“Is there snow in the forecast?” he asked.
“No, thank goodness.”
“You must love donuts.”
I smiled. “I’ll be back in an hour or so.” I started down the wooden steps but halted and looked back when Matt called my name.
“Can I ask you something else personal?”
“You’re paying.”
“Carissa said you don’t bill yourself as a ghost hunter or female priest.”
“That would be false advertising.”
“Have you seen ghosts?”
“I’ve seen things.”
He jogged down the steps until we stood face to face. “Worse things than ghosts?”
“We shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves.”
“Don’t you ever get afraid?”
If there was one thing I insisted on, it was honesty with my clients. “All the time.”
CHAPTER 2
I followed Oliver Street, a wide blacktop road, out of the Petersons’ neighborhood to County Road 64. Wells was a nice place by the looks of it. On the small side, about twenty thousand in population, but within an easy drive of Fort Collins, a bustling city to the southwest.
The Quick Mart parking lot was more than two-thirds full. When the weather turns bitter, people tend to stock up on the basics, needed or not. I found a parking spot, shut off the ignition, and headed inside, winding my way through the laundry soap, bread, and canned-goods aisles until I found the snacks. There, a clerk was stocking colossal bags of chips.
“Any donuts?” I asked him.
“We’re out, sorry. Truckers. If you get here earlier in the day, we keep them by the coffee at the front of the store.”
“Any prepackaged ones?”
“Nope, sorry.”
“Thanks.” I nabbed a bag of dill-flavored potato chips, took a six-pack of Diet Coke from the cooler, paid at the register, and headed back to my silver Ford Explorer, the best thing to come out of my divorce, aside from the small house I’d bought. Eight years old and it ran like a gem.
Back in my car, I cut open the chips bag with a pocketknife from the glove compartment and popped open a Coke. I hadn’t heard my phone ring, but I checked for calls and messages anyway, then dug into the chips.
The parking lot was fringed on the west and east with red twig dogwoods, a quarter of the shrubs’ orange-red leaves stubbornly clinging to the ruby red stems, their beauty marred by a field of abandoned vehicles and rusty junk on the west side of the store. I took a long drink from my ice-cold Coke, carbonation stinging my throat.
This new case would be a tough nut to crack. No dryer sheets, no rubbing pipes in a crawl space. Cases with such swift and happy endings were real, and Berg had taught me to recount them to allay clients’ fears, but the Peterson home was different. The body of a murdered man and manifestations of multiple kinds witnessed by both Carissa and Matt made it so.
I set my drink in the cup holder and phoned Berg. He answered on the third ring.
“I’m about to leave Wells. Be there soon.”
in the twenty minutes since I’d left Wells, the sky had gone gunmetal gray, though supposedly there was no snow in the forecast. Berg greeted me at the door to his house and welcomed me into his kitchen, inviting me to sit at his vintage blue Formica table.
I threw my coat over a chair back. “I smell something good.”
“Apple pies in the oven,” he answered with a grin. “And don’t look so shocked. They’re surprisingly easy to whip up. Coffee?”
“No thanks.”
He hung his cane from a hook on the front of the refrigerator, started the coffee maker, and pulled a single mug from a cabinet. White haired and extraordinarily tall for a man of seventy-six—Berg claimed he’d been the tallest kid on his Council Bluffs, Iowa, basketball team—he was dressed in his standard winter uniform: a wool sweater and loose, faded jeans. Though today he’d gone fancy and donned a newish looking gray Fair Isle sweater.
“So this is why you couldn’t come with me first thing?” I asked. “Pies?”
“Pies are important, Teagan, as you’ll discover one day. I’m bringing one of them to the Petersons.”
“The smell is making me hungry.”
“I’ve got something for you,” he said, opening a paper bag on the counter and presenting me with a plastic supermarket container filled with powdered-sugar donut holes.
“Awesome! I’ve been dying for some. The Quick Mart in Wells didn’t have any—can you believe it?”
