by Alt, Madelyn
“It has a couple of very dedicated keepers,” I said. At the lift of his brows, I told him, “The pastor’s mother-in-law, Letty Clark, and his wife . . . whose name I don’t recall.”
Tom consulted his spiral pocket notebook. “Emily Angelis. Very nice woman. A little on the quiet side . . .”
“I met her. ‘Fey,’ my grandmother would have said.”
“Tetched,” he agreed. “But nice.”
He began to make his way around the garden, pausing to bend over to eye the winding paths of pea gravel and mulch. Nothing looked out of order.
“Quite a lot of plants,” Tom said. “But no broken ones that I can see. I guess I was hoping I’d find something here. Signs of a struggle or something.”
I nodded. “What about inside the church itself?”
“I don’t know. I can’t rule it out right now. It seems a long shot, with the threat of discovery high, especially considering that the pastor and his family live right there on church property . . . but then, everything about this particular murder says unplanned to me. I mean, who plots to kill someone when any number of people who had attended the fundraiser could still be lingering around? I do know I didn’t see anything on our walk through, but it seems to be a little too twisted to kill someone in a fit of anger in a church. I mean, we’d have to be dealing with a psychopath or sociopath. Someone without any regard for the sensibilities of others.”
Touché. But we couldn’t rule that out, either.
We? What was I talking about? Tom couldn’t afford to rule that out. I was not a part of the equation.
And if I wasn’t mistaken, that wasn’t the only equation I didn’t seem to be a part of. And that’s what was causing us so much trouble to begin with.
But that was another worry entirely.
“Let’s go back this way through the church,” he said, waving toward the rear exit, “do another walkthrough, and then we’ll go.”
“ ’Kay.”
We made our way toward the very end of the west wing. The heavy, utilitarian metal door with its narrow peep window of wire-threaded glass stood open wide, showing a long hall with doors leading off to each side. Tucked up against the building just next to the entrance was a small, prefab shed, securely chained and padlocked against intruders. Inside the church, the lights in the hall itself were off, but the fading daylight cast geometric shapes of illumination here and there from the open doors. From somewhere nearby came the sound of running water.
Tom stepped over the threshold and glanced into the first room on the left, pausing in the doorway. “Hello there, ma’am. Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to startle you. Do you remember me from last night? Special Investigator Fielding.”
I heard Letty Clark’s voice respond. “Yes, of course. No, you didn’t frighten me overmuch. I just wasn’t expecting anyone to be standing there, that’s all.”
As I came up beside Tom, I saw Letty standing at a utility sink in what appeared to be a multifunction service room, a hose sprayer in her yellow-gloved hand, a stiff scrub brush in her other. She’d been scrubbing mulch and dirt clumps from her pronged weeding tools. I used to think my mom had long ago cornered the market on her version of OCD—Obsessive Cleaning Disorder. After all, once I’d even caught her ironing my dad’s socks. So this new evidence clinched it for me: A little bit of craziness must run in all Stony Mill families.
“Don’t mind me,” she said. “Just doing a bit of tool maintenance. My daddy always said a tool not cared for is a tool that’s wasted. But I just can’t stand getting all that muck and mud on my hands, either. Never could. Thank goodness they make these things.” She stripped off the rubber glove with a snap and laid it over the faucet to drip dry while she rinsed out the sink and sprayed it with an industrial-strength bleach cleaner. She glanced up at us with a quirky smile on her face. “Some gardener, afraid of a little dirt. Silly, I know.” Her gaze flicked sideward as she caught sight of me hovering in the hall. “Oh, hello there. Back again?”
No smile of welcome. I couldn’t help wondering if she was remembering Chief Boggs’s question about my ties to Enchantments . . . and if she had read the article in the Gazette. Sigh.
I held up my hand in a friendly wave. “Hello, Mrs. Clark. It’s nice to see you. We were just in your lovely garden.”
Her face relaxed a smidge. It was obvious the garden was her pride and joy. “It’s a nice place for a little courting, that’s for sure.”
I stammered something inane and glanced away, embarrassed by her assumption. There hadn’t been much to assume about when it came to Tom and me.
