A Sounding Brass

by Shelley Bates

  “Ow!” The car, a sedan definitely not built for potholes the way Ray’s truck was, jounced into and out of a hole in the road. Claire grabbed the armrest, and Margot gripped the steering wheel a little more firmly.

  “Sorry.”

  “We parked here.” Claire pointed out a flat spot in the grass where the track degraded into something only dirt bikes could navigate.

  “Lucky thing we changed.” In khaki pants and a practical windbreaker, Margot got out of the car with the roll of plans for the worship center. She locked the doors, even though there was nothing but cows for a mile in every direction. “I knew it was undeveloped, but I was at least expecting reasonable access.”

  “The tractors and trucks must have found a different way in,” Claire said as they set off down the hill. “Luke says the trenches have been dug and there are surveyors’ tapes and stakes everywhere.”

  “That can’t be right. Surveyors’ marks I can believe. But no actual work, including drainage and trenches, can start until we’ve funded the purchase of the land.”

  Claire lifted her hands in an “I-don’t-know” gesture. “I’m already paying invoices out of the listener contributions.”

  “Well, hopefully we’ll see in a moment.” Margot’s tone was noncommittal.

  But when they emerged from the belt of pines, all there was to see was the broad blue expanse of the lake and the acres of cattails, willows, and water-bird habitat that lay between the lines of barbed-wire fencing. Margot unrolled the plans and oriented herself so that the lake lay on her left, as it did in the drawing. Claire looked over her shoulder at the blue lines of the elevations and then at where they should be.

  “That’s where the creek empties into the lake.” She pointed. “The cabins should be over there, where that big clump of willows is, and the worship center itself beyond them.”

  Margot looked from drawing to swamp and back again. “Hm. Let’s have a closer look.”

  Her mosquito bites from last time were barely healed. Claire bit back a groan and followed her former boss into the swamp. They jumped from tussock to tussock of thick grass and took turns holding back the long, whiplike willow branches for each other. Finally Margot stopped when the ground got too wet and a bank of cattails, fluffy with unreleased seed, reached above their heads and blocked the way.

  “If I’m reading these plans correctly, we should be standing about where the worship center’s sanctuary would be. And if your information is correct, we should be seeing orange tape and stakes.” She lowered the plans and rolled them up again. The edges on one side were wet where she’d slipped and instinctively used the thick roll as a walking stick to hold herself upright. It hadn’t worked, which hadn’t improved her temper much. “But I don’t see any such thing here—including a buildable site.”

  “There must be a mistake.” Claire shivered in the wind off the lake. “Are you sure we’re—” She stopped. Of course Margot was sure. It was her job to be sure they were standing where the county assessor said they should be. “I’m positive Luke said work had been done. Let’s look around a bit, okay?”

  But looking around netted them nothing but more insect bites, some scrapes, and a lost shoe that had to be rescued by Margot, sticking her arm elbow deep in the brackish water.

  “This is ridiculous.” Margot wiped mud and decomposing leaves from her forearm and shook her fingers in distaste. “This is no building site. I don’t know why anyone would imagine they could put a commercial enterprise on such a property. Any fool could tell it was unbuildable. Look at the asking price. It’s 70 percent below the going rate in this valley, for heaven’s sake.”

  “Does—does that mean—” Claire couldn’t form the words.

  “Yes, it does. I’m sorry, Claire. I’m going to have to deny your church the loan. You might be able to put up a duck blind here, but it’s no place to build a worship center.” She pushed at a thicket of willow in irritation. “Not only that, I’d be interested to know just who you’re paying for all this so-called construction.”

  * * *

  WHAT WAS IT about the Elect that would make a woman like Claire Montoya put it first before—well, him? Or anything?

  Ray Harper dug into Julia Malcolm’s excellent beef stroganoff and wondered whether he’d survive asking that question aloud. Ross would capitalize on it and rib him for months. Julia would probably get on the phone and tell Claire in excruciating detail just what she’d done to his reputation as the local commitment-phobe.

