2 - Secrets: Ike Schwartz Mystery 2 (14 page)

“My treat,” he said.

“No way,” she protested.

“Just this time. You can pay the next time.”

“Who said anything about a next time?”

“Tomorrow night, dinner and a movie, how about it?”

“Oh I see, you want me to spring for the expensive meal.”

“Dutch,” he said.

“What time?”

“Seven?”

“No good. Pick me up at seven-thirty.”

Blake watched her leave. He poured himself another coffee and stared at his placemat. He turned his thoughts from Mary and their “movie.” His eyebrows knit in a frown. It did make more sense—that was the problem. It did not happen that way.

Chapter Twenty-six

Mary picked up her mail and quickly sorted through it. Anything without a first-class stamp went into the wastepaper basket with the fliers and junk mail. The rest she dropped, unopened, in the pile on the little desk by her front door. Mary had a rule. Neither telephones nor mail would manage her life. She did not have an answering machine. She did once, and found that it obligated her to make calls she did not want to make. The messages were on the machine and it would be rude not to return the call. By getting rid of the machine, she got rid of the obligation as well. She didn’t have to respond to a message she never received.

She also refused to answer calls while she ate. She rejected the tyranny of the telephone. She managed her mail in the same way. She sorted it quickly when it arrived, discarded most of it, and saved the rest for Sunday afternoon when she would open each piece, read it carefully and, if necessary, frame a reply which she would write on the spot. She found that only in this way could she keep up with her correspondence and pay her bills in a timely manner. She gathered her bag and keys, and left for work.

***

Lanny Markowitz and Dan Quarles met every other week for lunch. They used the time to set the Mission Board’s agenda and discuss problems. The Jack Pines Inn had a clientele drawn primarily from locals. Its location far off the main road all but assured that no one except locals could find it even if they called for directions. Dan had served as chairman of the Mission Board for more years than Lanny could remember. Lanny, on the other hand, had only been on for two. Because no one else would accept the responsibility, he also agreed to be vice-chairman.

Dan sat and pulled out his handkerchief, which he dipped into his water glass, and proceeded to wipe the Formica table. The Jack Pines Inn was not known for its food or ambiance. Satisfied that the table met his standard of hygiene, he turned to Lanny.

“So what are we going to do about the Vicar?”

“Fisher? What’s the problem?”

“You heard him Sunday. People are angry.”

“Nuts, people are always hot over one thing or another. I say let him go. If he fails, we don’t have a problem because he’ll be gone. If he succeeds, we don’t have a problem either. No, the real problem is Millie Bass, if you ask me. We need to fire her.”

The waitress brought their sandwiches. She put a cracked iced tea pitcher down next to them and left.

Lanny toyed with his food. He had been eating here for a long time but never noticed the food before.

“We can’t fire Mrs. Bass,” Dan said. “Why, half the congregation would be furious if we did.”

“Dan, I know your wife is a friend of Millie’s, one of her inner circle, so you don’t have a completely unbiased view. I do. Bass is a disaster. She spreads gossip and rumors like candy on Halloween. Her stories are mean and hurtful. It didn’t used to be that way. It used to be just idle gossip—but not any more. And she is a liar.”

“Now wait just a minute, that’s going pretty far.”

“No, it isn’t. There is something you don’t know. I didn’t know about it, either, until Tuesday. You remember those packets we got when Fisher was hired. They all had those letters from people in Philadelphia in them, you remember.”

“Of course, I do. I helped put them together.”

“You did?”

“Yes. So what?”

“How many letters were included, do you remember?”

“I don’t know. Three or four, maybe five. All bad, I remember that—except for Bournet’s.”

“Did you know there were other letters sent to the church from clergy in Philadelphia, the Bishop and some others?”

“There were no other letters, Lanny.”

“There were. I’ve seen them, or copies anyway, and they all say ‘cc: Stonewall Jackson Mission Board’ at the bottom.”

“We never got any letters like that.”

