“One more thing. When you’re talking to Derrick, tell him to break this to Owen gently. Owen’s going to feel responsible for this whole thing because Luke hooked him in first. Tell Derrick that the two of them should talk to Toby Henzig. We all need to stand together on this, and I think Toby and Owen can find some common ground.”
“You’re saying that the Elect and the community church can, you mean,” Rebecca translated quietly.
“Yes. As much money came from those folks as from the Elect. We’ve lost money and trust over this, and the only way we’ll get it back is to work together. I don’t care how radical or sinful that sounds, it’s the truth.”
“Oh, I agree with you. And from what I understand, Derrick has actually had a word or two with Mr. Henzig already. He is a very angry young man, our Derrick. Spearheading a recovery effort might just be the thing he needs.”
Claire rocked back in her chair with a huff of laughter. “Rebecca Quinn, you amaze me.”
“Why is that, dear?”
“You know more about the people in this town than we do about ourselves.”
“Nobody pays any attention to little old ladies in bookshops, dear. That’s our burden—and our strength.”
She sounded so smug about it that Claire laughed again. “Go forth and conquer, O intrepid one. Meantime, I’ve got calls to make and letters to prepare returning all these checks. I might as well do something constructive while I’m grounded.”
It took just as long to return a check as it did to thank a listener for one. While she filled in database fields on autopilot and got the mail merge ready, she called Margot at home and asked her to stop payment on the Good Shepherd Church’s check. Then, after forty or fifty letters, Claire realized that the eerie silence in the station had been going on for some time.
Dead air.
The tapes had stopped playing.
With a gasp, she leaped to her feet and ran into the studio, where the phone console was lit up like Main Street at Christmas with people calling in, no doubt wondering what had happened.
Oh dear. Oh dear. What was she going to do? Start the tapes over? No, the station was going to be in enough trouble when all of this broke without adding the fact that they’d all been fooled by a two-dollar tape. She sat at the console. She’d seen him do this often enough. Blindly, she reached for the nearest CD sitting in the caddy and popped it into the player. Okay. Slide the lever up to route sound to the mic. Headphones on. Now, talk.
“This is Claire Montoya, coming to you live from 98.5 KGHM, where we—” Are the biggest fools God ever put on the planet. “—rock for Jesus!”
She punched the Play button on the CD, slid the lever back down, and while the studio filled with the rapid-fire swing of Five Wise, she slumped back in the chair and burst into tears.
It didn’t last long. Her eyes already stung from crying so much, and besides, she had only three minutes while the song played. So, when the digital counter told her she had thirty seconds to get the next song started, she put another CD in the tray. She’d figure out how to back-call them in a minute. While the second CD played, she ran back into her office and got the stack of letters.
She glanced around her desk. Oops, better take the contents of the inbox, too. Back in the studio, she let the CD go to the next track while she got herself organized, then decided she’d do that for all of them.
“This is a Two-Track Weekend,” she announced to five counties when the song ended. “Today you’ll get not one, but two songs from each album. If you have any requests, just give us a call.”
Whew. That would give her six or even twelve minutes in which to get some work done. Unless the phone rang, which it did, a couple of minutes later.
“KGHM, this is Claire. What can I play for you?”
“Miss Montoya, I thought we made it clear that you were in Investigator Harper’s custody.”
It took Claire a second to place the voice. “Um—”
“This is your attorney, Miss Montoya. Spencer Rodriguez. Is the investigator at the station with you?”
“No,” she said.
“Do you have an explanation as to why you are suddenly a DJ and he is not there?”
Dead air probably wasn’t the explanation he was looking for. “Ray believes Luke Fisher may have gone to Idaho to collect a check I sent to one of his false names. So, he’s gone after him, and since I can’t leave town and no one is here to run the station, here I am.”
“You realize you are breaking the terms of your temporary release.”
“I know,” Claire said. “But I don’t have a choice. I’m hoping Toby will be here any minute, and then I’ll come to your office.” She glanced at the clock. Past two, and Toby’s shift usually started at noon. What on earth was going on? Had everyone fallen into an alternate universe, where nothing was where it was supposed to be? “I’m not going anywhere, Spencer. I promise.”
“You’d better hope no one at the police station is listening to the radio.”
She was hoping that, as a matter of fact. “Oops. Song’s ending. I have to go.”
* * *
TWO HOURS LATER, Claire had exhausted the contents of the CD caddy and had had to raid the library. She wasn’t familiar enough with popular music to know what she was doing, but she recognized enough of the artists’ names to fake it fairly well. Luke had a list of the prayer requests in an open document on his computer, so every fifteen minutes she read one of them, feeling like a complete fraud.
Well, the listeners had paid to have their prayers read, hadn’t they? Despite what had happened to their money, she could at least give them what they’d paid for.
The exterior door slammed around four o’clock, and Claire looked up from her play list as her heart jumped in her chest.
Ray?
But it wasn’t.
Toby Henzig opened the studio door and closed it behind him, collapsing into the plastic guest chair as if he’d just expended his last reserve of strength. Claire finished back-calling the last fifteen minutes of songs, announced the next band, and started the CD player. Only then did he speak.