  The problem was, he really needed to know.

  So he asked.

  Julia’s eyes widened and she glanced at Ross in a way that clearly said “I told you so.” Then she sat back with both hands cradling her heavily pregnant belly and said, “Because we’re taught to put the Elect ahead of everything, Ray. Family, friends, jobs—everything. But I learned that’s a mistake. The Elect have the system and God all confused and mixed up together. It’s God we’re to put first, not the system of worship.”

  “That still isn’t going to help me figure this out,” Ray said. “My mom got four churches off the ground, and to this day I don’t know if it’s God she loves, or starting churches.”

  “The thing is, what’s important to you?” Ross asked.

  “You guys,” Ray said simply. “Claire. The OCTF. My sisters. Probably not in that order, though.”

  “Have you ever thought about where God fits in to those priorities?” his partner asked quietly. Which felt a little weird. He and Ross could talk about everything from the consistency of pure cocaine to the best life insurance to take out when the baby came, but when it came to talking about God, they were treading in uncharted territory.

  “Up until recently I’ve avoided thinking about God,” he said. “He just complicates things.”

  “He simplifies things for me.” Julia heaved herself out of her chair and began to clear their plates. “Kailey, can you help me, please?” The eight-year-old hopped down and carefully carried a single dish over to the sink. Then she returned for another, treating each plate with solemn reverence.

  “How’s that?” Ray asked Julia.

  Julia and Claire had more in common than their experiences with the Elect. They had the same kind of smile, the kind that warmed a man and made him want to fall into that warmth forever. The ache under his ribs that had been there since he’d gunned his truck down the freeway away from Hamilton Falls throbbed as if to remind him of what he’d lost.

  “It starts with joy, I think,” she said. “And gratitude, and love. You find yourself permeated with it, and it makes you want to just give whatever you can to God in return for what He gives you.” She glanced at him. “It’s a bit like a marriage.”

  “Yeah, Ross always did have a God-complex,” he cracked.

  “You know how it is, Ray,” Ross said, his grin fading. “It’s like love, right? It simplifies everything—all you want is to be with that person. And yet it complicates everything—you have to change things to make it happen.”

  Now, that was something he could relate to. Something he could understand. “It’s all about love, isn’t it?” he said, almost to himself. “It’s not about what group you belong to. Or clothes or buildings or practices or any of that. It’s about the love.”

  “Going and coming,” Julia said softly. “God loves us, and we love Him. When you get right down to it, it’s really not that complicated, is it?”

  When you got right down to it, he supposed it wasn’t. The thing was, he couldn’t just leave it hanging, as he’d done for as many years as he’d been fighting his mother’s wacky ideas. He was a man of action. Make the plan, implement the plan. That had served him well in law enforcement and in life. So just what was he going to do about God? And once he’d figured that out, what was he going to do about Claire Montoya?

  * * *

  RAY WAS STILL pondering this several hours later, back in his apartment. He’d never paid much attention to his space. It was in a modest building in a middl
e-income neighborhood, with nothing much to recommend it but great freeway access and a low probability of running into the OCTF’s targets in the local restaurants. He was thinking about it now. About how quiet it was. About how it had no feminine touches. Claire’s little apartment had photographs and odd bits of brightly colored pottery, and even though her furniture was secondhand, it was comfortable.

  He didn’t even own a couch. He watched TV from his dad’s recliner, which was probably as old as he was but still smelled like the old man. It comforted him, like a big hug from a guy who’d died too soon, before Ray had had a chance to tell him he loved him. Or that he’d forgiven him.

  If Claire had been here, he could have told her stories about his dad. There would have been laughter instead of silence, and the sight of her eyes and smile instead of bare, empty walls. There would be companionship and possibility, not this sense that big chunks were missing out of his life that could be filled if he would just give in and let them happen.

