“A fine way to go.”
“You must come for lunch!” Ella’s rouge spots appeared to brighten. “Are you fond of sea bass?”
“Fond is an understatement. One of my great favorites!”
“Miss Child taught me how to poach sea bass on TV. I miss Miss Child, don’t you? I loved the way she dropped things on the floor and picked them up and went right on, a good lesson for us all, I think!”
“Indeed!”
Sam Fieldwalker joined them as St. John’s organist drew herself up to her full height, which was impressive. “I’m a good hand at plum wine, into the bargain!”
He chuckled. “Yet another incentive to visit. Sam, Ella’s asked us to Dorchester.”
“Oh, my gracious, we love Dorchester. They do a good bit of fishing business up there. It’s nice and quiet, without the tourism we get on Whitecap.”
“I think you’ll like my little house, Father, it’s quite historic. Built in 1902 of timbers that washed up from shipwrecks. I like to say I live in a house that once sailed the sea!”
“When you go over to Miss Bridgewater’s,” Sam suggested, “that could be a good time to visit Cap’n Larkin. He’s the old fellow I told you about who was a longtime member at St. John’s. He lives with his twin brother now, on Dorchester.”
“Their house is just a skip and a jump from mine,” said Ella. “They keep an old pickup truck parked at the front door, that’s where their dog sleeps.”
“You could take him communion,” said Sam. “That would thrill him. Father Morgan never . . . got around to doing that.”
“Consider it done! Of course, if we come anytime soon, Ella, you may have to entertain a three-year-old, as well. How would that be?”
Ella eyed Jonathan clattering across the porch tailed by two self-appointed Youth Group baby-sitters.
“I have a little garden plot fenced with pickets,” she said. “We could stake him out there!”
He saw a group gathered to the right of the porch and walked over to see what was what. Cynthia stood by a lacecap hydrangea, holding Jonathan on her hip and peering into a variety of cameras. “Smile, Jonathan!” she urged.
“I declare,” Jean Ballenger said, “that child looks enough like your wife to be her own! Do you see the resemblance?”
He did, actually. Two pairs of cornflower eyes. Two winning smiles. Two heads the color of ripe corn.
“I hope Janette can come home soon.”
“It’s going to be a while yet. It’s . . . a hard thing.” It hurt him to think about it. He could scarcely bear to witness deep depression; he had seen it in his father for years.
“Step over there,” said Sam Fieldwalker, “and let’s get one of you, too!”
Cynthia put her hand over her eyes and squinted in his direction. “Yes, dear, come and let them record your tan.”
He hated photos of himself; in a picture in the new church album, he looked as if he’d been dug up by the roots.
Sheepishly, he put his arm around his wife, adjusted his glasses, and peered at the cameras.
“You better smile!” crowed Jonathan.
“First to come, last to go!” Otis Bragg shook his host’s hand with vigor. “Look here, they cleaned us out.”
Father Tim peered into the depths of the empty shrimp basket. “A grand contribution, Otis. Thank you again and again.”
“My pleasure!” he said. “Good to see th’ parish turnin’ out like this. It’s what makes us family.”
“I agree. Come back anytime, you and Marlene.”
Like the rest of the common horde, his landlord and parishioner definitely had some traits that were unlikable. Yet he was growing to appreciate Otis; he had the odd feeling that if the chips were ever down, he could count on Otis Bragg.
“We ought to go on a little run with Cap’n Willie one of these days.” Otis took the cigar from his mouth and eyed it fondly. “You do any fishin’?”
“I hardly know a hook from a sinker, but my good wife has bought me a chair on Captain Willie’s boat, and looks like I’ll be forced to go before it’s over.”
Otis pounded him on the back. “Do you good! Clergy has a tendency to think too much, you need a little fun in your life. Nothin’ like a good, hard fight with a blue marlin to get a man’s blood up!” Otis pounded him again. “Give me a call when you set a date, I’ll try to go out with you.”
“Well . . . ,” he said, not knowing what else to say.