“Mrs. Clark, I’d like to ask you a couple of questions, if you don’t mind,” Tom said.
“Sure, shoot.”
“Did you spend the morning in the garden today?”
“Yes, I spend every morning in the garden. Best time of day to work. It’s quite large, if you haven’t noticed. It requires constant supervision, constant care. My daughter and I are very attentive to its needs.”
“So, you worked on the entire garden or only a section of it?”
“Oh, let’s see here. My daughter was feeling a bit under the weather—not sleeping well, you understand—so I worked on my own this morning. I did a bit of weeding around the roses and raked all of the paths. Threw down a bit of new mulch where erosion has taken a toll. Did my usual watering and deadheading. That sort of thing. I guess with all of that I covered most, if not all, of the garden.”
“And did you notice anything out of the ordinary about anything? Anything out of place, or broken, or missing?”
She frowned and pursed her lips, thinking. “No, sir. Nothing at all.”
“You’re sure?”
She chuckled. “I know my garden, every inch of it. Nothing was out of place.” She squinted at him. “Why do you ask? Something to do with the murder of that poor girl?”
“Yes, ma’am, maybe so. I’m just muddling things out and trying to put them together. It’s kind of like working a puzzle. You try a piece here, a piece there, and pretty soon, if you get your foundation right, it all just kind of falls into place.”
She nodded her approval. “Good analogy, that. Makes sense to me. Only, what happens if there are pieces to your foundation missing?”
“You put it together as best you can and hope it doesn’t all come tumbling down on you later.”
“Funny you should say that. We once had a wall come down when we built this church. It was a horrible mess.” She wrinkled her nose and shook her head to demonstrate just how much she didn’t approve. “My daddy worked day and night on fixing up that mess with the help of a whole lot of good, decent people, praise the Lord. It’s a shame the behavior of a few bad apples has to put a blight on this church’s good name.”
“It must be upsetting,” Tom commented noncommittally.
“A real shame. Though I heard through the grapevine that you have a suspect nearly in custody. Some young man that the girl had been seeing? Did you know, my son-in-law went out to visit the girl’s mother this morning, to pass along our condolences. The poor woman is beside herself with grief . . . but worse still must be the worry that somehow her daughter had brought it on herself.” She leaned toward Tom and lowered her voice to a loud whisper that was somehow meant to excuse the gossip. “You know how some young women are. Flitting about from man to man without a care for who they hurt along the way. Getting into all sorts of trouble with drugs and I don’t know what.” She straightened again, staring confidently down her nose with an air of pious judgment common in these parts for anyone who steps over the line of propriety. “You know the type. So, while I say it’s a shame, I can’t say it should come as a surprise to anyone who knew her.” And then, as if she realized how insensitive that made her sound, she shook her head sadly. “Regrettable. A real, real tragedy. I pray she finds rest and forgiveness at the feet of Jesus.”
Amen.
“One more thing,” Tom said. “I saw a shed just outside. I’ll bet that’
s where you keep your lawn and garden supplies.”
“Yes, lawnmowers, gasoline, sprayers, leaf blowers. The usual.”
Tom nodded. “I thought as much. Is that shed always padlocked?”
She raised a brow. “Of course. I am nothing if not precise, Officer. Everything has a place, and everything in its place. It’s the way I was raised.”
“I’d like to take a look at it, all the same, if you don’t mind?”
Letty led the way outside to the shed, unlocking the padlock with a key she pulled from her pocket and swinging the door open. Inside the ten-by-twelve shed, items were shelved and stored with an almost militaristic precision. At first glance, most things appeared brand new. Closer inspection showed a few scrapes, a few scratches, but everything was incredibly clean and oiled to perfection. Even the riding lawnmower, the push mowers, and the garden cart. Letty was right—she was nothing if not precise.
Tom and I waited while she locked up again.
“Thank you, ma’am, for answering my questions,” Tom said as Letty paused with us once again beside the open door leading inside the church. “I’ll be heading on up now to let your son-in-law know we’ll be on our way. You have yourself a nice evening.”