  Like this God business, for instance. Maybe there was something to it if you just kept it simple and focused on the love, as Ross and Julia did. Maybe it wasn’t all about a bunch of brainwashed people acting out of character. Maybe they acted the way they did because they weren’t in it for themselves, like 99.9 percent of the people he knew. Ross and Julia hadn’t had to offer Tamara Traynell a home when she’d arrived in Seattle, desperate and grim and soaking wet because she’d walked from the bus station in the rain. Matthew Nicholas didn’t have to be a father to the child of rape that didn’t even belong to his fiancée. They did it for love. He had a feeling if he asked her, Claire would say, “and because Jesus would have done it.”

  Oh, he knew plenty about Jesus. No one who had grown up with his mom could help it. But the Jesus he saw reflected in these lives—so different, and yet knit so tightly together—wasn’t the one his mom seemed to know. Or, for that matter, the one the Elect seemed to think they knew. If he had a choice, he’d take this one.

  And he did have a choice. It was just up to him to make it.

  It was after eleven, and he was still sitting in the recliner, pondering what the will of God really meant and missing Claire and generally—okay, he admitted it—moping, when his cell phone rang.

  At this time of night, it probably wasn’t good news.

  “OCTF, Harper.”

  “Investigator, this is Bellville from Hamilton Falls PD.”

  Uh-oh. He knew he’d left too soon. Swinging his feet to the floor, he said, “Working swing shift, sir? Don’t tell me Luke Fisher slipped up, and you slapped a charge on him.”

  “No, it’s not Fisher at all. It’s the other one.”

  Lightning fast, Ray ran through all the names in his case file and came up blank. “What other one? There is no other one.”

  “Yeah, turns out there is. This individual has been siphoning off the funds Fisher’s been raising since the beginning. Taking advantage of the position of trust.”

  “Who?” It had to be someone new. Some accomplice Ray hadn’t run into yet, who had been operating in the shadows to pull off the crime Ray had known in his gut was going to happen.

  “What really gripes me is the whole holier-than-thou angle,” Bellville went on. The objective viewpoint of the career law enforcement officer was obviously a struggle, judging from the anger in his tone. “If you’re going to be a crook, fine. Be a crook. But don’t masquerade as a person of faith and all the time laugh at everyone else who’s really trying to do the right thing while you do your dirty work.”

  At last Ray understood. “Lieutenant, what are you telling me? Surely not Toby Henzig. I would have bet two weeks’ salary that guy was solid.”

  “Well, you’d win your bet. Not him. The other one.”

  “What other one?” Ray repeated.

  “The girl. The accountant or whoever she is. Montoya. I’ve got her in my holding tank until I can figure out which I’d rather charge her with—grand larceny or dragging the God I love through the mud.”

  * * *

  CLAIRE HAD ONCE thought that the worst thing that could happen to a person was to be Silenced. In that ceremony, which was called when a person had committed a serious spiritual crime, he or she was barred from fellowship with the Elect, and no one could talk to them for a period of seven years. People generally didn’t survive the pain of being Silenced; the majority went Outside and were lost to their loved ones forever.

  But she knew now that there were worse things than being Silenced. Being denounced as a thief and an embezzler was at the top of the list. Hearing her mom’s frantic voice as she tried to get in but not being able to see her was another. And knowing Luke Fisher had engineered it for reasons she couldn’t understand was worst of all.

  That was what had kept her awake most of the night on the clean but spartan mattress in the Hamilton Falls PD lockup. The jail was empty of criminals other than herself, so it wasn’t noise or light that kept her from sleep. It wasn’t the pervasive smell of disinfectant and cold sweat. No, it was the knowledge that someone she’d worked with, laughed with, partnered with—and, face it, had romantic dreams about—could turn on her in the space of a moment.

  He’d called the police in at the tail end of her work day, making good and sure she’d made the deposit of the day’s donations to the bank and generated yet another stack of thank-you letters. Then when the policeman had arrived, she’d ignored the two of them while they talked in the CD library, out of her hearing, blissfully making mailing labels while he stuck the figurative knife in her back.

