All Mortal Flesh

by Julia Spencer-Fleming

  “Harlene! Is the chief’s mother here yet?” Lyle’s voice, harsh with fear, seemed to be coming from a long way away. “Chief? Russ?” Someone shook his shoulders.

  His vision cleared. Lyle was out of his chair, leaning over the desk, his hands tightening Russ’s flannel shirt into uncomfortable knots. “Jesus Christ, Chief. I thought you was having a stroke. Are you okay? Do you want to lie down?”

  “No.” He held on to the rage. He had a job to do. “I want to be brought up to date on the investigation.”

  “We’re not going to be able to put together anything like a coherent picture until tomorrow. The CS team is at the—is at your house right now. The ME ought to be over there as well. I can have Noble and Mark talk to the neighbors, see if anyone saw anything.”

  Russ tried to snort. It came out a wheeze. “Not likely.”

  “I know.”

  “I want to see the scene. I’ll need to—to identify anything that might be out of place.” It felt as if he were pushing his thoughts, one at a time, down a long, dark track. “You think . . . home invasion?”

  “You mean a burglary? Not from what I could see. Nothing missing that jumped out at me, unless you’ve loaded up on silver or electronics since last summer’s open house. There weren’t any signs of forced entry. The storm windows were all in place. She”—Lyle swallowed hard and went on—“she always locked the door when she was alone at home, right?”

  Russ nodded. There was a noise, outside his door, down the hall.

  “I think your mother’s here.”

  “I need to see the scene.” He looked up into Lyle’s face.

  “You will. Just not tonight. Trust me on this, Russ. Not tonight. Go home with your mother.” The noises grew closer. Footsteps, and voices. A rap on frosted glass, and before he could answer, the door swung open and his mother stood there, short and squat and beautiful.

  “Oh, my darling boy,” she said, her eyes filling. Then she was there, beside him, wrapping her arms around him. Sitting down, his head came to her shoulder, and he pressed his face into a purple sweatshirt that would forevermore be the color of grief to him, while she rubbed his back and said, “My boy. Oh, my sweet boy,” and wept tears he could not allow himself.

  SEVEN

  Tuesday, January 15

  Clare awoke early to a cold cabin and the realization that she was due to return to civilization today. To meet the new deacon the bishop was saddling her with. The thought should have made her grimace, but even annoyance was too much for her to compass this morning.

  She rose; she dressed; she stripped the bed and threw the sheets, along with the napkins and the tablecloth, into the washing machine. Her attempt at morning prayer was flat; she had no words to offer. It felt as if she were kneeling inside a refrigerator box. Finally, she simply read out the Fifty-first Psalm. The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

  Well. She might not come up to snuff in any other way, but she had the troubled spirit and the broken and contrite heart down pat.

  She pulled on her parka and gloves and went out to shovel her car free. The clouds had shaken out all their snow and moved on overnight, leaving the morning stars burning clear and bright in an indigo sky. Her brand-new Subaru, purchased with a combination of insurance proceeds and what she couldn’t help thinking of as blood money from the family of the man who destroyed her last vehicle, was a featureless mound of white. She brushed off the windows, the lights, and the door handles, then attacked the driveway behind the car. She figured two paths, each about ten feet long, would give her tires enough traction to make it the rest of the way down the long, narrow road. She was carrying two twenty-five-pound bags of kitty litter in the trunk and had her own snow shovel wedged in the backseat. Between them, she ought to be able to get out of any deep spots.

  By the time she finished, she had stripped off both her parka and her sweater and was working in a sweat-dampened turtleneck. She tossed her coat into the Subaru and went inside to put the wash in the dryer. She packed her clothes and her rucksack, wiped down the kitchen and straightened the stack of old New Yorker magazines, knocked the snow off her snowshoes and poles, and had the whole shebang loaded in her car by the time the dryer was finished. She folded the sheets, left them on the end of the bed, and walked out of the cabin for the last time.

  The rising sun made Mondrian patches of reddish-orange between the black lines of the trees. She got into the car and watched it ascending in her rearview mirror. She had spent an hour and a half in a continual round of motion. She had not stopped sorrowing for a single moment.