“And you. Both of you.” She flicked her gaze to me with none of the warmth of yesterday afternoon in the garden. Somehow I suspected that her initial opinion of me had been adversely affected by the good chief of police.
We left her to return to her cleanup efforts while we walked along the silent hallway, each of us attempting to soften footfalls that seemed overly loud. There was something about the hush of a church that begged respect from anyone over the age of sixteen, even when it came to one’s footsteps. My flats didn’t make much of a dent in the silence, but Tom’s heavy lug-soled boots could make enough noise to raise the dead. Crossing the sanctuary wasn’t much better. The acoustics in the vaulted space were fantastic.
We found Pastor Bob in his office, just as he’d said he’d be. Tom knocked on the door.
“Come in.”
Tom pushed the white paneled door inward. “We’re nearly done, sir.”
The pastor’s office wasn’t quite what I’d expected. For some reason I saw Pastor Bob as a man who would be into comfort and ease. His office was a large enough space but so sparsely furnished as to be almost utilitarian in nature. His too-small desk was scarred with nicks and scratches along the skirting, its varnished oak faded into an orangey yellow. The desk chair was a simple, bow-backed wooden chair with a thin pad that would have left my behind numb after ten minutes. A pair of old-fashioned paintings of biblical scenes adorned the walls, bordered by sconces on either side of the antiqued gold frames. Opposite the pastor’s desk stood the only extra seating—a deacon’s bench, also wooden, also thinly padded. That left a short bookcase—no leather-bound heirlooms here—adorned with a number of framed old black-and-white photos and a number of giveaway Bibles, both child and adult versions.
Not quite the utmost in comfort. Working in this office day after day would seem almost like self-enforced penance. I found it bleak and somehow utterly depressing.
Pastor Bob waved us in. “Good, good. Did you find what you were looking for, Deputy?”
“No, unfortunately,” Tom replied. “No tracks in the grass, no evidence of blood, no trails marking where a body”—Pastor Bob winced at this—“might have been dragged over the ground.”
“That is unfortunate. That poor girl. When I think that this . . . this heinous crime was committed on church property . . . well, I just don’t know what to think. It’s just terrible. Awful.” He shook his head back and forth as he leaned into the hard wooden back of his chair and formed his hands into a steeple over his heart. “I only wish I had known her better, that I might have foreseen something, some person or circumstance in her life that might indicate this kind of end for her. That I might have been able to counsel her away from . . . whatever element it was that precipitated this. That young man who everyone is saying is guilty, for instance. I will pray for him, too. Young people these days lead such tangled lives, and they don’t seem to know how to disentangle themselves when things go wrong. It’s a confusing world we live in, full of vice and temptation.”
“I would agree with that, sir,” Tom said politely.
Counsel . . .
There was something about that word that was bothering me. But what?
Tom sat down on the deacon’s bench and shifted his bulky gun belt across his middle for maximum comfort. “Mrs. Clark mentioned that you went to visit Harriet Maddox this morning.”
“I did.”
“A courtesy call?”
“Condolence call is what I like to call it. Just paying my respects to the victim’s family, as is only right.”
“Mrs. Clark also mentioned that Mrs. Maddox mentioned Veronica’s drug use and . . . promiscuity.”
Pastor Bob grimaced. “Well, I’m not sure whether they call the propensity for sexual freedom promiscuity in a thirty-year-old woman these days . . . but that about sums it up, from what her mother told me.”
“And the drugs?”
“Apparently so. Mrs. Maddox believes she’s been clean since she’s been attending services at Grace—that made me proud, quite the feather in our cap, I dare say, if it’s true . . . or it would be, if she’d not lost her life so precipitously. It’s a sad state of affairs that such things affect the lives of our young people more and more these days.”
“Did she tell you anything about Veronica’s most recent love affairs?”
Pastor Bob hesitated, clearing his throat. “Well, honestly, Deputy—wouldn’t it be better to ask Mrs. Maddox herself these questions? If you don’t mind my saying.”
Tom’s lips curved in a hard nonsmile. “I don’t mind. But I’ve already spoken with Mrs. Maddox. I’m just reaf- firming what she told me. Now, as you were saying?”