He smiled and sat across from me, his empty mug in one hand, waiting for the coffee to finish brewing. “So tell me what you think of the Peterson church—or home.”
“It’s still unmistakably a church. I also saw where Matt Peterson found the body.”
“They’re saying it’s probably the Episcopal priest who went missing.”
“How did you know?”
“I’m still part of the ministerial grapevine. I also remember what people said when he disappeared.”
“I never heard about it. What was his name?”
“Edward Lloyd.”
Nodding, I opened the plastic box and plopped a donut hole in my mouth.
“You had a look around?”
I wiped sugar from the corners of my mouth. “The basement, kitchen, lobby.”
“Narthex,” he corrected.
“I figured ‘lobby’ might be too secular. It’s a pretty space, whatever you call it. Seven-foot double doors, a couple of huge windows above them. And I was briefly in the sanctuary, which they’re going to turn into a great room. There’s a spectacular stained-glass window of Michael slaying the dragon.”
“I saw it maybe twenty years back. Glad to hear it’s still there. Undamaged?”
“On first inspection, yes. Matt Peterson took a photo of the body.”
Berg grunted and his unruly eyebrows rose.
“I thought it was strange too, but he said he wanted it for a possible insurance claim, and that makes some sense.”
“First impressions of him?”
“He loves his wife, but he doesn’t want to sell the church. He’ll do anything to convince her that the manifestations are baloney, even if he’s not so sure of that himself. And when I drove up, I could see the shock in his eyes. I think he was expecting a female Episcopal priest, complete with holy water.”
Berg let out a rich, deep laugh.
“Don’t be too amused. They probably think you’re a priest, not a retired minster.”
“You didn’t fill them in?”
“You’re my associate. I left it at that.”
“Carissa Peterson?”
“Carissa’s tired, scared, and very impressionable. She’s also ready to move, especially for their kids’ sake.”
“This case concerns you more than our others. I hear it in your voice.”
Again I opened the donut box. “Matt found a strange note in the wall. On the other side of the post from the body. I’ll show it to you in a sec. And if you’re up to it, the photo of the dead man.”
“How do you think Carissa will deal with our being there?”
“She’s glad we’re staying overnight, but she’s genuinely scared, Berg. The Petersons don’t strike me as scammers or liars, and they’re not angling for a TV show—not that I know of. They want whatever this is to go away so they can get on with their lives. When Carissa called, she told me they’d hired a medium and a psychic, and this was before they found the body. She’s convinced the place is haunted.”
“Have you told them what you think of ghosts?”
“I want to see what we’re facing before I burst her bubble.” I shamelessly ate another donut hole.
Berg rose, poured himself a mug of steaming black coffee, and lowered himself to his chair, his knees almost grazing the underside of the table. He watched me for a minute, and in that time I became more conscious of my nervous tics—cracking the knuckles on my left hand, biting the inside of my lower lip.
“Rememb
er when we first met?” he asked me. “A year and a half ago.”
“Of course.”
“You and a dozen other people came with me to a house that was said to be home to a mischievous ghost. Mischievous. Don’t you love that word? Would it were so. It was a lark for most of them. A haunted house story. Not for you it wasn’t—nor should it have been, once you saw what we were up against. And just when I felt my courage fade, the others took off. You didn’t.” He sipped his coffee. “You’re a brave woman, Teagan.”
“Or a fool.”
Berg chuckled softly. “Definitely not a fool. Sure you don’t want coffee?”
“No, thanks, I’ve got Diet Cokes in the car.”
“I admire your ability to down that stuff, but a decade from now—”
“It’ll catch up with me.” I knew that to be true, but for now I felt healthy and strong, and so it was easy to shove aside thoughts of ill health and advancing age. Unlike Berg, I was on the slightly short side, with blue eyes and dark brown hair, both of which my husband had once found attractive. Now there were a handful of early grays at my temples.
