A Sounding Brass

by Shelley Bates

  The crowd was utterly silent.

  “God gives us all our talents, my friends. And what have we been doing with them? Have we been burying them in the backyard of our own little group? Or have we been lending them out to others?”

  “Backyard,” Claire heard someone say. Six months ago, no one would have agreed with such a thing unless Phinehas himself had decreed a change in doctrine. Just a few months ago, the Elect had been sure of themselves and sure of what they believed. Things were different now. They were all shaken and a little uncertain about what exactly was right.

  “Nonsense,” snapped Elizabeth McNeill, Julia’s mother, and then blushed scarlet at having actually spoken aloud in a Gathering, where it was forbidden for women to raise their voices except in song.

  Luke Fisher smiled, and Claire lost her ability to breathe.

  If only someone would smile at me like that.

  * * *

  AFTER GATHERING WAS OVER, Claire hung at the fringes of the little group that had gathered around Luke and Owen. It was hard not to watch the newcomer, what with that smile and that charismatic presence.

  “Don’t go making eyes at that worldly preacher.” Alma Woods shook Claire’s hand in her abrupt way. “Enough of you young women have lost your salvation by chasing ungodly men.”

  Claire choked down a defensive retort. Not by any stretch of the imagination could Ross Malcolm or Matthew Nicholas be called ungodly. And she’d never chased anyone in her life. “I’m not making eyes at him,” she said with dignity. “I’m waiting to speak with Owen.”

  Alma ran a critical eye down her dress and coat. “Been ordering from catalogs again, have we?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact. There are some pretty things in—”

  “Vanity, all is vanity.” Alma looked her in the eye. “You should be a better example to your mother. I saw her in Pitchford, you know, traipsing around in a pair of pants, worldly as you please when she thought no one was looking.”

  Shame flogged hot color into Claire’s cheeks. “My mother’s choices are her own,” she said. “Excuse me, Alma. I need to speak to Owen.”

  Please let him help, she begged the Lord. I have to get out of this town.

  Owen broke away from the little group at last and she stopped him with a hand on his arm as he glanced around for his kids. “Owen, could I speak to you a minute?”

  His smile was open and warm, and she took heart. “Sure. What’s up?”

  “I—I wondered if you’d heard anything from any of the Shepherds about whether I could move or not.”

  His smile faded. “Claire, we’ve been over this. Your place is in Hamilton Falls. Besides, you did move. To Rebecca’s.”

  That didn’t count as a move. More like an aborted flight that crash-landed. She’d received notice that she’d gotten the position she’d interviewed for at one of the bank’s branches in Seattle. She’d given her notice, packed her things, and was practically on the highway when Phinehas had stepped in to ask her what she thought she was doing.

  “There are plenty of young people in Seattle, Claire,” he’d said with that gentle smile of a man who controlled people’s lives with absolute authority. “And not so many here in Hamilton Falls. I need you to be an example to the younger girls.”

  The younger girls hardly looked at her—why should they? Nobody needed her, really, with the exception of her manager at the bank, who’d been delighted she was staying and had offered her the new accounts position. She hadn’t wanted it. She’d have been a mail clerk in the Seattle branch if that’s what it took to get out of Hamilton Falls.

  But no. Even that had been denied her. So, when Dinah had declined it, she’d rented Rebecca’s suite and put the best face on the situation that she could.

  “You know what Phinehas said,” Owen reminded her now, with a little of Phinehas’s own gentleness.

  “But with him on trial tomorrow, maybe we should look at my situation again.”

  “Claire, the Elders have a lot to think and pray about right now. Please be considerate.”

  Her desire to move away and have a real life was inconsiderate? Tears burned the back of her throat as Owen stepped around her to shake someone else’s hand.

  She should be used to it by now—the bitter flavor of unwillingness.

  * * *

  INVESTIGATOR RAYMOND HARPER of Washington State’s Organized Crime Task Force ran his fingers through his hair and gripped his skull as he read through his notes early Monday morning. The district attorney’s assistant detoured around the desk temporarily on loan to him and dropped a pile of papers on the corner of it.

