“That would be fun.”Inky liked to play.
“I know where she keeps them at Foxglove. It’s a pieceof cake to reach into the golf bag and filch one. And her house dog sleeps right through it.”
“Charlie,”Inky said and blinked,“did you notice anything unusual in that fog when you were riding Orestes?”
“I smelled Ralph. He sent off a strong, strong odor offear. And I heard two other riders moving in different directions. They weren’t together. I know one was Sybil,because I could smell. I couldn’t get a whiff of the otherrider. Too far away.”He rolled upright.“Don’t you findit odd that humans kill one another? To kill for food,well, we must all survive, but to kill members of yourown species? Very nasty.”
“You know, sometimes a vixen will go into a killingfrenzy to teach her cubs how to kill,”Inky soberly said.“I think humans can go into killing frenzies, too, butfor a different reason. I worry that this person mightdo that.”
“Possibly.”Charlie swept forward his whiskers.“Youknow that Cly and Orestes didn’t see the killer or theywould have blabbed to everyone. Cly can’t keep a secret. Cows are dumb as posts.”He laughed.
As the two left the den, Inky wondered if murder was a pleasure for humans the way catching a mouse was a pleasure for her. If so, how could a killer ever stop killing?
CHAPTER 33
Plain pews of rich walnut accented the severe yet uplifting architecture of the local Episcopal church. When its first stone was laid in 1702 it was a rough affair. Few Christian people lived this far west, and those who did had little money. The native tribes of Virginia, divided into Iroquois-speaking peoples and Sioux-speaking peoples, warred against one another sporadically. The handful of whites found themselves in the middle, an uneasy place to be.
The small church proved a refuge from the unrelenting hostilities of the New World, a land devoid of familiar English nightingales yet filled with scarlet tanagers. For every animal left behind on England’s shores, there appeared here some new, beautiful creature.
Stone or brick was necessary for buildings of any permanence since the Indians used fire when raiding settlers. The large church bell could be used to sound an alarm. Every farm also had a bell. Upon hearing it, people set free their livestock, hopped on their horses, and galloped to the church.
While it may not have been its most Christian feature, the church, like their homes, was built with a small room with gun slits in the walls. The settlers took aim at attackers through those narrow openings in the stone. A slate roof provided protection from fire.
Over time, truces were made, later broken by both sides. But as the Thirty Years War raged, followed by the English Civil War, the trickle of colonists swelled to a stream, then a river. The hardships of America were more alluring than the hatreds of Europe. A few adventurous souls pushed west toward the fall line.
The fall line was a series of rapids dividing the upland freshwaters from the saltier waters below. Above the fall line rolled the undulating, fertile hills of the Piedmont, which lapped to the very feet of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Very few whites had reached the Blue Ridge. Those who did hung on for dear life. Building churches with rifle slits did not seem a Christian contradiction to them.
The early American experience was one of intense loneliness and backbreaking labor relieved by bouts of paralyzing danger. Church on Sundays meant seeing other people as much as prayer.
Once the Thirty Years War ended, the worst destruction that would befall Europe until the Great War, there was less reason for Europeans to flee. And after Charles II was restored to the English throne, he had the sense not to kill most of those who had overthrown his father, with a few exceptions. Even more Englishmen decided to stay home.
Hands were needed to work in Virginia, South Carolina, New York, and Massachusetts. So as the seventeenth century became the eighteenth, Africans were forcibly hauled onto the shores of the New World in increasing numbers.
The parishioners of this isolated church had argued among themselves over slavery. Many noted that the Bible not only has numerous stories about slaves, it never actually says that one human being should not own another. Reason enough, many said, reason enough. And so an economic monstrosity found theological dress clothes to hide in.
If the Native tribes thought the slaves would turn on their masters during attacks, they discovered these new people fought against them as ferociously as the Europeans.
Slave and master, back to back in the fortress room, would shoot at the raiders, then emerge to clean up the mess, the vertical hierarchy again restored. If anyone perceived the irony in this arrangement, they tactfully kept it to themselves.
By the time of the Revolutionary War, the fortress room attached to the church was no longer needed but, as is the wont of Virginians, they kept it out of tradition.
Ralph Assumptio’s body lay in this room, his casket on a kind of gurney that would be pushed into the sanctuary at the appropriate moment by two burly employees of the funeral parlor, flanked by two honorary pallbearers. The other pallbearers acted as ushers.
Frances sat in the first pew with her two daughters and two sons, grown now with families of their own.
The entire membership of the Jefferson Hunt attended, all 135 people. Sister Jane sat to the right of the Assumptios, three pews behind. The Bancrofts and Sybil Fawkes sat in front of her. Ken, being a pallbearer, remained in the fortress room.
Shaker escorted Sister while Walter sat with Alice Ramy, who had driven all the way back from Blacksburg the minute she’d heard the news. This surprised some people, but Alice really had turned over a new leaf.
The closed casket was brought out. The service for the dead had begun.
For Sari Rasmussen, this was the first time she heard the priest read,“Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord.”
Sister had heard Psalm 130 more times than she could count, but the profoundness of The Order for the Burial of the Dead never failed to move her. Some people hated funerals and wouldn’t go. Sister called that selfishness. If ever there was a time when a person needed the sight of friends, words of sympathy, this was that time.
What always struck her about the service was the abiding sense of love. Love for the deceased, love for the survivors, love for God. At such a moment, there were those whose faith was shaken. Hers never was, not even when Ray Junior died. She’d heard her own heart crack, but she hadn’t lost her faith. Had not women lost sons since the beginning of time? One bore one’s losses with fortitude. Anything less was an insult to the dead.
Frances and her children may or may not have believed this way, but they held themselves with dignity.
As Sister sat there, she found it sad that Ralph himself could not hear the words intoned by the Episcopal priest,“Depart in peace, thou ransomed soul. May God the Father Almighty, Who created thee; and Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God, Who redeemed thee; and the Holy Ghost, Who sanctified thee, preserve thy going out and thy coming in, from this time forth, even for ever-more. Amen.”
She recalled Raymond, at the end, sitting up on a hospital bed that they’d put in the living room so he could receive visitors and see the hounds and horses go by. The large windows afforded him a good view. She remembered every word they’d said to each other.
“I’m dying like an old man,” he rasped.
“Well, dear, you are an old man,” Sister teased him, hoping to keep his spirits up.
“You, of course, are still a nubile lovely.” He coughed as he winked at her. “I don’t mind being old, Janie, I mind dying like a candyass.”
“You haven’t lived like one.”
He coughed again; the muscles in his chest and back ached from the continual spasms.“No. Didn’t live like a saint, either. But I thought I’d die on my feet.”