by Ann Yost
The congregation rose again, this time singing “Angels We Have Heard on High,” while a dozen little girls in white nightgowns with tinsel haloes on their heads, danced up the aisle and across the front of the sanctuary. Jessie’s heart jerked. All those innocent children. She prayed Eleanor would leave them alone. She had to be interested in the fate of one person and one person only. Her husband. Reverend Dennis Prendergast.
The congregation settled back into their seats, and a string of children dressed in satin and velvet, crowns crooked on their heads, processed up the aisle while Eleanor continued the gospel.
“In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem asking ‘where is the child who has been born King of the Jews? We have observed his star and have come to pay him homage.’”
****
Eleanor listened to the congregation warble five verses of “We Three Kings.” It had to happen any second now. She knew him well. He’d hear the organ, panic because he was late, scrabble around trying to figure out how to get out of the room, realize there was no way and finally, finally he’d think to call her.
He was actually stupider than she’d thought. He should have made the call already, but then the Viagra she’d stirred into the citrus parfait had probably addled him.
It didn’t take much.
She found she was holding her breath, and she made herself inhale and exhale slowly. She didn’t want to blow the whole thing by hyperventilating.
Why the hell didn’t he call?
She’d located a man who, for a hefty fee, had inserted a tiny bomb into the new phone. It shouldn’t kill anyone, but Dennis would lose his head. The congregation would rush to see what had happened and they’d catch him with a million dollars he couldn’t explain, his cheap mistress, and his pants down. Her eyelids fluttered with anticipation. Finally, Dennis would get a taste of the humiliation he’d so heedlessly heaped on her all these years.
The revenge would be complete when he discovered it was she, his loyal, loving wife who’d lured him into a life of crime, who’d scared him to death, and who’d set him up. The only flaw in the plan was that she couldn’t stick around and watch.
Someone in the front row cleared her throat. It was time for Eleanor to take up the story. As she took in a breath, she saw a movement out of the corner of her eye. A man was working his way up the outside aisle in the shadowed church. Luke Tanner. She felt his eyes on her, and she knew he was heading for Denny’s office. He was going to ruin everything.
Fury erupted in her, constricting her breathing. She reached under the lectern for her pistol, but before she could use it, the bomb exploded. In the candlelight people screamed and scrambled to find their children. Eleanor, of course, kept her head. Luke was on the other side of the chaos, twenty feet away and he was moving but Eleanor was an excellent marksman. She knew she could hit him. She aimed the pistol and fired.
****
Jessie had one eye trained on Eleanor Prendergast, the other was assigned to watch the back of the church. Luke would come, and he’d have Chief Smith with him. What if they’d figured this out? Neither Prendergast, Lois or J. Mortimer Epps was here. Had Eleanor killed them all? Would she stop at a cop and sidekick?
The sanctuary was dark, lit only with candles. Everything seemed normal. It was the same scene being replayed in thousands of churches across American tonight. Hopefully it was the only one that involved a diabolical corpse-snatching murderer. Jessie was staring so intently at the front door she wasn’t surprised to see it open. She wasn’t surprised to see Luke enter, his jaw set, his face grim. He moved toward the front of the church. She watched him over the heads of the standing congregation. When the hymn was finished and everyone sat down, he was clearly visible even in the candlelight. He was heading for Prendergast’s office. Would Eleanor notice him? She glanced at the pastor’s wife and saw her hand slide under the lectern.
A sudden explosion rocked the crowd. Women screamed, men shouted, kids started to cry. Jessie tore her eyes away from Luke and fixed them on Eleanor Prendergast. It all seemed to happen in slow motion after that. Eleanor palmed a small pistol, sighted it, and aimed. Jessie knew she couldn’t stop the bullet. Luke was only a few steps from the door that would take him to Prendergast’s office, but Jessie knew he’d never make it. Her best chance to save him, her only chance, was distraction. She filled her lungs and bellowed.
“Luke!”