  “Your depositions came back from Transcription,” she told him. “George thought you might want a look.”

  Great. One more thing to do, one more thing keeping him in beautiful downtown Pitchford instead of back in Seattle doing what he’d signed up to do.

  Sexual abuse wasn’t his bailiwick—organized crime was. But two things had prodded him into taking the case: the fact that this religious group was statewide, which put it in the OCTF’s purview, and Tamara Traynell’s big brown eyes and the depths of pain he had seen in them as she’d told her story. He’d left Ross and Julia Malcolm’s dinner table that night if not a changed man, then certainly an angry one. He had at last understood why his partner and best friend had made busting bent religious groups his particular mission. Trust wasn’t Ray’s biggest fault, but it was in plenty of people—people who gave their faith and their money to a group and got nothing but abuse and a bunch of happy brainwashing in return.

  Which is why it puzzled him to see Ross and Julia and their daughter Kailey tripping off to church as if Ross’s daily disillusionment about human nature never happened. The guy must have superhuman powers of denial. Or a bigger capacity to love and forgive than Ray himself possessed.

  With a sigh, he closed his notebook and laid it on top of his file on Emile Johan Rausch, who thought he was going to get away with running cocaine over the line into Canada in the guise of horseback-riding trips, and the frustrating case of Brandon Boanerges, the invisible fraudster with the beautiful voice who had been driving him nuts for a year. He opened the deposition file for the rape case.

  This Philip Leslie guy—aka Phinehas, aka the senior minister of the group Julia, Dinah, and Tamara had belonged to—was a real prince. As his arresting officer, Ray had been delighted to be subpoenaed to testify against him. As far as he was concerned, the prosecution’s case was open and shut, but he still had to show up on the stand and say his bit about the arrest.

  He had no doubt young Tamara would hold herself together while Leslie gave her the hairy eyeball from the defendant’s chair. Her sister Dinah, who was also on the prosecution’s witness list, had lost her fear of the man, too. He glanced through the young woman’s deposition. Her answers had been clear, concise, and full of damning detail, just the way Ray liked them. In Prosecution 101, this girl would get an “A.”

  TRAYNELL: Phinehas is an itinerant minister, so he stays in the homes of the Elect. He would come to my room at night and have sex with me against my will, telling me that I was a vessel filled with love and my purpose was to give love to him so he could have the strength to go on preaching the gospel.

  HARPER: For how long did this go on?

  TRAYNELL: Ten years. It started when I was fourteen.

  Ray’s stomach turned over. Justice was supposed to be blind, but the people in her service didn’t have to be so impartial. It was a stroke of luck they’d pulled Judge Eleanor Keaton—a woman, the D.A. had told him, who was particularly hard on sex offenders.

  The D.A.’s assistant stopped by the desk a second time and tapped her watch. “It’s time, Investigator.”

  He was one of the first witnesses on the schedule, so he hustled down the corridor that connected the county offices with the courthouse. It sported all of two courtrooms, one for municipal cases and one for superior court, housed in a modest brick building facing a green space that forme
d an old-fashioned town square.

  By nine-thirty he was sworn in and on the stand, with Judge Keaton on his right and a sea of people dressed in black in front of him. Tamara had told him the Elect dressed in black to symbolize the charred remains of the burned offering of their human nature. Weird. He wondered how many still supported their former leader, and how many were here to see him condemned, if that turned out to be the verdict.

  The accused, Philip Leslie, his spine straight and his face calm, sat at the defense table next to John Ortega, the public defender. Phinehas was dressed in a beautifully cut black wool suit. Ray suspected that none of the flock knew he would be strip-searched each time he changed into and out of it. For a man as fastidious as he’d learned Phinehas was, each time he had to submit to the search would be a fine kind of torture.

  Ray smiled inwardly.