  “She’s in there, Officer,” he’d said, ushering the policeman in. “That’s Claire Montoya.”

  She’d looked up, thinking it was an odd way to make an introduction, and had given the policeman a professional smile.

  “Claire Montoya?” he asked.

  “Yes. What can I do for you?”

  “I need to inform you you’re under arrest, ma’am.”

  She gaped at him. The words made no sense. Was Luke playing a prank on her? “What?”

  “The charges are criminal impersonation in the first degree, wrongfully obtaining funds by means of deception, larceny, and embezzlement, ma’am,” he said politely. “We have a statement from Mr. Fisher, here, laying out the events since you’ve come to work for the station. According to his information, you’ve embezzled more than one hundred thousand dollars from this station, and by extension from the listeners of KGHM in several counties. Would you come with me, please?”

  None of it had made any sense. Not the booking process, not the panicked call to her parents, not the fact that the soonest they could get one of Derrick Wilkinson’s coworkers at the legal firm down here was ten o’clock in the morning.

  This morning.

  Claire cocked a bleary eye at the window, where the color of the sky told her it was just after dawn. Three more hours until someone would come to help her. Three more hours of lying in yesterday’s clothes, the scent of her own fear heavy in her nostrils.

  Three more hours to pray.

  She’d done little else during the endless night—it was the best use she could make of her time. Not one person outside of her parents had communicated with her in more than twelve hours. It wasn’t that she expected a mob of people to storm the police station’s door, demanding her release. But surely more than two people in a town the size of Hamilton Falls would stand up for her?

  Look how they turned on Phinehas, a voice whispered in her mind.

  Phinehas really was a criminal. She was not. And as soon as Derrick’s lawyer friend turned up, she was going to tell them so, at great length and in excruciating detail. Somebody had to believe her. Luke had made it all up. She had no idea what she’d done to make him do this to her, but somehow it had to be made right.

  If only Ray hadn’t left town. If only she hadn’t been so rigid and blind. If only she could have another chance to talk to him. In fact, as soon as she got out of here, she was going to get his number from Julia an
d call him up and apologize. Grovel. Beg. Do what it took to make him believe that she wanted to see if something could work between them, too.

  O Lord, please help me. Help me not to panic. Help me to trust that You’re in control and will show people that I’m innocent. Soften Ray’s heart toward me. Help me to—

  “Claire!”

  For a moment, she wondered if she’d heard his voice outside in the hall because of the strength of her prayer. In the next second, she’d convinced herself it couldn’t be. This whole experience was a nightmare, a dream, and she’d teleported him into it just because she wanted him so badly—

  “Claire, are you all right? Sergeant, let her out, please.”

  She rolled off the mattress and ran to the tiny window that separated her from the normal world where people walked around free.

  “Ray?” she croaked. There was water in the little sink, but she’d been too disgusted with what might have been in there before her to drink out of the faucet. She was unshowered and dehydrated and hungry—and she’d never been so glad to see anyone in her entire life.

  The sergeant ran a card key through a slot on the wall and something inside the door chunked open. Before she could even grab the handle, Ray had whipped it back and dragged her into his arms. She burst into tears against the rough wool of his jacket. A fiery mix of joy and confusion and relief flooded her as she dragged the scent of clean fabric and his cologne into lungs starved for a single breath that wasn’t tainted with fear.

  “I can’t believe they’ve got you in here,” he said incredulously. “I came as soon as the lieutenant called. I put the bubble on the roof and drove all night.”

  She had no idea what the bubble was or what it was for, but if it got him here faster, then she was grateful.

  “The emergency light is for police business only,” the sergeant said, her mouth pruned up as though someone had pulled strings on either side of it.

  Ray’s response to that was short and pithy. “If getting an innocent person out of jail isn’t police business, I don’t know what is. Come on, Claire.”