“I’ll bring us a bucket of chicken,” declared Otis, spitting shreds of Cuban tobacco into the border of cosmos.
While he took a cleanup shift in the kitchen, Cynthia carried Jonathan, now overtired and overwrought, through the house and out to the back stoop.
“Mommy! I want my mommy!” he sobbed.
Father Tim stood at the kitchen window and watched them approach the bird feeder in the backyard, his wife struggling to console and distract the weeping boy.
“I want Babette an’ Jason!”
“There, Jonathan, it’s all right. You’ll see Mommy soon, and Babette and Jason, too, I promise. Oh, look at the bird on the fence, I wonder what it is. . . .”
He watched her holding the boy close, patting his back, and saw him lay his head on her shoulder. When she turned to look toward the house, he could see tears in her eyes, as well. His wife had a natural gift for “rejoicing with them that do rejoice and weeping with them that weep,” as St. Paul commanded the Romans to do.
He lifted his hand and waved awkwardly as they passed from view.
Cynthia was growing attached to the boy, no doubt about it. She’d never been able to have children of her own; in fact, her former husband had spent most of his time, she said, “making babies with other women.” The barrenness had been a deep hurt to her, a thorn.
He finished washing up as Cynthia carried Jonathan once more around the route they usually traveled when the boy was crying for family. He heard her murmuring softly to him, crooning bits of stories and songs.
This was torture for all alike, he thought, as Cynthia trudged up the porch steps, looking weary. Surely next week Babette and Jason would be back from visiting another set of family in Beaufort, and they could borrow them for an afternoon. . . .
He stood at the door as Cynthia eased the boy onto his bed and Barnabas leaped up and lay at his feet.
He watched her smooth Jonathan’s damp blond hair from his forehead, and saw the infinite tenderness in her eyes.
“What a good boy,” she whispered. Then she turned and patted Barnabas.
“And what a good dog!” she said.
Feeling an unexpected weariness of his own, he sat by the phone in the study and dialed Emma’s number. “Found anything?”
“Oh, law, there’s hundreds, maybe thousands of Ed Sikeses out there, it’s like lookin’ for Bob Jones or John Smith! There’s two Ed Sikeses right over in Wesley, one Edmund an’ one Edward, but Harold knows ’em both and says they couldn’t possibly have run off with anybody’s kid, one’s a deacon at First Presbyterian and th’ other one goes frog giggin’ with Harold’s brother.
“Plus, you don’t even want to know how many different names Ed stands for.”
“How many?”
“I looked it up on th’ Internet and found thirteen—Edison, Eddrick, Edgar, Edwin, Eduardo, to name only a few. You know you can find anything you’re lookin’ for on th’ Internet, you ought to be on th’ Internet, it would help with your sermons, it seems like preachin’ Sunday after Sunday, you’d be desperately lookin’ for new material. . . .”
Emma Newland had been into the Little Debbies again, he knew sugar-induced hysteria when he heard it.
“So . . . ,” he said, seeking an escape.
“So you’ll have to come up with another gimmick this time,” she announced.
He called Pauline.
“I forgot to tell you somethin’,” she said. “He was from Oregon, or he maybe was goin’ to Oregon.”
“Excellent! Wonderful!”
>
“Father ...”
“Yes?”
“I’ve been . . . I’m really scared about somethin’.”
“What scares you?”
“Well . . . you see, I don’t feel like I deserve . . . all this.”
“All this what?”
She took a deep breath. “This . . . happiness. It don’t seem right for me to have it.”
“Grace isn’t about deserving, Pauline. We can’t earn God’s grace, there’s no way on earth we can earn it. Grace is free, and I believe as sure as I am sitting here that He brought the two of you together. Do you love Buck?”
“More’n anything. Just . . . more’n I can say. He’s so good to me and th’ children, he’s . . . nobody sees it, but he’s tenderhearted, you know.”
“I know.”
“I just pray everything’s going to be all right. I’ve told the Lord I’ll work real hard.”