“No, we didn’t, but Millie did. She got them and she buried them. The only good letter we saw came from Bournet that said he had every confidence in Fisher and so on. We have been treating this guy like a leper with halitosis for nearly three months because we didn’t know the truth—the truth we would have known if Millie Bass had put the good letters in the packets.”

“That’s a pretty strong accusation, Lanny. I don’t know.”

“Dan, I am not a big Fisher fan, you know that. But we have done him a disservice and we need to make it right. Nearly every one of the old-timers thinks Fisher is some kind of monster. Millie Bass did that to him, and we need to fix it. I don’t know about you, but most of the time when I find myself opposing him, I’m not thinking about what he’s saying, but what I believed he did. I bet most of us are in the same boat. It has to stop. We have to set the record straight, and Millie Bass has to go before she poisons the well beyond hope.”

Dan licked his lips, looked out the window, and then inspected the contents of his soup bowl as if he thought he would see reason in the dregs of cream of broccoli. Lanny stood up, his food uneaten. He dropped three dollars on the table and left.

“If you won’t do it, I will,” he said over his shoulder as he left. He thought he heard a plaintive “Oh, dear,” but he could not be sure.

***

Blake pulled up in front of Mary Miller’s town house at seven twenty-five. He decided waiting five minutes would be the tactful thing to do. He got out of his car and inspected the chrysanthemums that lined the walk. The yard was tiny but Mary had made the most of it. There were mums and dahlias, some asters about to bloom, and some sort of ground cover he could not identify. His inspection took about fifteen seconds, and then he changed his mind about arriving early and rang her bell. She opened the door immediately. He guessed she had been just inside watching and waiting. He walked her to the car. She opened her own door before he could, and slid gracefully in, no mean accomplishment. Blake drove a small, and very low, sports car. Mary had somehow folded her long legs in without a hitch.

The ride to the mall passed without much in the way of conversation. He had the top down and the wind noise prevented any but the most perfunctory talk.

He’d made reservations at L’Escoffier, a restaurant with pretensions and a name more French than its cuisine. It differed very little from the other eateries in the area—the odd collection of unconnected memorabilia tacked to the walls near the ceiling, and a menu that featured basic beef, seafood, and chicken dishes, only the fries were
pommes frites
, and the entrees,
boeuf, pêche,
et poulet.

Later, Blake could not remember what he had ordered or how it tasted. His whole attention was focused on Mary. She, on the other hand, seemed to enjoy her food immensely. She ate, sampled his, and chattered on about any of a dozen subjects. Blake listened, fascinated.

After they finished their coffee and paid their half of the bill, they strolled around the corner to the multiplex theater. They discovered the movie offerings were all either R-rated or one of those moronic kid flicks designed to fill theaters at the end of summer. Blake suggested a walk instead, window-shopping and people watching. They strolled along the several wings, stopping now and then, to admire or critique some item. In front of Classique—The Store for Women, Blake paused.

“Look at that gown,” he said. The manikin in the window was draped in a black beaded cocktail dress. The neckline was scooped, but not too low, and it had spaghetti straps.

“You like that?” she asked.

“It’s really pretty,” he said. “It would look wonderful on you.”

“You don’t think it’s too…slinky?”

“I have a theory about clothes,” he said. “Clothes make the man, but women make the clothes. I mean you can take a derelict off the street, clean him up, put him in a pinstripe suit, and pass him off as a banker. But you put a dumpy woman in that dress and she’s a dumpy woman in a beaded dress. Put a fast woman in it, and it becomes, as you so delicately put it, slinky. On you, it would be elegant.”

He got the blush he expected. They passed Victoria’s Secret.

“We’ll just move right along,” she said. “Eyes front.”

At Radio Shack, Blake stopped to look at cell phones.

“You don’t have one, do you?” he asked.

“No, and I don’t want one.”

“You are so hard to reach,” he said, “I am ready to buy one for you.”

“Please don’t. I treasure my privacy. I wish I didn’t have the regular phone. I would get rid of it if I could.”