“I thought you didn’t want to have anything to do with this,” he gestured around the booth.
“I didn’t have a choice. And you wouldn’t believe what changed my mind.” She yanked the headphones off and tossed them on the turntable that no one seemed to use. “Where on earth have you been?”
“You wouldn’t believe me, either.”
“I’d believe a lot of things today that I wouldn’t have believed yesterday. You heard I was arrested, right?”
“Oh, I heard. Luke told me the whole thing in great detail last night before his show, with a lot of hand-wringing and crocodile tears over how misled he was about you. I told him that was impossible and a huge mistake, which I assume the police have now realized, since you’re sitting here.”
“It’s a mistake, all right. Everything that guy has done or said since he got here has been a complete lie. He’s been embezzling the listener donations for weeks and set me up to take the blame for it.”
Toby stared at her with a lot less astonishment than she would have expected. “So your friend Derrick told me.”
“He called you, then?” Bless Rebecca for getting her messages through. That made two people in the world that Claire could count on.
“Oh yes, he called. That’s where I’ve been all this time—at an emergency assembly of your folks down at the mission hall. You have a very efficient phone-tree system, I must say.”
“You?” After they learned they’d been duped by Luke Fisher, Claire wouldn’t have been surprised if the Elect had risen up and stoned any Outsider who would have dared set foot in the mission hall. “What happened?”
“It seems Derrick has had his suspicions about Luke from the beginning. I had reservations myself, but he seemed so sincere and so—let’s face it—successful that I thought I was just being narrow-minded and maybe a little jealous. So, when Derrick got your
message to come and talk to me and we both realized we’d had the same misgivings, it didn’t take much to decide that the whole church needed to know. I’ll be speaking to Hamilton Falls Community Church tonight.”
“So, everyone knows it wasn’t me, right?” If she could come out of this a free woman, that’s all she would ask. She’d never think badly of her mom again. She’d never roll her eyes at her dad because he loved to watch Seinfeld late at night. They’d had it right all along and she’d been an insufferable, self-righteous prig who thought she was better than they were because of how she looked. As soon as this was over, she’d have her parents over for dinner and beg their forgiveness.
“Not many people knew you had been arrested, and when they heard about it, no one believed that you did it anyway,” Toby assured her. “Some still can’t quite believe Luke could have done it. Owen Blanchard took it as quite a blow. I understand he and Luke had become friendly.”
“Together they were our leadership team. So, then what happened?”
Toby smiled his gentle smile. It held neither malice nor triumph, only a tired kind of satisfaction.
“I invited them to church.”
Chapter 15
CLAIRE BLINKED and stared at Toby, not certain she’d heard correctly. “You what?”
His gaze was direct, though there were lines of exhaustion around his eyes. He lifted a hand, palm up on his knee, and let it fall. “Let’s be honest, Claire. Your group is not going to survive in the form it has been all these years. The leadership is faulty, the doctrine is unsound, and now that people see they’ve been mistaken in their faith a second time, it might be the wake-up call God has been trying to give them.”
Claire tried to feel a little indignant, to defend the community in which she’d grown up, but there was no getting around the fact that he was right. She’d come to the same conclusions herself, some time ago.
“I proposed that the people of the Elect be our guests at our Sunday-evening service tomorrow. I don’t know if any of them will come. But this town needs healing, and if the members of the body of Christ don’t reach out to each other, it won’t happen.”
Claire couldn’t imagine the Elect going to a service in a “worldly” church. But then, she couldn’t imagine herself being arrested for larceny, either—or imagine falling for a cop who didn’t believe in God. But she had. And who was to say God’s hand wasn’t working in all this, leading the Elect away from the mess they’d made with all their rules and regulations, and bringing them, despite themselves, to a knowledge of the truth?
“Toby,” she said with complete sincerity, “if I’m not back in jail, I’ll be there.”
His smile was the tired grin of an old friend as he slumped in the hard plastic chair. “I hoped you would be. And bring your friend Ray, as well.”
“That’ll be up to him, but I’ll give it a try.”
“Ready to hand the headphones over to me? Probably no one in Hamilton Falls is interested in the stock reports right now, but it’s my job to read them anyway.”
She held the headphones out with the air of someone trying to hand over a crate of tarantulas. “Here. Take them. If I never have to do this again I’ll be a happy woman.”
He slid them over his ears and took her seat behind the console. “Oh, I don’t know about that. You sounded great—as if you’d been doing it for years. I’ll bet you a doughnut that you start getting fan mail.”
Laughing, she gathered up her piles of paperwork and took them back into her office with a huge sense of relief. Toby was back. Ray was on the job. She had her paperwork. If you didn’t count the fact that she was illegally at large, all was right with the world.
As she dumped the pile on her desk, her phone rang—the office line, not the studio line, which meant it was station business and not a fan making a request or someone calling in to rant about the discount store going in.
“KGHM, this is—”
“Claire, it’s me.” Ray’s voice was exhausted, with anger and frustration making the edges a little ragged.