“You’ll need to,” he said. Why not speak the truth?
“Thank you, Father. It always helps when we talk. I feel better.”
“Can you think of anything else? Anything else about Ed Sikes?”
“I’ve been prayin’ to think of somethin’ else, but there’s only one other thing I remember. . . .”
“Yes?” He sat forward in the chair.
“He was losin’ his hair in front.”
Who isn’t? he thought.
He rang Emma again.
“Oregon,” he said. “Look up Ed Sikes in Oregon. We may be on to something.”
“You should get your church to set you up on the Internet,” she said, sounding grumpy. “Especially since they don’t give you a secretary, it seems they could at least—”
“Emma, remember how you helped find Jessie? If it hadn’t been for you, Dooley’s little sister might still be missing.”
“That’s true!” she said, sounding brighter. “All right, I’ll get to it soon as Harold and I go to Atlanta, we’re goin’ to borrow Avis Packard’s RV, you know he never uses it, it just sits in his driveway losin’ air in th’ tires because he works all the time, he’s th’ only man I know who’s more interested in rump roast than women.
“You and Cynthia ought to get an RV, it would do you good to throw your cares to the wind, after all, you are retired. When Harold retires from th’ post office, we’re goin’ to do as we please and not kowtow to another living soul, he’s got six years to go, then we might hit Hawaii or Alaska, maybe even Dollywood, have you ever listened to her sing, I mean really listened? She is very talented, I know you like Bach and Mozart, but you could at least try tunin’ in to the real world once in a while, you have no idea what you might be missin’. . . .”
Roughly speaking, he figured the sugar content in a box of Little Debbie fudge rounds possessed the power to jolt the human system for a full eight hours, minimum.
Why the angel?
He was beyond trying to figure out who had entered the yellow house, and wondered only why they would have taken the angel and nothing more.
If he’d been the thief, he would have stolen the books. Books, however, didn’t seem to be a popular item with thieves. They liked silver, TV sets, and jewelry, yet none of those items had been touched.
Boggling. Each time he thought about it, he felt as if someone had removed the top of his head and poured in cooked oatmeal.
No word from Rodney, but he didn’t want to call and stir that pot any more than he had already.
He looked at his watch. Six-fifteen, and the sun was setting. He didn’t feel like running—maybe a long walk with Barnabas instead. If they’d held on to one of the babysitters, he might have talked his wife into coming along. . . .
He trotted down the steps in shorts and a golf shirt, amazed how all evidence of the merriment had vanished, that a lovely moment in the lives of forty-two people had become history—with scarcely a mark in the garden from the folding chairs.
He latched the gate behind him and hunkered into an easy lope, with Barnabas on the red leash. Maybe a trek past Ernie’s, hang a left this side of St. John’s, another left at the little gray house, and circle back by Morris Love’s front gate.
Seventy, indeed, he thought, huffing up the lane.
They were circling toward home when the fattest, sleekest squirrel he’d seen on Whitecap made a dash across the road. The leash was fairly torn from his hand as Barnabas leaped after the creature, leash flying.
“Barnabas!”
His dog was doing sixty miles an hour and barking like thunder as he raced toward Morris Love’s rusted iron gate, and, in a flash, slithered under it.
“Barnabas! Come!”
Deaf as a doorknob, like any dog chasing a squirrel . . .
He huffed to the gate and examined it. Locked. Not to mention rusted. “Barnabas! Come now!”
He wiped the sweat from his eyes and saw his dog disappear into a thicket—no, a kind of loggia to the left of the house, which was barely visible through the trees. The furious barking continued unabated.
He whistled loudly. Dadgummit, his wife was a better whistler than he was. She could shake green apples from the tree.
More barking. More whistling.
What if Barnabas crossed the Love property, went under the fence on the other side, and into the street? He didn’t keep his dog on a leash at all times for no good reason. Hadn’t Barnabas been stolen by the vilest drug-dealing Creek scum, and kept staked and half starved for weeks on end?