But you can’t stay up all night, heart galloping, veins coursing with sugar, without it one day wrecking your health. I’d seen the creeping lines around my eyes, the slightly saggy jaw line, and the sallow skin after two nights of “ghost hunting,” as some of our clients liked to call it.
Berg knew all about ill health. When the rheumatoid arthritis in his ankles and right knee flared, as it often did, he needed a cane to walk, and managing the gas pedal and brake on a car was out of the question. Worse, his meds, including for pain, didn’t help him much, at least at the level he was willing to take them.
“It might be nothing’s going on in that church, Teagan,” Berg was saying. “It might even be a neighbor playing a prank on the new folks in town. Tell me about the Petersons’ kids.”
“Liam is eleven and Sophie is seven, and thankfully, they’re gone for the weekend. So you’ve been inside that church?”
“A lifetime ago.”
“It doesn’t look postmodern industrial, like so many churches do these days. That limestone—”
“From a quarry in Indiana.”
“The cross on the roof and the bell tower. Not to mention the stained glass. Why did it close?”
“There were several factors, the most important ones being a lack of money and a missing priest.”
The oven timer beeped. “I’ll get the pies. You keep talking.”
“Make sure they’re done.”
I opened the oven door and took a step back to avoid the blast of heat. “Golden brown crust, bubbling apple filling.”
“Ah.”
Taking a potholder from the counter, I carefully removed the pies and set them on the counter to cool. “Smells like heaven, Berg.”
“The day the Reverend Lloyd went missing,” he said, “a woman arranging flowers in the sanctuary found a few drops of blood near the altar. It wasn’t much, so it didn’t raise an alarm. Even the woman didn’t think a whole lot of it. People injure themselves on rose thorns or when they cut flowers, she said.”
“Do they know if it was Lloyd’s blood?” I asked, retaking my seat.
“The blood was scrubbed away, so DNA testing was out of the question. The flower woman didn’t mention seeing it until she learned Lloyd had been absent two days without a word to a soul. Not the church, not his extended family. He vanished, and no one ever knew what became of him.”
“Until now.”
“I’m afraid you may be right. After Lloyd went missing, the rumors started, and they grew more outlandish by the month. Lloyd was living with a young woman in Canada, he’d stolen money from the church, he’d changed his name and left the state, he’d joined a cult and was sneaking into the church at night to blaspheme God.”
“Holy cow. So they didn’t like him.”
“I think some of them did, until he disappeared. Anyway, the church, which had been losing congregants before this happened, fell apart, even though several temporary priests took over and were by all accounts good men. Eighteen months after Lloyd vanished, the church’s financial situation was untenable. That was fortuitous for the Petersons, since it led to them being able to purchase the place. None of the other churches in Wells needed or wanted the land or building.”
“That’s a shame. All churches should look like St. Michael’s.”
“We should get a move on.”
Berg grimaced as he rose, and he took a minute to work the kinks out of his legs. His arthritis was manageable if he kept moving, he told me once, but after he’d been sitting for a while, only more movement—forced movement—would oil his chassis.
I put my coat on and took up the box of donuts. “Who’s the second pie for?”
“Joanne Millhouse, my neighbor to the north. While I’m gone she’s collecting my mail, feeding my fish, and keeping an eye on the place, so a pie in return is the least I can do.”
“Almost forgot. Do you have a sleeping bag? The pews are padded but they’re narrow.”
“You know these old bones don’t sleep.”
“You’ll have to sleep at some point. We can take turns using mine.”
“I’d rather get up off a narrow pew than the floor, Teagan.”
“So you can use my sleeping bag on the pew. I’ll get the Peterson pie.”
Berg grabbed his coat from a hall closet and walked alongside me to his door, hand on my shoulder. “We’ll do fine. Remember why we chose this path.”
“You made a choice, Berg. I just stumbled into it.”
“Nonsense. Have you told the Petersons you’re a police officer?”