  The D.A. ran Ray through his testimony with concise competence. Name, rank, and serial number. How long he’d been with the OCTF. The circumstances of the arrest. The contents of his depositions and the lab reports that had proven both Dinah Traynell and her younger sister’s child, Tamsen, were both the daughters of Phinehas. The D.A. sat alone at the plaintiff’s table; he’d remain alone until Tamara and Dinah were brought out of the private room in which they sat until it was their turn to testify. Personally, Ray was just as happy he didn’t have to watch the teenaged Tammy’s face from the stand. He didn’t want to give the impression he was emotionally involved.

  Because everyone else in the courtroom certainly seemed to be. Nobody talked, but the intensity of their gazes and their focus on every word of testimony was eerie. It was like their survival depended on the verdict.

  For all he knew, maybe it did.

  The defense had a few questions on cross-examination about the chain of evidence, but Ray had made sure that everything having to do with the lab and the DNA results was airtight. Then it was time to put Tamara on the stand.

  Ray could have made his way into the gallery to watch, but he decided not to. He had all the gory details in the deposition if he wanted them, and watching her say the words was not going to help his peace of mind or the case.

  Tamara’s mother, Elsie, sat directly behind the railing dividing the audience from the active members of the court, and as he slipped out the door, Ray saw Tamara reach over it and clutch her mother’s hand for a moment before she took the stand to be sworn in.

  Good luck, princess.

  A fast walk took him back to the D.A.’s office and the desk where his paperwork sat. He folded himself into the chair and reached for the phone.

  “Harmon,” his sergeant barked when the call rang through.

  “It’s Harper.”

  “Are you finished dazzling that hack D.A. out there in the sticks?” Harmon and the D.A., George Daniels, had been partners back in the Dark Ages, before Daniels had dropped out of the force to go to law school.

  Ray grinned. “He sends his love, too.”

  “So, when can I expect to see you back here doing some real work?”

  “I finished giving my testimony just now. I can head back tomorrow.”

  “What’s wrong with this afternoon? You think my budget has endless nights of hotel rooms built into it for you?”

  It was a good thing Ray knew Harmon’s bark was worse than his bite. “I have a couple of things left to do. And I want to check out a lead on this Boanerges thing. One of the lonely hearts he ripped off gave me a tip he might be over this way.”

  “Sounds pretty vague.”

  “It is vague. The whole case is vague, and you know how I hate that. But if he’s crossing county lines, that puts him in my case load, so I’ll do what I can.”

  “I’ll expect you back tomorrow.”

  “Sooner or later.”

  Fortunately Harmon hadn’t pressed him on his “things-to-do” list. There was only one thing on it of a personal nature. Julia, his partner Ross’s wife, had asked him to take one of their framed wedding pictures to her former landlady, Rebecca Quinn. He’d met her at their tiny wedding, but he hadn’t seen her in the courtroom. Not surprising. The lady apparently ran her own business, and driving ninety miles to hear the trial proceedings wouldn’t make her a living.

  He’d do pretty much anything to make Julia smile, and if that meant playing delivery boy, then that’s what he would do.

  Then he’d blow this popsicle stand and get back to work.

  Chapter 2

  NUMBER 1204 GATES PLACE was a big, sprawling house with Craftsman lines and Victorian sensibilities that had been built for a railroad executive back in the twenties, when the town of Hamilton Falls had been founded. It could have housed a family of twelve comfortably, and had at one time, but now all that was left of the original Quinn family in the area was Rebecca.

  Rebecca was not the kind of woman to sit back with nothing to do but dust the sepia photographs of her ancestors. She had braved the storms of both gossip and disapproval and, after her brother Lawrence’s death, taken over management of his bookstore. Over time, Quill and Quinn had gone from being a dark, dusty place for boxes of used books to a tourist’s delight, stocking wholesome new novels and books of local interest, and featuring the odd piece of art or craftsmanship by local artisans. The shop was bright, welcoming, and full of plants and Rebecca’s practical, cheery personality.

