by Jill Orr
“…and another time, I remember it was so icy out, we couldn’t even make it to church! The pastor called everyone and told us all to stay home and watch whatshisname from TV, but I don’t go in for all that TV preaching. Don’t get me wrong, I love me a good sermon, but some of those preachers just seem like a bunch of snake-oil salesmen to me, ’cept for Billy Graham—God rest his soul—and Wyatt Claremore, of course.” She laughed. “I remember this one time…”
Wyatt Claremore. As soon as she said the name, it hit me. I hadn’t made the connection until that very moment, but once I did, it was so obvious. “Theresa,” I said, my adrenaline rising. “I am so sorry, but I have to go!”
“Oh. Okay. But I was just gonna tell you real quick about this one time when Daddy went straight up to—”
“Can you save it for next time?” I said, already pushing the door open. “I really have to get back to the office!”
A cold wind rushed in.
“Oh. Sure. Okay.”
“Thanks, and sorry again!”
As soon as I got back to the office, I dropped the mail on Kay’s desk and rushed to my own. I opened my laptop and typed the name Wyatt Claremore into the search box. The second the screen populated, I literally blurted out, “Yesssssss!” I was looking at a spitting image of the cupped hands drawing from Flick’s file. It was the logo for Claremore Ministries, a prominent megachurch out of North Carolina. I knew I’d seen it before but couldn’t place it until Theresa’s ramblings about TV preachers reminded me.
I had no idea what the connection between Claremore Ministries and my grandfather could have been, but this was the second religion-related clue I’d come across. First, Mom tells me that Granddad had hidden a piece of paper in his desk with a Bible verse on it, and now Flick has the logo for a megachurch in his notes. I might not have known what it meant, but I knew enough not to ignore an emerging pattern.
I picked up my laptop and went into Holman’s office. “I think I may have found something.”
“So, you think Flick was investigating Claremore Ministries?” Holman asked after I finished explaining what I’d found.
“Looks that way to me.”
“Do you have any idea what he might have been looking for?”
“None.”
He took a sip of tea, allowing himself to fully sip and swallow before speaking again. “All right. Let’s start by checking if we can find a connection between Claremore and any stories Albert may have worked on. I can crosscheck his obit subjects for any mention of the church, and you start looking into his background and see if you recognize any ways in which they may have personally overlapped.”
I nodded and immediately typed Wyatt Claremore into my search box. Of course, Wikipedia was the first entry to pop up. Any journalist knows Wikipedia is not a valid source, but it can be useful for gathering generalized background information. When I got to the part about Personal Life, what I read stopped me cold.
“Holman?”
“Mmm?”
“I think I found something already.”
He looked up from his own computer. “That was fast.
What is it?”
I read from the screen: “Wyatt Claremore married Shannon J. Miller of Lawrenceville, VA, on April 5th, 1982.”
Holman’s response was, predictably, a slow doubleblink. “That is curious. The odds of that being a coincidence are extremely low.”
“I’d put them at right about zero.”
Holman moved his laptop aside and took out his legal pad and began writing. “So, we know that Charlie Miller was Daniel Miller’s next of kin because he signed the death certificate at the funeral home.”
“Right.”
“And we know that Daniel Miller had a child named Shannon Miller who died in the plane crash in 1959?”
“Right.”
“And we know that Charlie Miller also has a daughter named Shannon Miller—or Shannon Claremore now, I guess.”
“Exactly,” I confirmed. “Add to that the fact that Flick had the Claremore Ministries logo in his notes and now we find a connection between them and the Millers…this is shaping up to be one weird story.”
“All stories seem weird until you find the glue that binds the disparate facts together,” Holman said. “Add the Claremore’s marriage to your list of things to look into.”
Holman got a call, so I took my laptop back to my desk and continued my research there. The first mention I found of the couple was their engagement announcement in the Greenville Gazette published in 1982:
Miller-Claremore.
Dr. Robert and Mrs. Nancy Claremore proudly announce the engagement of their son, Wyatt Clifton Claremore, to Shannon Jane Miller, daughter of Charles Miller and Rebecca Miller (deceased) of Lawrenceville, Virginia. Miss Miller is a graduate of East Carolina University (class of ’75) where she earned her bachelor’s degree in elementary education. She is currently teaching first grade to students at Harrison Elementary School in Greenville. Mr. Claremore, a graduate of Wake Forest University, is working on his doctoral degree in Theology from Duke University. The couple is planning an April wedding, after which Miss Miller will join Mr. Claremore in Raleigh-Durham.
I found it interesting that the engagement announcement came from his parents. Historically, it is the bride’s parents who publish those. I did a deep dive into the archives of the Greenville Gazette for any more mentions of the Claremore family. Most were about events they’d attended, charities they’d supported, and causes they’d championed. Nothing appeared about Wyatt and Shannon until several years later, when they took out a home mortgage in 1990. The next mention was five years later, when Wyatt took the head pastor position at Oakwood Christian Church. I read article after article and was able to piece together a skeleton outline of his life, at least from the time he married Shannon until now.