He heard her and dove toward the solid oak baptismal font just an instant too late. The bullet hit, and while Jessie gaped in horror, his big body spun around. Some sixth sense had her looking back at Eleanor. The gun reported again, but the bullet thudded into the stable as Eleanor was knocked off her feet by seventy-five pounds of excited golden retriever.
Zach and his dad were on Eleanor in an instant. They pinned her down where she’d fallen. Jessie didn’t have time to worry about Eleanor. She didn’t have time to thank Bosco.
Jessie’s mother, father, sister and Kit materialized around her in a protective fortress.
“Let me go,” she yelled, desperately. “I’ve got to get to Luke.”
“Take it easy,” Kit said. He pulled out a handkerchief and dried the tears she hadn’t even realized were coursing down her face. The ambulance driver, who’d parked outside to attend the service, wheeled the stretcher through the front door. Jessie twisted away from Kit.
“I have to go,” she repeated.
Kit held her shoulders firmly but without hurting her. “Now isn’t the time,” he murmured.
As the crowd ebbed and flowed around Luke, she saw Kit’s point. Crystal knelt next to Luke, her blonde head on his chest, his fingers buried in her hair.
In the candlelight Crystal looked less like a goddess and more like a beloved wife.
Chapter Twenty
Dennis stared at the soot-stained skin on his hands. He didn’t understand what had happened. He only knew that Lois’s shrieking was making him deaf.
“Can’t you get her to shut up?” he asked plaintively.
His eyes burned, and he realized there was smoke in his office. A fire? No. An explosion. Right when he dialed “1” to call Ellie for help.
The door had been blown off its hinges and half a dozen people crashed into his office.
“Reverend,” a masculine voice called out, “your pants.”
What about his pants? They were fine wool, hand-tailored. Ellie’d given him the lightweight phone so it wouldn’t stretch his pocket.
A short, squat man approached him. Ezra Smith. Denny wondered why middle-aged men neglected their appearance. How did they expect to attract lookers like Lois? Her bleating cries were really beginning to annoy him now.
He put his hands over his ears and closed his eyes. When he opened them, Ezra was standing in front of him. “What happened?”
Denny put his hands down. Luckily, Lois’s caterwauling had drizzled into whimpers. Questions chased themselves through his head. Was she hurt? Was he hurt? Where was Ellie? She should be here, taking care of him.
“Explosion,” he said, finally. “It happened when I dialed my cell phone.” He looked around. “I guess it flew out of my hand.” His gaze settled on the briefcase by the sofa. He gave a start as he remembered. The money! He needed to grab it and get out of here.
Where was Ellie?
“What’s in the case?” Smith asked.
“Papers,” Dennis said. “Just some private papers.”
“We’ll have to take a look,” the chief said. “This is a crime scene now.”
Dennis panicked. “Okay, it’s not papers. It’s money. I can explain it though.”
Smith nodded. “First things first. Your fly is open.”
Dennis glanced down to the opening in his pants. The silk of his boxers rubbed against his erection.
“Oh my God,” Lois said, in a cold voice. Apparently her hysteria was over. She pointed at his swollen groin. “I don’t fucking believe that
.”
“What’s the money for?” Chief Smith switched the subject again.
Suddenly Denny was trembling. He couldn’t handle this by himself. He needed help. He answered Smith’s question with one of his own.
“Where,” he asked, “is my wife?”
****
The bones surrounding Eleanor’s eye socket throbbed. She’d fallen hard on her face, and then a large man, instead of helping her up, had planted his knee on her spine. She could barely breathe.
Something had gone wrong thanks to the damn dog. She was supposed to be in the car en route to a small airstrip twelve miles outside of town. Despite the change in plans, she had no intention of panicking.
“Please let me up,” she said. Her words went unheard in the chaos. The pain, she realized, was coming from more than her face. She’d fallen on something, too. She felt hard, metal ridges dig into her abdomen. She felt a flash of excitement.
The pistol!
They’d let her leave if they knew she had a gun. She was a crack shot, and she wouldn’t hesitate to give a demonstration of her skill.