  The suite on the top floor of the house had long been converted and rented to a succession of single Elect girls, the most recent of whom was Claire Montoya. When she’d learned that Dinah wasn’t interested in moving in, Claire had comforted herself with the fact that at least she was going somewhere, even if it was just across town. Not that she was desperate to get out of her parents’ house or anything.

  Well, okay, she was.

  Her folks were great people, and she loved them, but the fact of the matter was that they were what Alma Woods liked to call “half-and-halfers.” Other, nicer people might say “Elected but not perfected,” implying that there was still hope. No matter what the expression, Claire always cringed. Her folks had come to the Elect later in life, after she and her sister, Elaine, were born, and instead of embracing the lifestyle and traditions of godliness with a whole heart, they had maintained some outward appearances and not others—and told no one about the television on a rolling cart in the bedroom closet. Late at night Claire could hear them laughing at some program, and it became like a canker, sitting in the heart of the house like a great big lie.

  Maybe that was why she tried so hard to live up to the standards the Elect set. So okay, she wore up-to-date outfits, but they were black. And she worked in public, which not many of the Elect women did. But no one worked harder than she did at schooling her words, keeping her temper, saying nice things to Alma Woods when all she wanted to do was snap back something that would silence the old crow for good. She always had a smile and an offer of help, even when she didn’t want to give either one.

  Maybe deep down she thought these things would offset her parents’ behavior in the eyes of the congregation. Maybe they’d think, That Claire, now, she’s really got it. She’s a hearty one, being such a good example to her parents. Or maybe they wouldn’t, but at least it made her feel as though she were doing her best to serve God.

  In any case, at least Claire was nominally on her own. The furniture might be Vintage Garage Sale and the dishes her grandma’s second set, with prim little rosebuds that were the last thing Claire would have chosen had she had any money, but the space was hers to do with as she would. She could jump on the bed if she felt like it. Eat cereal lying on the couch. Wear colored pajamas.

  No, scratch that.

  A woman could wear color in the privacy of her own bedroom, but for Claire, the sacrifice had to be complete. Her nightie was black flannel, and every night she put the desire for red silk pajamas on the altar of sacrifice, where it belonged.

  Tonight, though, she was down in Rebecca’s suite, dressed in black as usual, with Dinah soon-to-be-Nicholas and
her sister, Tamara Traynell. They were both staying with Rebecca until the trial was over, making the ninety-mile commute to Pitchford every morning and evening in Rebecca’s car. Claire and Rebecca drove to work in Claire’s car, one going to the bookshop and the other to the bank across the street.

  “But where’s the baby?” Claire asked Dinah as they finished their dessert. Court had gone right to five o’clock before the judge had dismissed everyone, and after driving an hour and a half back to Hamilton Falls, the Traynell girls had been starving.

  Dinah licked ice cream from her spoon with relish. “I thought it would be better to leave her at home, with Matthew,” she said. “If I’m on the stand, there’s no one to look after her, and we thought this whole thing would be emotional enough for Tamara.”

  Privately, Claire wondered how on earth Tamara could have given up her daughter Tamsen in the first place, but she’d never say that out loud. After all, what did she know? If she were in Tamara’s situation, knowing that her daughter was the child of rape, could she be the kind of mother the child needed? Maybe Tamara had been right to place the baby in Dinah’s custody. To make a new life for herself up in Seattle.

  “Besides,” Dinah went on, “Matthew adores her, and she loves him right back. He’s teaching part-time at a junior college until we’re married, and his friend’s wife has a newborn so she looks after Tamsen while he’s in class.”

  “Good for you,” Rebecca said with a smile. “And I’m looking after your other babies.”

  Claire grinned.

  “You were so kind to give them a home,” Dinah said affectionately, speaking of her beloved flock of hens. “I could take Schatzi and the five most senior, but it was a bit daunting to find a place for twelve. One of the perks of staying here is seeing them again.”