  She leaned her head against her hands, folded atop the steering wheel. “A little help, here, God,” she said.

  She turned the ignition, and David Gray poured out of her big, balanced speakers. Well if you want it, come and get it, for cryin’ out loud. The love that I was giving you was never in doubt . . .

  She wondered what it said about her spiritual fitness that her clearest messages from the Almighty seemed to come from the alternative rock station.

  At the rectory, she debated acknowledging she was back on the job by wearing clericals, versus pissing the new deacon off by meeting her in her civvies. She compromised by wearing a black blouse, dog collar, and subdued black cardigan over a pair of old undress-green fatigues.

  “Interesting look,” Lois said when Clare checked in for a report on the past week.

  “It’s a clerical mullet,” Clare said. “Business on the top, party on the bottom.” She took the handful of pink message slips the St. Alban’s secretary handed her. “Miss me?”

  “If I say yes, will I get a raise this year?”

  “You have to miss the vestry and the finance committee for that, I’m afraid. I could preach a special sermon for your birthday, though.”

  Lois tucked a shining strand of her strawberry blond bob behind one ear. “Please. At my age, my birthday’s already a religious holiday. Passover.”

  Clare grinned, while one part of her head marveled that she could smile at all. She shuffled through the messages. “The Ketchums want to know about baptism—” She looked up at Lois. “Why didn’t they bring the kid in on January sixth?”

  “They were still vacationing in the Caribbean on the Feast of the Epiphany.”

  “Well, they’ll have to wait until Easter with the rest of them.” She laid that one on Lois’s desk. “Mrs. Thomas wants a home visit, okay, Mr. Stevenson . . . Mrs. Darnley—what does it say about our parish when half the congregation is either shut-in, at the Infirmary, or in the hospital?”

  “It says it’s time for a membership drive at the Adirondack Community College?”

  “It’s scary that I’m one of the youngest attendees of my own church.” She flipped through a few more. “Abigail Campbell wants me to perform a funeral service for a lamb?”

  “She said it was the children’s 4-H project. Something got into their byre and tore the poor thing up, and the kids were devastated.”

  Clare waved the slip at Lois. “What was this lamb’s fate going to be, before it became coyote chow?”

  Lois steepled her fingers. “Easter dinner.”

  “Which they would have asked me to bless, I suppose.” She shook her head. “I’ll have to think about this one.” She glanced up at the office clock. “Look, if anyone calls this morning, I’m going to be unavailable a little longer. I’m expecting a visitor. Reverend Elizabeth de Groot. She’s been assigned to us by the bishop. As our new, prepaid, full-time deacon.”

  The secretary’s perfectly shaped brows rose, and Clare found herself thinking, No Botox for her! You go, Lois.

  “When is she starting?”

  “Uh . . . now, I guess.”

  “Now? Today? Nice of the diocese to notify us.”

  Clare wanted Lois to form her own opinion of the new deacon, so she skipped over the reason they were receiving the bishop’s largesse. “It was a surprise to me, too.”

&nb
sp; Lois sat ramrod stiff in her typing chair. “Well, it’s not going to be my fault she’s not in the new directory. It went to press last Friday.”

  “Don’t worry about it. And think of it this way—she’ll be another willing worker. Many hands make light labor, and all that.”

  A calculating look crept over Lois’s face. “You mean she wouldn’t just be doing pastoral work?”

  “Of course, her focus will be on assisting me with the counseling and the services. But I don’t see why she couldn’t help out in other ways.” After all, a very busy deacon was less likely to have extra time to poke her nose into Clare’s business.

  Lois smiled. It was not a beatific sight. “Oh, yes. I can think of lots of jobs I could use some help on.”

  “There you go. Now, before I get sidetracked, I’m going to need—”

  “Excuse me.”