“You are a very funny lady.”

“Funny like in Ha Ha, or funny like in Gaga?”

She paused in front of the jewelry store. The window had been arranged to show off a collection of diamond engagement rings.
End of Summer Sale
, announced a big sign in the window.

“I almost had an engagement ring once.” She gave him a sidelong look.

“Really?” he said and felt a small and quite unjustified pang of jealousy.

“Yep. About as big as that one in the middle.” She pointed to a diamond that had to be at least two carats.

“It’s none of my business,” he said, “but what happened?”

“Oh, we had a disagreement about housing. He wanted me to move in with him before we got married to ‘see if it would work.’ I told him that at that moment, it was clear to me it wouldn’t, and gave the ring back. I never even got it out of the box.”

“I’m speechless.”

“That’s a nice change,” she said and smiled.

They walked some more. Finally they made a turn and realized they were back where they had started.

“Sorry about the movie,” they both said at the same time and laughed.

“Tomorrow?” he asked.

“No, I can’t. And Sunday you work and will be tired.” He began to protest and then changed his mind. He did not need to rush.

“Monday night. What would you like to do Monday?”

“Would you take me to the theater? I love stage productions. There’s a road company doing
Cats
in Roanoke. Could we go there?”

“Sure, consider it done. Would you like to eat first?”

“Sure.”

He drove her home. The street seemed darker than he remembered it. Then he saw that her streetlight was out. He parked, got out, and opened the door for her.

“You know, I thought there was something familiar about your address. Templeton lived near here, didn’t he?”

“Yes,” she said. He could not see her expression in the darkness. She averted her head and hurried to the door.

“Did you know him?” he persisted.

“Blake, I have to go in now. I had a wonderful time.”

“You didn’t answer. Did you know him?”

“Oh yeah, I knew him,” she said and let herself in the house.

“You never told me you knew Templeton.”

The door shut and Blake found himself alone on the doorstep.

Chapter Twenty-seven

“I’m not going,” Grace Franks screeched. Her eyes had become red rimmed and flecks of dried saliva filled the lines at the corners of her mouth. Her voice climbed a half octave. “I hate those people. They’re evil.”

“Keep your voice down, Grace. You want the whole neighborhood to hear you?”

“I don’t care. I will not go to that church anymore. It’s full of hypocrites and—”

“Give it a rest, Grace, we’re going. Get in the car. I’ll be late for choir.”

“Then go without me. Go on. Get in the car and go.”

“I’ve had enough of this, you hear? Will you get a grip? You sound like you’re nuts.”

“Maybe I am. If I am, it’s because you are making me crazy, you and your…girlfriends.”

“Me?
My
girlfriends? That’s rich…pot calling the kettle black, I say. How many times do I have to tell you, Grace? There aren’t any girlfriends.”

“You say.”

He unclenched his fist. He’d been doing that a lot lately, and she wondered how much longer it would be before he smacked her.
To the moon, Alice!

He shook his head and left the kitchen to finish dressing. She sat with her head in her hands. She hated him, she knew that, but she could not do anything about it. Even if she tried, they knew. Everybody knew. They would come right to her first.

“You still here?” he said, knotting his tie. “It’s time to go.”

“I said I am not going.”

“Either you get in the car or I’ll—”

“You would, wouldn’t you?” She followed him out to the driveway and got in the car. They drove to church. He chewed on the stub end of an unlit cigar and talked about the garden and how he wanted her to water it the next day. He droned on, but she was not listening. She was thinking about guns.

Her father had lots of them. Her father had been a colonel in the army and kept guns from the service—souvenirs—Japanese, German and nineteen fifties vintage Russian weapons from his tour in Korea. He had a big collection of them, handguns, rifles, shotguns, and even some illegal automatic weapons. He tried to teach her how to shoot when she was six. The noise scared her so much she cried all the way home. But she had mastered them eventually. Her father kept dragging her back to the range until she forced herself to learn out of a sense of survival. Now she thought about those guns and especially the one she thought of as hers. She thought what his face would like if she reached into her purse and aimed it at his stupid cigar. The thought made her smile.

