York's not here?"
"Hugh? No, he had to work. Some deal his bank is putting together. He had to fly to Las Vegas."
"Too bad. For you, I mean, not for him. Vegas isn't any hardship."
"It's okay. We're pretty casual. And he'll be up for the St. Alban's Festival next month."
"I hope he has some money left over from his trip."
Clare laughed.
"Reverend Fergusson," someone called. "Can I speak to you for a sec?"
She handed Doug the key and told him she'd be back as soon as she could. Which turned out to be forty-five minutes later. She fielded questions about the upcoming parish picnic, spoke to a woman who wanted to volunteer for their teen mother mentoring program, praised every choir member she clapped eyes on, and, gratifyingly, talked with no less than three different people who expressed interest in trying out next Sunday's Eucharist.
"I feel like we're getting them under false pretenses," she confessed to Betsy. The church had emptied out except for a few last choristers, gossiping in the center aisle. "They don't know the choir's about to break for the summer."
"We'll just have to rely on your preaching to snag them after Trinity Sunday, then, won't we?"
"Oh, yeah, they'll come for miles around for that." She let the music director precede her into the sacristy. "The only thing people want from a sermon in the summertime is that it be five minutes or less." She spotted Amado, peeping around the corner from the main office. His bright yellow cast glowed in the shadow. "It's okay, Señor Esfuentes. You can go ahead and start cleaning. Uh, Limpiar la iglesia, por favor."
"I bet you can't wait for Glenn Hadley to come back to work," Doug said from his seat beside the lockbox.
"He is easier to communicate with," Clare admitted. "On the other hand, Señor Esfuentes doesn't feel compelled to call me Father."
"How'd we do?" Betsy asked. The choir was planning an August trip to a choral festival in England-if they could raise enough to cover some of their expenses. They had been fund-raising with concerts and bake sales since last fall.
"Four hundred fifty-two dollars and seventy-five cents." Doug grinned hugely.
"Yessss!" Betsy clenched her fists in triumph.
Clare and Doug signed off on the receipt slip and Doug zippered the deposit bag and dropped it into the lockbox.
"Are you two going out to celebrate your artistic and financial triumph?" Clare asked. She ushered them out of the sacristy and locked the door behind her.
Betsy shook her head vehemently. "I'm going to go home, have a large bourbon, and crawl into bed. And I'm not getting out until Sunday morning."
Clare laughed. "You let me know if you want to stay there. I'm sure I can enlist someone to play guitar for us."
"Not unless I'm dead. Guitars." The organist shuddered.
"Are you headed for the rectory?" Doug asked. "We'll walk you there."
Clare checked her old steel Seiko: 8:45 P.M. Kevin Flynn had said "they" would take Amado home. It probably meant he would return. Kevin. Not Russ. It probably wouldn't be Russ.
"Clare?"
"Sorry." She smiled at the Youngs. "No, I'll stay here until Señor Esfuentes's ride comes for him."
She made her farewells to the Youngs in the narthex. The choristers had gone, leaving only Amado, wrestling the large upright vacuum cleaner into position in the north aisle. He was getting adept at doing everything one-and-a-half-handed. She cruised the pews, looking for hymnals or prayer books out of place, picking up discarded concert programs.
She had reached the front of the church again when the inner doors opened. She looked up, but instead of Russ or Kevin she saw two big, burly country boys, one with a reddish ZZ Top beard, the other with an oh-so-fashionable mullet. She stepped into the center of the nave, blocking their path. "May I help you?" she said. The bearded guy looked familiar, but she couldn't place where she had seen him.
"Well, ma'am," the mullet began, and the bearded one said, "There he is," and they both turned toward Amado with the coordination of sharks spotting a tuna.
"C'mere, lover boy," the bearded man said. "We wanna have a talk with you."
Her sexton froze behind the vacuum cleaner. His caramel skin was pasty, throwing his scraggly beard and mustache into high relief. Clare doubted he understood anything they had said, but he didn't need to. The smell of violence clung to the intruders, filling the church. The kid shivered, toppled the vacuum into the aisle, and rabbited toward the hallway behind him.