She probably wouldn’t need to shoot. People tended to panic when faced with a weapon. Of course, most people were cowards.
Not her. She heard Ezra Smith’s voice.
“Anybody find a gun?”
She felt a surge of satisfaction. No one knew where it was. She’d have the element of surprise working for her. She smelled a familiar cologne, and Dennis put his fingers on her cheek.
“Ellie?”
Rage exploded inside her. She could feel the heat rush to her face. What the hell was he doing here? The faithless bastard was supposed to be up in his office with his erection jutting out of his pants and his bimbo at his side.
He leaned down far enough so she could see him. The usually florid face was pale. He didn’t look embarrassed though. He looked concerned.
Her heart flopped in her chest. It was all over. Her grand scheme of revenge had failed. The idiot didn’t even know he was supposed to be humiliated. Eleanor closed her eyes and gritted her teeth against the despair.
“Ellie? Ellie, speak to me, honey.”
Inspiration arrived like a gift from heaven. She could salvage this. She could still make her worthless tool of a husband suffer. A cold resolve formed in her chest.
“Denny,” she said, in a pitiful voice, “I can’t breathe.”
“I’ll take care of it, sweetheart.” His voice took on the authority of the pulpit as he spoke to her captor. “Let her go. I’ll take responsibility for her.”
“She’s under arrest,” Ezra Smith pointed out. “She shot Luke Tanner, and we have reason to believe she killed Letty Appleby.”
“Denny,” she whimpered.
“You’re wrong,” Dennis said to Smith. “Tell him, Ellie.”
“I would if I could breathe.”
Smith must have given the okay because the pressure on her back eased enough for Eleanor to position the pistol in her hand.
She canted up far enough to gaze into Dennis’s pale blue eyes, and she put the barrel of the gun in her mouth. He’d never expect her to shoot. He thought he knew her inside out.
The explosion threw her out of his arms. Dennis stared at the dead woman he’d been married to for twenty years. The woman he hadn’t known at all.
“Ellie,” he whispered. Then he threw up.
****
“You okay, Jess?”
Kit’s voice insinuated itself into her misery. They were sitting in a pew bench, among the stragglers still in the sanctuary. She was far from okay.
Gillian appeared and took a seat on her other side.
“Luke is going to be fine,” she said, in a soothing voice. “The ambulance attendant said it looked like the bullet nicked an artery, but they’ll stabilize him in the ambulance and whisk him into surgery.
“I shouldn’t have yelled.”
“That shout saved him, as I understand it,” Howard Maynard said. He appeared next to the pew, his arm around Jessie’s mother. “He was literally able to dodge the bullet.”
“I don’t suppose anybody knows why Eleanor Prendergast would shoot Luke Tanner,” Gillian said.
It was such a long story. Jessie didn’t feel up to telling it. She didn’t feel up to anything. Her thoughts were with Luke. She prayed he’d survive. She tried not to think about how much it hurt to see Crystal bending over him, to glimpse his fingers in her hair.
She forced herself to answer her sister. “She must have figured out he was heading for the office to rescue Prendergast and Lois.”
“Rescue them from what?” Monica asked, puzzled.
“Let’s continue this conversation at home,” Howard said. “Jess needs to get out of here. And I need a Scotch.”
Someone—Kit probably—stripped off Jessie’s bathrobe and covered her with a coat.
“I don’t want to go home,” Jessie said. “I want to go to the hospital.”
Fifteen minutes later the E.R. receptionist told her Luke was in surgery. The woman suggested that Jessie wait with Luke’s wife who was here “all alone.”
Jessie glanced around to see Crystal seated in a comfortable waiting room chair. There were five cups of coffee on the table next to her and a gaggle of young, male doctors hovering around. Jessie resisted the urge to point out that Crystal was hardly alone and that she was Luke’s ex-wife. None of that was important right now.
The admiring physicians departed, reluctantly, when Jessie took a seat opposite Crystal. There was a look of determination in those amethyst eyes. Jessie had to hear everything.
“How was he in the ambulance?”