Claremore had started at Oakwood as the youth pastor, but his charismatic preaching style quickly began attracting new parishioners from surrounding communities. When the head pastor stepped down, Wyatt was promoted in an effort to help the church grow. I found an article accompanied by a grainy picture of Wyatt, Shannon, and their two children, Ella and Nicholas. Shannon had blond hair and a wan smile, and as far as I could tell from the picture, wore little makeup and plain, modest clothing. Wyatt, by contrast, had a sturdy build with broad shoulders and perfect posture. Even with the low quality of the photo, something about Wyatt made him pop off the page. It was easy to see how he could have attracted a following—he had that indefinable allure, that X factor that made the spotlight shine directly on him. Shannon, and even the kids, seemed to fade into the background.
Once he took over as the lead at Oakwood Christian, Wyatt’s name was often mentioned in the press. His pedigreed education combined with his charm made him a favorite subject of journalists, local and otherwise, on subjects ranging from religious holidays to helping the less fortunate. He published his first book a couple of years later, and from my quick search it looked like he had nearly eight books out to date, most of which had topped the charts.
His most famous book by far, though, was one he co-authored with a woman named Megan Johanning. Megan was a young parishioner at Oakwood Christian and had just been diagnosed with a form of muscular dystrophy when she and Wyatt met. She was having a hard time coming to terms with her diagnosis and what it would mean for her future, so she turned to Wyatt for counsel. Those counseling sessions led to a “complete and miraculous transformation of faith that changed the trajectory of my life,” according to Johanning’s quote on the back of the book.
Wyatt and Megan co-authored a book titled Healing from Within: The Faithful’s Guide to Making Peace with Illness. It struck the market like lightning, selling hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide and becoming a beacon of hope for many people struggling with chronic illnesses. I was familiar with the title because when I worked at the Tuttle County Library, we always had trouble keeping it on the shelves. Then again, people in T
uttle Corner loved their spiritual self-help books. We had a waiting list a mile long for The Alchemist the entire time I worked there, despite having multiple copies and it being thirty years old.
Ash texted and offered to pick me up from the Times so I didn’t have to walk home. I’d been so wrapped up in my research, I didn’t realize the weather had deteriorated so badly. I stood up and looked out the front window. Frozen sleet was raining down in diagonal sheets, covering the already wet streets and sidewalks. With the temperature plunging, the entire town was about to turn into an ice rink. Though we did experience storms like this from time to time, Tuttle Corner was not well equipped to handle severe winter weather. The county dispatched plows with salt, but the main safety measure was to warn people to stay home and off the roads.
I gladly accepted, packed up my things, and went to say goodnight to Holman.
“You going to be okay getting home?” I asked.
“I grew up in Canada, Riley.”
“Okay. Well, Ash has a giant pickup if you’re worried about your Neon.”
He blinked. “I’m not.”
“How long are you going to stay?”
Holman looked down at the time on his computer and said, “Fourteen more minutes.”
“That’s oddly specific. What happens in fourteen minutes?”
“It will be six p.m. exactly.”
“You’re a weird one, Mr. Holman.”
“I know,” he said without any regret at all. “Goodnight, Riley.”
“Goodnight, Will.”
Just as I turned to leave, he said, “Do you realize you only call me Will when you’re trying to imply emotional sincerity? Otherwise you call me Holman.”
“Um…do I?”
“Yes,” he said. “Why is that?”
I stopped at the threshold of his door and turned to face him. This was the last thing on my mind, but I knew these sorts of questions were important to Holman. I got the impression that trying to decode the intricacies of social interactions helped orient him in a realm where he all too often felt lost.
“I guess using your first name feels more intimate—” he opened his mouth to say something, but I cut him off, “—and before you say it, I don’t mean that in a sexual way.”
“Thank goodness for that,” he said as the ghost of a smile crossed his face.
CHAPTER 24
I got into Ash’s pickup, slightly out of breath from the cold and grateful not to have to make the ten-minute walk home. “Thanks for picking me up—it’s awful out there.”
“No problem,” he said, pulling away from the curb. “I guess we’re not going to the Shack tonight.”
Tuttle’s other response to a storm like this was to behave as if the apocalypse was upon us. Schools canceled classes, businesses closed early, and though I hadn’t been to Landry’s, I’d bet my last dollar that there’d been a run on bottled water and canned goods.
“Are they closed?”
Ash nodded. “Luckily, though, I came prepared.” A wicked grin slid across his face.
“What does that mean?”
“Look in the back seat.”
I looked. There was a picnic basket stuffed with goodies, including two bottles of wine, sitting on the bench in the back. My internal reaction was How romantic, followed up quickly by Omg what does this mean? “I thought I was supposed to buy you a drink tonight?”
“Next time.” He smiled. “I tried to pick out your favorites. There’s one of their famous charcuterie plates in there with cheese and crackers and some chocolate truffles. Oh, and a can of Pringles, of course.”
I looked at the basket overflowing with all the things I love, and an emotion I couldn’t readily identify swept through me. “I can’t believe you did this.”
“You like?”
“I like,” I said, and raised my eyes to meet his. “Very much.”