“Ray! What’s going on? You’re never going to believe what I’ve been doing all—”
“I’ve lost him.”
She stopped, a cold feeling prickling over her shoulders. “Lost him?”
“Yeah. He emptied his post-office box and closed his account, about two hours before I got here.”
“What about the bank?”
“He was there. Made himself real memorable when he tried to cash the check and the teller told him about the fifteen-day hold.”
“What happened?”
“He’s getting frustrated. Had a shouting match with the teller, and they finally escorted him off the premises. He took the check with him.”
“I had Margot put a stop payment on it,” Claire said. “He’ll look for a bigger town now. Somewhere he can blend in while he waits his fifteen days. And then he’ll find he can’t cash it anyway.”
“A bigger town in which direction? Boise? Spokane? I’m sitting here at a gas-station pay phone on the interstate because I forgot to charge my stupid cell phone during all the excitement last night. There are freeways going in four directions and I have no idea which one he took.”
Defeat hung heavily in his voice. She couldn’t stand it. Luke Fisher had destroyed her church’s faith in itself and had broken the trust of countless people in five counties. She absolutely would not allow him to destroy Ray’s irrepressible spirit.
“There has to be something we can do,” she said desperately. “Don’t give up.”
“Maybe you should ask God to give us a clue.”
She blinked against the sudden prick of tears. “Ray, please don’t be sarcastic with me. I can’t deal with it. Not now.”
“Honey, I’m not being sarcastic. What I am is out of gas. In a metaphorical sense.”
“You’re asking me to pray for a—what do you call them? A lead?”
“Why not?”
“Because God doesn’t care about things like leads in fraud investigations.”
“Why shouldn’t He? He cares about you and me, doesn’t He?”
There was a note in Ray’s voice she had never heard before. “What’s going on?” she asked again, meaning something different this time.
“There are a lot of miles between us right now, and a lot of room for thinking. So, I’ve been doing just that.”
“And what did you conclude?”
“I’ve concluded that I need help.”
“I’ve concluded that myself.” Propping her elbows on her letters, she rubbed her gritty eyes.
“I thought you already had a direct line to help.”
“I used to think I did, until last night. Then I realized I really don’t know much about anything. I think I have to start over.”
“Yeah, me, too.”
Claire could do nothing but sit with the receiver pressed to her ear, marveling at the circumstances that had brought them to this point, connected to each other by the fragile means of a phone line, making the same discovery from completely different points of origin.
“Claire?”
“I’m here.”
“About that prayer?”
“What, you want me to pray now? Over the phone?”
“I don’t know about you, but I think I need to hear it. You know how I am. Reading about it in the papers later just won’t do it for me.”
She smiled, despite the fact that her throat was a little closed up. She stared at the invoice on the top of her inbox pile without really seeing it. Instead, she saw Ray in the late-afternoon light, standing in a phone booth at a nameless gas station, someplace where two roads met.
“Father, Ray and I have come to the end of ourselves in more ways than one.” She hesitated, then cleared her throat. “We need help, Lord. You know our hearts, what’s inside us, better than we do. Thank You for showing us that we can’t go on like this, him depending on himself, and me depending on the Elect, instead of depending on You.
“Amen,” Ray breathed.
A little silence fell, punctuated by a growl in the distance as a diesel rig went past where Ray was standing.
Claire’s gaze fell again on the invoice on the top of her stack. Brandon Brothers, for fifty thousand. A lot of concrete that was never poured and a lot of pipe that had never been laid.
“I never paid it,” she said suddenly.
“Paid what?”
“This invoice sitting here. Luke yelled at me to pay the balance to Brandon Brothers the day it came, and I got so mad at him I chucked it in my inbox and never did it.”
“Brandon . . . Brothers?” Ray said carefully.
Oh. My. Stars. Claire, you idiot.
“That’s where I heard that name,” she said. “It’s the general contractor in Spokane that we hired to build the worship center.”
“We did, did we?”
“Luke did. Ray?”
“Yes?”
“It’s laser printed, just like the church thank-you letter. And they have a post-office box, too.”
“In Spokane, you said? What are the odds they really exist?”
“Not very good.” Excitement and hope blossomed inside her. “When I called them, a really unprofessional woman answered the phone. It sounded as though I woke her up. I was trying to get better terms for payment, and she told me I had to pay the invoice on receipt.”
“Ten to one it was some lady friend of his and he paid her to say a few lines if anyone ever called. What’s the box number?”
She told him, then said, “Ray, I bet he’s going to go west. He didn’t have any success in Idaho and now he’s heading for the check in Spokane. Except there isn’t going to be any check there because I didn’t pay the bill.”
“So, not only can he not cash the one he has, he’s going to drive all the way down there and find an empty box. That might push him over the edge and he might come after you. We can’t risk it. I’ll call the OCTF and have whatever investigator is closest pick him up. Even if I doubled the speed limit I’d never make it in time to do it myself. I’ll alert the postmaster there, too, so they can stall him until my guys get there.”
A Sounding Brass Page 21