  Clare and Lois both turned around. The woman standing in the office doorway didn’t look anything like the mental image Clare had built up of the Reverend Elizabeth de Groot, which ran heavily to Dame Judi Dench. This woman was younger, for one thing, maybe a decade or so older than Clare herself. She was petite—bird-boned, as Clare’s grandmother Fergusson would have said. Noticeably skinnier than Lois, who at a size six was usually the thinnest woman in the room. But Lois was close to Clare’s height. This woman could have walked underneath both their chins without mussing her beautifully blown-out ash blond mane. She was wearing a little black suit with her collar that looked like Chanel, if Chanel made clerical garb.

  Clare could feel the ghost of her own seventeen-year-old self stretching to reclaim her skin. Her wrists, poking out from beneath her sweater, seemed huge and bony. Her hair was already coming out of the knot at the back of her head. She was sure that if she looked, she would see the same grease around her fingernails that had been her permanent badge when she worked on airplane engines with her dad.

  “I’m Elizabeth de Groot.” The woman smiled pleasantly. No wonder. It was undoubtedly a wonderful thing to be Elizabeth de Groot. Her smile grew more fixed, and Clare realized she hadn’t responded.

  “Hi! I’m Clare Fergusson.” She stuck out her hand—a quick peek proved that no, there wasn’t any more grease on it now than there had been fifteen minutes ago—and shook. “This is our church secretary, Lois Fleming.”

  “I hope this doesn’t come as a total surprise to you, Ms. Fergusson. Please tell me the diocese let you know I was going to be assigned to St. Alban’s.”

  “Oh, no, no,” Clare said. “I mean—yes, they did let me know. In person. I just haven’t had my coffee yet.” She made a noise that was meant to convey self-deprecating amusement but wound up sounding like she was clearing her throat. “Why don’t we go into my office? We can chat there. Lois, will you hold my calls?”

  She ushered Deacon de Groot down the hallway and into her office. The room had the usual accoutrements one would expect of a rector: a bookshelf filling one wall, a large and graceful quarter-sawn oak desk, two chairs flanking a fireplace, and a sofa not far away, complete with boxes of tissues close at hand for people in counseling.

  However, there were some unique touches as well. The two chairs were salvage from a WWII-era destroyer’s admiral’s quarters. The wall behind the desk was hung with framed aviation sectional maps. Interspersed among books on theology and pastoral care were mementos such as a photo of a much younger Clare and her crew in Kuwait, an Apache helicopter clock whose rotors ticked away the minutes, and a flight helmet.

  “My goodness,” the new deacon said. “This is positively bristling with martial energy. I take it you were a pilot? In the army?”

  Clare unscrewed the Thermos of coffee she always brought to work. “Yes.” She breathed in the steam as she poured herself a mug. She waggled her clean Virginia Episcopal Seminary mug toward the other woman. “Would you care for some? It’s dark-roasted Sumatran. I grind it myself.”

  De Groot smiled apologetically. “I’m not a coffee drinker. Do you have any tea?”

  Clare gritted her teeth. God save her from tea drinkers. Always with the water not hot enough and the soggy little bags dripping. “Let me get Lois on that for you,” she said. She picked up the phone and buzzed the secretary. “Lois, will you make a pot of tea for Deacon de Groot?” She hung up quickly enough to avoid Lois’s answer.

  “So, what were we talking about? The room. Yeah, when I first got here, I just wanted lots of my favorite things around me. But I’ve come to realize the novelty value helps to break the ice when people meet with me.” Clare gestured toward the chairs. “Like now.”

  De Groot took a seat, her pleasant little smile unchanging as she eyed Clare’s DEATH FROM THE SKY! mug. “I realize this must have come as a shock, Ms. Fergusson. Going off for a week’s retreat and getting home to a new deacon.”

  “Please, call me Clare. And are you Beth? Liz?”

  “Elizabeth.”

  “Elizabeth.” Of course. “I can’t lie, it was a surprise. I didn’t hear from Willard Aberforth until yesterday afternoon.” She propped an enthusiastic look on her face. “But I’m looking forward to working with you,” she lied.

  “Oh, thank goodness. I feel just the same way. I’ve heard so many wonderful things about all the energy and innovation you’re bringing to this parish.”