Having the grace to look abashed didn’t get him off the hook. “Her mother said she didn’t know who Veronica’s recent men were. She knew that Veronica had someone lately—or possibly more than one someone—but she was at a loss as to his identity. Apparently Veronica wasn’t always forthcoming about her love life. The last one Mrs. Maddox knew of was Tyler Bennett. According to Mrs. Maddox, Veronica’s breakup with the young man sent her into a spiral of drug use that was almost the end of her. That was when she found God.”
Yet another vote for Ty Bennett. It was looking more and more like Ty might have been the end of Ronnie Maddox after all.
I frowned, not sure why that revelation was making a knot form in the pit of my stomach. Why was my sense of guilt so strong when it came to fingering Ty? Why did it matter? Everything was pointing in his direction. Just because he didn’t seem like the psychopathic type didn’t mean he wasn’t responsible for her death. Maybe it was an accident and he freaked out and hid her body. I mean, just because a person kills someone doesn’t make him a monster necessarily . . . um, right?
Anyone?
Bueller?
Hm.
While Tom and Pastor Bob hashed out the rest of the details of his visit with Veronica Maddox’s mother, I drifted over to the window and the bookshelves beside it. Outside, the shadows from the trees were getting longer. One of them drew a finger of shadow across the plain white sign that was the church’s signatory presence: GRACE BAPTIST CHURCH, EST. 1872, PASTOR ROBERT ANGELIS PRESIDING. Eighteen seventy-two, wow. That would make it . . . I calculated the math in my head . . . one hundred and thirty-seven years old. With the county having been formalized no earlier than 1855, that would make this one of the oldest standing buildings in the area. I commented on that to Pastor Bob.
“Actually, no,” he said. “Take a look at the photos next to you.”
I did. Many of the framed pictures were black-and-white, some of them actual tintypes dating back to the latter quarter of the nineteenth century. I noticed something in them, though. “That’s not the church we’re in today!” I exclaimed.
Pastor Bob chuckled. “Good eye. This is actually the second Grace Baptist Church on this property. The first Grace Baptist burned to the ground in 1959, and it was rebuilt where we are standing today.”
The buildings were similar but not the same. This church, for instance, was much larger. Only the general shape was the same, that ubiquitous sprawling, white stee pled church.
“Come to think of it, your mother-in-law mentioned that her father worked on the church. Apparently a wall must have fallen down while they were in the process of rebuilding.”
“He did indeed. As pastor at the time of the fire, that was only fitting.”
“Pastor?” I frowned. “But how—”
“Old Zeke Christiansen, that was my mother-in-law’s father. He was pastor here for almost forty-five years. Yes, sir. I took over from him the year he retired—I guess that would be fifteen years ago now. He died that next year, you know. Just plum wore out.”
I picked up a picture frame. “This must be him.” I could see a resemblance to Letty, especially through the eyes and the bridge of the nose. Letty’s iron gray pin curls, though, did not come from him. Probably her mother.
Pastor Bob had come up behind me, and he took the frame from my hand to look at it himself. “Yes, that’s him. Poor man, lost his son in that fire, and that after having lost his wife when Letty was born. Just a whole lot of tragedy for that family for quite a while, but somehow he managed to see through it all to be a shining example for folks here. Letty took care of him after, you know. She was always good about that. A real nurturer, she is. She’s had a hard lot in life, too, what with growing up without a mother, losing her brother so young, and then her losing her husband later on, too. Just like her father. Some people can’t seem to catch any breaks. But all that is water under the bridge now. She has a nice home with me and Emily here, and she will ’til the day she dies.”
Ah, but had her life changed as much as Pastor Bob suggested? It seemed to me, in the limited bits I’d witnessed of their lives, that Letty was still taking care of people. She must be one of those kind, unassuming souls who isn’t happy unless she’s nurturing the bejesus out of someone. I’d known a lot of them in my day. They crept out of the woodwork at family reunions and church functions, force-feeding you their latest culinary creation until it was coming out your ears, asking if you were warm enough, pinching your cheeks until they were bruised, or noticing your developing bosoms until you were tempted to resort to leis of garlic flowers and a chestload of crucifixes to keep them away.