Ash pulled into my driveway and turned off the engine. “Listen,” he said, turning toward me. “I don’t want you to feel any pressure. I just wanted to do something nice for you. You may not realize this, but your friendship has been really important to me over these past couple of months. Moving here and taking over the funeral home…it was hard, and you’ve shown me that life in Tuttle can be…well, I don’t know…good, I guess. I thought some good food and wine might make you smile, that’s all.”
But it wasn’t just food and wine to me; it was a selfless gesture of kindness, something he did for the sole purpose of making me happy. One of my reservations with Ash was that he’d been so volatile when we’d met—up then down; hot, then cold. But I had to admit that once he’d decided he was staying in Tuttle Corner for good, he’d been more up than down. More hot than cold. Literally. I looked over at Ash with his amber eyes and sandy brown hair, and it was like some kind of switch flipped inside of me. In the space of a second, images of Jay and Chloe, Ryan and Ridley, even Tabitha and Thad flashed through my mind, and I thought, Why not me and Ash?
I reached over, put my hand behind his neck, and pulled him in. Our kiss was warm and sweet and full of all the things I couldn’t think to say, a combination between a thank-you, an apology, and an invitation. When we finally pulled away, it was Ash who was at a loss for words. I lowered my eyes, a counterweight to our intimate moment. I wasn’t exactly embarrassed, but the heat that drove me to kiss him left me feeling exposed. The silence stretched on for another few moments until I broke it. “C’mon, let’s go inside. It’s freezing out here.”
“Not where I’m sitting it’s not,” he said, a distinct note of bewilderment in his voice.
Once we got inside, we ate, we drank, and we talked about what we were going to wear to the party. It was fun to focus on something superficial for a change, and by the time we’d gotten halfway through the bottle of wine, we’d gone online and ordered a cheap top hat and walking stick for him, some strands of faux pearls, a cigarette holder, and a feather headpiece for me.
“How’s it going with the investigation into Flick?” he asked after we’d exhausted our party-related conversation.
I caught him up on what had happened over the past couple of days and the connection I’d just discovered between Flick’s notes and the Claremore Ministries logo. “What I can’t figure out is what a televangelist like Wyatt Claremore could possibly have to do with my grandfather or Flick.”
“Maybe they knew each other in college or worked together somewhere?”
“I don’t think so.” I paused. “I just wish Flick would have talked to me about what he was working on. He was so damn stubborn about wanting to ‘protect’ me from whatever it was he was looking into.” I braced myself against the you-should-be-careful reaction I was used to getting from people like Carl and Jay and my mom.
But Ash just shrugged. “He was old-school, that’s all.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was from a generation when men felt they had to protect women and children—and to him you were both. It sounds ridiculously outdated now, but that’s how they were raised. My PopPop was—is—the same way.”
“How’s your grandma doing?”
He held up the bottle of wine and raised his eyebrows. I did a shrug/nod combo. I probably didn’t need any more, but the mild buzz I had was so pleasant, I figured what the hell.
“She’s holding up okay, I guess. It’s just so sad. They’re each other’s whole life, you know?”
“Sad,” I agreed, “but kind of beautiful too. That kind of love seems pretty rare these days.”
We were both sitting on the floor, leaning against my overstuffed sofa. I’d moved the coffee table and spread out a blanket so that we could have a proper picnic since he’d gone to the trouble of buying the basket and everything. (I was pretty sure he didn’t just have that thing lying around his rental.) Coltrane, unmoored by this new furniture arrangement, had fled to the couch. He’d mostly been sleeping, but every now and then he’d roll his big floppy head around to keep an eye on the prosciutto. I plucked one
of the remaining pieces off the board and fed it to him over my shoulder.
“That’s one spoiled puppy you got there.”
“Don’t I know it.” I gave Coltrane a kiss on his long, furry snout. “But I can’t help it. Just look at that face, it’s perfection.”
“It sure is.” From his tone it was clear Ash was not talking about the dog. I felt my cheeks begin to flush. I could feel him looking at me. “Should we talk about that kiss?” he said quietly.
“Not unless you want to.” I was suddenly very interested in the hem of my shirt.
He brushed the tips of my toes with his. “I could think of a few things I’d rather do.”
A current of attraction zipped through me. It wouldn’t take much, a tilt of the head, a slight turn of my shoulders… I just wasn’t sure. And I wasn’t sure why I wasn’t sure.
I took another sip of my wine. “It’d change everything, you know?”
“I know.”
“Do we want to do that?”
“I think one of us does…” he said with a playful edge to his voice.
I laughed, the wine rounding the edges of our conversation.
Ash turned his shoulders so we were face-to-face, or face-to-cheek, I guess. He tucked a strand of hair behind my right ear. Then he leaned in and kissed the side of my face, leaving his lips there for one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi.…
Screw it. I turned my head and let his lips find mine. The world faded out and we were lost to the energy that had been building for months. Whatever reservations I had disappeared, and it was just him and me. Everything was happening so fast—like we were racing against time, or perhaps our better judgment. He leaned me back onto the floor, his hand beneath the curve of my neck. I felt the weight of his chest against mine, his hot breath on my neck, and then suddenly he stopped.