“What’s so funny,” he said.

“You are.”

***

By ten o’clock the temperature had inched up ten degrees. Stonewall Jackson would stay cool inside, but outside on the parking lot, the heat rose off the asphalt and made you hurry to the church’s cool gloom.

Blake waited near the end of the parking lot, standing first on one foot and then the other. The asphalt burned through the thin leather of his loafers. He had prepared a surprise for Mary. The day before, he had carefully lettered a sign and mounted it next to his own. Mary now had a reserved parking place near the rear door. He wanted to catch her as she drove in and guide her to the place. The sun beat down on him and he wished he had at least taken off his robes after the eight o’clock service. Now he did not dare for fear he would miss her, so he stood in the parking lot arrayed in his full regalia and felt the perspiration trickle down his back.

Finally, her car pulled into the lot. He waved frantically, signaling her to come to him. She hesitated and then drove slowly forward. He backed up and directed her into the spot like a ground crewman at the airport, bringing his hands together slowly as she edged to a stop. He stepped aside so she could see his sign. She grinned and shook her head.

“People are going to start talking,” she said.

“Let them,” he replied. “That is nothing more than I would do for anyone on the staff. See, even Millie Bass has a spot.”

“Did Waldo Templeton have a reserved spot, too?”

“Well, no, but he would have if I’d thought about it.”

She smiled at him. “You must be boiling in that outfit,” she said. “Get back inside before you melt.”

***

Blake stood at the crossing at the front of the church between the two rows of pews. The altar area had been restored, the damask curtain removed and, except for a few traces of bloodstains, everything seemed to be back to normal. He thought there might be a sermon in there somewhere, but not today. He bowed his head and prayed, looked up and scanned the congregation.

“Good morning,” he said. There were fewer people in the “hole” he thought, but maybe a few more in the “doughnut.” Call it even.

He began his sermon slowly. The second lesson for the day was from Philippians. He needed some time to get from “at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow and every tongue confess, that Jesus Christ is Lord,” to the Ten Commandments. It was not an easy transition, and he wondered if he had made a mistake not to just select the appropriate lessons instead of sticking to the lectionary.

He spoke slowly, pausing to make a point here and there. He measured his audience. They were attentive; even the “hole” seemed to be listening. Finally he said, “Bow to what? No, bow to whom? If Jesus is Lord, what obligation does that place on us? What does he expect of us, day by day? John’s gospel tells us he says, ‘If you love me, you will keep my commandments.’ So how about, for starters, we keep God’s Law.”

Not a great segue, but he had learned long ago that very few people listened for things like that anyway. They took the message as delivered and rarely noticed the rhetoric. Once on his topic, he rolled on. He ticked off each of the commandments, one by one. Most of them he simply summarized and briefly described. After each he paused and intoned, “Can we say, in the privacy of our hearts, I have kept this commandment?”

He spent a little more time on honoring one’s father and mother. There were a handful of teenagers slouched in the back of the church and he thought he might make a point or two with them.

“Can we say, in the privacy of our hearts, I have kept this commandment?”

He stopped again on the Seventh Commandment. He knew he probably should not. He did not know why, but felt compelled to do so. “Adultery,” he heralded, and watched as adults squirmed, and the teenagers sat up and took notice. Good. Now they were all listening.

Epiphanies are a sometime thing. They come in all sizes and at odd and often inconvenient moments. He’d been in Picketsville for a little over three months, all of them prejudiced by the dark clouds of his personal disappointment. As he spoke the words, at that precise moment, he realized with painful clarity that much of the distance between him and his congregation was of his own making—the residue of his unhappiness. He smiled and turned back to the people.
Time to lighten up, Fisher
.