“I never graduated, as you well know, and besides, that was years ago.”
“They might find comfort in knowing you were at the academy and were well trained.”
As we started down the brick path for my car, I pulled my keys from my coat pocket and clicked the remote. “You’re as worried as I am, aren’t you?”
“A touch concerned. Show me those photos before we drive off.”
While I laid the pie in the cargo section, Berg backed up to the passenger seat, sat, and then swung his legs until he was inside, facing front. I climbed into the driver’s seat and showed him the photo of the murdered man.
“It looks like his throat was cut,” he said. “I never met the Reverend Lloyd, so I can’t tell if this is him.”
“The note’s in block letters, not cursive. Swipe the screen.”
Berg did so.
“If the body is Lloyd, who’s Jack?” I asked. “And what’s with the Latin?”
He stared silently at the screen. After a minute he gave me my phone back and tilted his head at the steering wheel, which I interpreted as the signal to start driving.
Berg was a talkative guy. It wasn’t like him to clam up.
CHAPTER 3
We drove in silence until we reached the Peterson home, and when we arrived, we found Carissa waiting for us outside the church. She stood on the top step, her smallish body framed by the church’s cranberry red doors. Wearing a coat and green knit cap, her cheeks pink in the cold air, she looked like she’d been outside the whole time. Relief flooded her face when I exited the SUV.
Berg didn’t like me to watch him as he struggled out of a car. “Don’t coddle me,” he’d say. So I grabbed my donuts and six pack of Coke, then focused my attention on Carissa, meeting her halfway up the steps. Thank goodness there was a concrete ramp to my right.
“You found your donuts,” she said.
I gestured behind me. “They’re a gift from Berg.”
“Berg?”
“Short for Bergland.”
“Yes, of course. I’m so glad you came back.”
“Remember, we’re staying the night.”
She nodded vigorously. “I’ll put your Cokes the fridge.” She reached out and took the six pack.
From the corner of my eye I was relieved to see Berg, an obstinate man i
f ever there was one, giving in to reality and making his way up the ramp rather than hobbling up the steps.
“Is he okay?” Carissa whispered.
“No worries.”
When Berg reached her, he stuck out his hand. “Mrs. Peterson, John Bergland.”
“I was just telling Teagan I’m so glad you’re here. I’ve made a late lunch and kept it warm. Soup and sandwiches?”
“Delicious,” Berg said.
We followed Carissa past the sanctuary and into the kitchen, the aromas of tomato soup and grilled cheese greeting us, their homeyness soothing my worked-up nerves.
“After lunch, we’d like to take a tour of the whole building,” I said, laying the donut box on the table, slipping out of my coat. “Is Matt still here?”
“He’s replacing a rotten floorboard in the old church library. We’ve been afraid the kids would fall through. It’s hard to believe the church let things get this bad.” She set down two bowls of soup and two plates, a fat cheddar cheese sandwich on each, and gripped the back of a chair. “I can heat it up more if it got too cold.”
“No, no, it smells delicious,” Berg said. “Thank you, Mrs. Peterson.”
“You can call me Carissa.”
“And you can call me Berg.” He hooked his cane on the table, took a small bite of his sandwich, and pulled his soup bowl closer. “Wonderful. The taste reminds me of all the good parts of my childhood.”
At the compliment, Carissa relaxed her grip.
“I’d like to hear your take on events,” Berg said.
Carissa sat and immediately began to squirm in her seat and toy with her locket necklace. “I’m not a nervous person. I want you to know that up front. I don’t have an overactive imagination, and I’m not the hysterical type.”
“We never thought you were,” Berg said. “Far from it. This is a serious matter that requires serious attention.”
“Yes, thank you, it does. I was sure you’d think I was a ninny. I mean, after I phoned Teagan. Right? I must have sounded childish.”
Chasing Angels (Teagan Doyle Mysteries Book 1) Page 2