Grasping the top of the wall with his hands, he gained a foothold against the rough surface and managed to heave himself up and over, landing beside the overgrown driveway with a thud.
He stood for a moment, still winded, and looked around.
He had entered another world.
Though he was mere inches beyond the gate, a few feet from the street, and only yards from Dove Cottage—he was no longer in Whitecap.
It was a jungle in here, literally.
The grounds had the density of a rain forest, with trees and vegetation he’d never seen before, save for one enormous live oak, damaged by an old storm. He wouldn’t be surprised to hear monkeys and macaws, the trumpet call of an elephant. . . .
He stood still, as if frozen to the spot. Cool in here, and quiet, strangely quiet. He heard his own hard breathing, and remembered his maverick dog.
“Barnabas!”
In reply, there was crashing through the underbrush to his left, and a revived fit of barking.
“Come! Come, old fella!”
Barnabas bolted into the driveway through a vine-entangled hedge, gave him an odd look, then turned and raced toward the house.
He ran, too, pounding along the weed-grown driveway, until the house came fully into view.
Spanish. Stucco. Tile roof. Moss growing in wide, lush patches on the walls of the loggia or portico; vines covering half the house; the smooth, worn roots of a huge tree gnarling up through a stone semicircle at the front door.
He looked at the windows, which returned only a blank and curtainless stare.
“Barnabas!” he hissed.
Dadgummit, there he came around the right side of the house, galloping like a horse after yet another squirrel, which was fleeing for its life through yet another iron gate on some kind of outbuilding that was nearly obscured by undergrowth.
Enough was enough, by heaven. The party was over.
He dashed after his dog as the squirrel ran through the partially open gate, and Barnabas followed, his long hair catching on the rusted iron and slamming the gate behind him.
As it clanged shut, Father Tim stood for a moment, swallowing down his anger.
It was some kind of ancient, stuccoed enclosure, an old dog run, perhaps, grown up with straggling shrubs and weeds. The squirrel was over the rear wall and gone from sight, leaving Barnabas stranded at the end of the run, barking with impotent fury.
Father Tim jiggled the gate, which appeared to have locked. He’d never seen such an odd contrivance to latch a gate; the rust didn’t
make it work any better, either. Blast! He hit the thing with the palm of his hand, smarting the flesh and drawing blood.
He could fairly throttle his dog, who now turned toward him with a look of sheepish regret. “Come,” he said through clenched teeth.
Barnabas, clearly on the downside of his adrenaline rush, walked slowly toward the gate, head down.
His master punched the gate again, repeated the favorite expletive of his school buddy, Tommy Noles, then gave the blasted thing a stiff kick for good measure.
“Out!”
He heard the bellow as if it were projected on a loudspeaker.
“Out!”
His skin prickled. “Mr. Love,” he shouted into thin air, “my dog is locked in your run, and I don’t have a clue how to get him . . . out.”
“You’re a fool to let him in,” growled Morris Love.
Father Tim looked to an upstairs window where he thought the voice originated, but saw no one.
“I didn’t let him in. He ran in on his own, chasing a squirrel!” He was fairly trembling with the frustration of this escapade, and suddenly angry at the man who refused to show himself, much less proffer a grain of human hospitality.
“Take the pin out,” Morris Love yelled.
He slid the pin out. Whoever put this thing together ought to have his head examined. . . .
“Turn the latch to the right!”
He cranked it to the right. Nothing. Dead. Not to mention that something was eating his legs alive.
He was furious. He felt as if he could dismantle the gate with his bare hands, like Samson, and pitch it into the weeds. His blood pressure was probably halfway to the moon.
“It doesn’t work!” he shouted, slapping at his bitten legs.
“It works, Father, it has always worked. Don’t push it when you turn it to the right!”
Morris Love could wake the dead with that huge bellow, as if he were speaking through the pipes of his organ. Father Tim tried again, without pushing. The gate opened as easily as if it had just rolled off the assembly line.