“You have no doubt heard what Moses said to Aaron at the foot of Mount Sinai. No? Ah. Well, he comes down from the heights and says, ‘Aaron, I’ve been talking to You Know Who’—to speak God’s name was forbidden, you understand—‘about His commandments and I have good news and I have bad news.’ And Aaron says, ‘So, what’s the good news?’ and Moses says, ‘I got him down to ten.’ Aaron says, ‘Great, and the bad news?’ Moses says, ‘Adultery is still in.’”

Blake waited. Had he gone too far? A few tentative smiles, a chuckle in the rear. Not loud but genuine. He counted several disapproving scowls among the smiles.
Too soon to tell a joke? Well, they might as well get used to it. It’s definitely time to lighten up.

“I told the story to illustrate a point,” he went on. “Many people would very much like this commandment to go away. Adultery has become the lifestyle of modern America. Daytime television, soap operas, even primetime is saturated with adulterous relationships…relationships that often seem as complex as strands of DNA. Movies, books, everywhere you turn, adultery, not fidelity, illicit sex, not chastity, is the standard. Indeed the institution of marriage has been systematically and thoroughly trivialized by our culture and its leaders.”

He scanned his congregation again.

“If the statistics are correct, at least half of you here today have had, or are now engaged in, a relationship of that sort.” He stopped and looked at the people. Stony, icy, and shocked silence greeted him. Then, for reasons he never understood, even years later, added, “And you know who you are.…Again, can we say, in the privacy of our hearts, I have kept this commandment?”

He had started pacing at the fourth commandment, and now, as he pivoted to walk to his left, he caught sight of Grace Franks. She had a look on her face that could only be described as dumbfounded. She rose and left the church.

Blake moved on through eight and then jumped directly to ten. He quickly polished off Covetousness. He paused and surveyed his congregation once again.

“I skipped the ninth commandment, because that is the one I want to discuss at length today. ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.’ Most of us think this law has something to do with testimony given in court, with perjury. And in some ways it does. Perjury is a felony in most courts, and the penalties can be very severe. In the first century, they could be even more so. The rule was as follows—if you bore false witness, that is, if you gave untrue testimony in a trial, and the person was subsequently acquitted and your story deemed false, you received the punishment the accused would have received had he been found guilty. You understand? If it was a capital crime, you got stoned to death, not him or her, but you.

“But the commandment has a much deeper application. Remember, God gave it to Moses, for the people in the wilderness. These were nomads living in tents, cheek by jowl. Any behavior that separated them or lessened their mutual affection and harmony could be catastrophic. Think about all of the commandments. Aren’t they actually designed to keep people at peace? What effect would theft or adultery have on the social equilibrium of a tribe living on the edge in the desert?

“This commandment is one of those strictures. Bearing false witness in that context is what today we call gossip.”

There, he said it. It might have been his imagination, but he felt the air crackle. Feet shuffled. People coughed nervously. A few heads turned to steal a look at Millie Bass. She sat stock still, her lips pursed and eyes squeezed together as if she were trying to read an eye chart without her glasses. Whatever goodwill his story about Moses had created seemed to have drained out of his listeners.

“I daresay there is not one of us in the room that has not broken this commandment at least once this week. You know how it goes. We hear something about Miss A. We pass it along and the story gets more elaborate and negative with each telling until we are part of a chain that has contributed to the character assassination of another human being. And the problem is, we cannot take it back. Once the words are out of our mouth, they have a life of their own. They pass from lip to ear, and twenty years later they are still alive in someone’s memory waiting for a reason to wander off again.

“Did you know,” he continued, “the root word for gossip and gospel is the same? Isn’t that interesting? And it should tell us something. Stories that uplift and speak to the truth ultimately come from God. Those that do the reverse are the work of the Devil. I want us to search our hearts this morning. When was the last time we yielded to the temptation to gossip? How will we resist it the next time?

“I’ll close with this. In my opinion, more people have gone to Hell for breaking this commandment than the other nine put together. Can we say, in the privacy of our hearts, I have kept this commandment?”

He stopped. You could hear the proverbial pin drop. Finally a voice in the back said, “Amen.” It sounded like Rose Garroway.