  I just bet you have. “Since you know more about St. Alban’s than I do about you, maybe you can tell me how you see your role here. You’ll be helping me out with services and . . . ?”

  De Groot beamed. “Oh, there’s so much more that a deacon can do besides assist during services! This is a good example of how I believe I can be most of service to you. I want you to think of me as a repository of knowledge. Church culture, church tradition, church law—I’m here to give you the information you need to do the best possible job you can.”

  Clare set her mug down so the winged rattlesnake would be visible to her new deacon. “I do have a master’s in divinity,” she pointed out.

  “And I have a doctorate. But really, what is book learning compared to experience? I’m sure you feel you’ve learned more in the past two years than you did during your whole time in seminary!”

  In the past two years, Clare had been shot at, crashed a helicopter, nearly drowned, and had her car blown up. Oh, yes—and had fallen in love with a man as inaccessible as the moon. “Yeah,” she said. “I’d have to agree with that.”

  “That’s what I can supply. The experience. There’s at least one advantage to getting to my age!” Elizabeth’s laugh was both self-deprecating and musical.

  Every possible response Clare could come up with sounded snotty, so she held her tongue. “What else do you see yourself doing here at St. Alban’s? Besides being a font of wisdom?”

  “Oh, you’re funny!”

  A kick to the half-open door swung it wide. Lois stood there, balancing a tray loaded with a china teapot, matching cups and saucers, and a silver sugar bowl and creamer. “Tea is served,” she announced.

  “Thank you, Magenta,” Clare said under her breath. She smiled. “Great. Let’s put it here on the table—”

  Lois was already lowering the tray. She faced Clare directly and whispered, “Don’t get used to this.”

  Elizabeth was exclaiming over the china.

  I owe you one, Clare mouthed. With their guest fussing with the tea and the cream, Lois walked backward out of the room. Clare didn’t think she had ever seen anyone bow sarcastically before.

  “Okay. Getting back to the subject at hand—”

  “Of course. What else can I do to be of assistance? Let’s see. I have a master’s in counseling. I used to be a teacher, so I have a special interest in all aspects of Christian education. At St. Stephen’s, I worked extensively in parish development and volunteer coordination. And at Bethesda Church in Saratoga, I led the capital campaign to restore their historic bell tower.” She smiled brightly at Clare.

  “Wow.” Clare couldn’t think of what to say to that litany of acc
omplishment. “I mean that. Wow. Why aren’t you a priest?”

  For the first time, Elizabeth de Groot looked less than serene. “I’ve actually been up before the Discernment Committee several times.” She fingered her collar. “They seem to feel I just haven’t had . . . an authentic call.”

  Clare felt her cheeks pink up. She had been silently carping at the woman, and now Elizabeth’s honesty shamed her. “It seems to me you have been called. To do what you’re doing now.”

  The deacon set down her china teacup. “Well, I’m certainly not going to sit around moping about what can’t be.” Her voice was brisk. “And I believe it gives me a sensitivity toward—a reverence for the role of priest that will help me help you.”

  Several alarm bells went off in Clare’s head. “Uh, just so you know, I’m not really comfortable with the whole reverence thing. Ordination didn’t suddenly make me a better and nicer person.”

  Elizabeth smiled indulgently. “You remind me of some of the first-time parents I used to meet when I was teaching. They often felt insecure about using their natural authority with their kids. Accepting where you are in the hierarchy takes time and experience.”

  “I was in the army for ten years. Believe me when I say I don’t have any problem with authority. I just don’t want to be stereotyped into something I’m not.”

  “You don’t feel you have any problems establishing your control over your parish?”

  Control. Good God. “Leadership isn’t a matter of control,” Clare said. “Leadership is infusing the people around you with trust and confidence and expectations, so that when you move in one direction, they follow.”

  “What about the bishop?”

  “What about him?”

  “Do you have any problems with his authority over you?”

  “I don’t see how that—” Clare was saved from making a rude remark by Lois’s appearance in her doorway.

  “There’s somebody here to see you.”

  “I’m in a meeting.” Clare’s voice was tight. “They’ll have to wait. Or call for an appointment.”