“Unconscious,” Crystal said. “He’s in surgery to repair a ripped artery in his thigh. Listen, Jessie. You can’t marry Luke. He belongs to me. He always has. This whole thing, you and Luke, it’s all about Blanche. She always wanted him to meet someone who wasn’t me. She had a thing about you and Luke, and she tried to manipulate you into a couple by asking him to come here and look after you. She probably didn’t know he’d be risking his life.”
Jessie’s eyes widened in shock. Was it true? Was this about Aunt Blanche. She focused on the last accusation. Crystal was right. In the past few days, Luke had been locked in a coffin, threatened with a gun, and finally, shot.
“He’s a lot safer with me,” Crystal added.
Jessie’s eyes narrowed on the other woman. “Safer, how? You broke his heart.”
The lovely eyes hardened for an instant, and then they shone with unshed tears. “I told you. I didn’t intend to divorce him,” Crystal said, in a soft voice. “I did it for us. I knew he loved me. I was just trying to get his attention.”
“If he loved you so much, why did he walk away?”
Something flashed in the amethyst eyes. Uncertainty? “That’s what I came back to find out. This time I’m in all the way. The picket fence, the golden retriever.” She held Jessie’s gaze. “The baby.”
It was ridiculous to feel as though someone had cut out her heart. She stared at the other woman, unable to come up with a single word.
“I know he’s made a commitment to you,” Crystal continued, “but you’re a smart woman. And a romantic. I know you wouldn’t want to marry a man in love with someone else.”
Jessie knew Luke would never back out on his commitment. So it was up to her. She could marry him, or she could set him free so he could marry the woman he’d always loved. At the moment neither option was appealing.
Their conversation was interrupted by the reappearance of a handsome young doctor. He nodded to Jessie but his attention was all for Crystal.
“Mrs. Tanner? We’ve set up a cot in your husband’s room so you can stay with him tonight.” The doctor glanced at Jessie. “No visitors tonight. Just family.”
It was after midnight by the time Jessie left the hospital with Kit. He pulled up to the curb in front of the witch hat house. The windows were dark except for a small light in the foyer. Jessie’s head lolled aga
inst the back of the front seat in the Fusco’s truck.
“God,” Kit said. “What a night.”
Jessie gazed through the windshield at St. Michael’s, still and dark as an abandoned tomb. Within the next few days, Miss Letty and Eleanor Prendergast would be buried in the churchyard. A new pastor would open the doors and let in fresh air. A new mortician would establish a respectable business. There was no more terror in Mystic Hollow. The community was starting to heal.
“You accomplished a lot,” Kit said, clearly thinking along the same lines. “You’ve been here less than a week, and you shut down a corpse-looting ring and exposed a cold-blooded killer.”
Suddenly she was unutterably weary. “All I did was get people stirred up.”
“Sometimes that’s all that’s needed.”
Her eyes swept the Green. The white lights on the gazebo twinkled in the opaque dark. She’d almost forgotten it was Christmas.
“Jessie,” Kit said, shifting in the driver’s seat to face her, “I know you think you’re in love with Luke Tanner.” His look was full of sympathy. He knew about the cot in Luke’s hospital room. He squeezed her hand but she hardly felt it. “Come home with me. Let me show you I won’t let you down again.”
She looked into his light blue eyes. “Why?”
“I think we can make a good life together. We’ve always been friends and deep down I think you know we have similar goals. I care about you, Jess. And I think you care about me.”
Jessie thought about the home she could have with Kit. They would have kids, dogs, a lovely home, lots of friends, and her parents nearby. They’d have all the things she thought she wanted until she found out there was more.
“There’s no spark.”
“It’ll come.”
It had come. She’d felt the spark. Just not with Kit. She decided to follow a hunch. “Kit, have you ever considered dating Gillian?”
The look on his face was one of shock. “I’m in the middle of a proposal, and you’re trying to fix me up with your sister?”
“Just think about it.”
“That’s your final answer? Because I won’t ask again.”
“I know.”