“That’s part of it, but mostly because as soon as I spoke about my retirement to the diocese, he was in. Just like that, and ahead of what anyone would’ve thought to be better qualified candidates. Four years an undergraduate, three years a graduate, and four months an ordained deacon before becoming a priest and promptly taking over St. Michael’s. That, my friend, is a fast track if ever there was one. I didn’t find this out right away, of course. Only after I stuck my nose in and asked around—and got slapped down for it by more than one person. But I still considered the congregation my flock, and I wasn’t going to leave them to the tender mercies of a nonbeliever. Not that I had any say in it.”
“What did the congregation think of Lloyd?” I asked.
“They liked him at first. He was very bright, very personable. They thought he’d clear the cobwebs, I think. Take the church in a new and vibrant direction, however they put it these days.”
“But membership declined a couple months after he came in,” I said. “I’ve been looking at records that were left in the church office.”
Reft frowned. “Records in the church office? They should’ve been turned over to the diocese. Not that I’m surprised they weren’t.” He shook his head sadly. “That office . . . the poor office manager—my office manager, Patty Nordwall.”
“Did she stay on?” Berg asked.
“She resigned after seven months. A dedicated woman who’d given so much to the church had to resign. Let me tell you something. When I left St. Michael’s, the church was in apple-pie financial shape. Six weeks after Lloyd arrived, donations began to fall.”
“And after six months they’d plummeted,” I said.
Reft took a long, slow breath, as if what he had to say next was necessary but personally painful. “I also believe money was disappearing from the donations, and I don’t mean a few dollars skimmed from Sunday offering plates. The recorded donation totals didn’t match what I observed during services and what I knew of the congregation. Patty clued me in on that. And before you ask, that woman ran the office with complete honesty for all my five years. She wouldn’t have taken one cent, and I’d stake my reputation on that.”
“How much money are we talking about?” Berg asked.
“As far as Patty could work out, it was a couple hundred a month to begin with, but that quickly became a few thousand. Eventually the online giving totals fell by half too, but I knew many people who were giving the same amount each month they always had. They didn’t understand why we had to cancel some much-needed church repairs.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Repairs to the bell and bell tower. We wanted to hear that bell ring again.”
“The diocese must have been concerned about the donations,” Berg said. “What did they have to say?”
“They pointed to the decline in membership, though at that point the decline was still relatively small. To my shame, I didn’t press the matter, and bureaucratic inertia meant no one else pressed it.”
“You did more than most would,” Berg said. “How did the church fare under the temporary priests?”
“In those twenty-two months, St. Michael’s never recovered financially. The diocese tried to keep it afloat and tried to bring in a permanent priest, but it was as though the church had been tainted. Finally, they had no choice but to close it as a church and put it on the open market.” Reft reached into his jacket pocket, produced a slip of paper, and gave it to Berg. “My phone number so you can reach me directly if you think of any more questions. Call anytime. I live just outside of town, about five minutes from the church. I looked into you, Mr. Bergland. I hope you don’t mind.”
“I’d expect nothing less.”
“Your reputation is stellar, even among us Episcopalians. Can I ask what brings you to St. Michael’s, given your specialty?”
“The present owners, the Petersons, have experienced unusual phenomena in the church, and since Teagan and I have been there, we’ve experienced much of the same. Have you heard about Weston Meyer’s murder?”
Reft shook his head. “Who’s Weston Meyer?”
“A psychic hired by the Petersons. His body was found last night on the church lawn. His throat had been cut.”
Reft’s jaw dropped. “What?”
“I’m sorry, I thought you might have heard about the body.”
“My wife and I don’t get the paper, and we leave the radio off until the afternoon. He was murdered at the church? But why?”
“No one knows yet. The only connection we’re sure of is that the Petersons hired him to—what was it, Teagan?”
“Psychically cleanse the church,” I said.
“What the blazes?” Reft said disdainfully. “But you know what? That doesn’t surprise me. The new age or occult, whatever you term it, was making headway in this church before the Petersons bought it, and Lloyd was leading the way. I don’t think he was a priest in any sense of the word.”
“Do you know Ray and Hattie Nickle?” I asked him.
Still reeling from news of a murder on his former church’s doorstep, he looked at me blankly for a moment before saying, “The names don’t ring a bell. Are they parishioners?”
“I seriously doubt it.”
“Would you like me to ask around?”
“Please.”
I slipped him my card.
Reft stared absently ahead, thoughtfully scratching his chin and rocking slightly in his seat. “I heard Lloyd’s throat was cut too. I know people with the police. Any connection between the two men?”
“Not that we know of,” Berg said.
“So you have two problems at St. Michael’s. One worldly and one otherworldly.”
“I believe you’ve nailed it,” Berg said.
“Let me poke around. I’m mostly outside the loop now, but I know people who are still in it.”
Berg reached back to shake his hand. “We would greatly appreciate that. Thank you.”
“I should thank you,” Reft said, popping open the door. “Talking about Lloyd has been a weight off my mind. Maybe I can do now what I didn’t do when he was alive, which is find out what he was up to.”
Berg and I said goodbye, and I watched Reft get back into his car and drive off with a wave, the Honda disappearing into the fog.
“Did you look into Reft like he looked into you?” I asked Berg.
“My friend vouched for him. Reft is a good man.”
“That’s refreshing. I’ve been thinking about what you asked me. How Ray Nickle got my card. He says someone gave it to him at a meeting, and we both know that’s rubbish, but he did have one of my cards because Matt said he gave it to Carissa. It’s not like I hand those things out like candy to kids. A handful of them have gone to clients or people like Reft.” I started the engine. “I need to make a few phone calls.”
CHAPTER 15
Before heading back to the church, I drove slowly down Oliver Street, toward house number 1051. The fog gave us a little cover from the Nickles, I thought, but it also made it more difficult to see who was out and about and if we could interrupt them at whatever they were doing.
When Berg and I spotted a neighbor two houses up from the Nickles’ home collecting his morning newspaper from the end of his drive, I did a U-turn, pulled up to his curb, and rolled down my window.
“Good morning,” I said cheerfully. “Have you seen a little dog running loose? A Jack Russell terrier?”
“Oh, not again,” the man said.
At least he was smiling.
“He’s an escape artist, isn’t he?”
He strolled up to my window. “Ray and Hattie need to fix their fence. How long has he been missing?”
“We’re not sure.”
“I usually find him in my yard. He’s a friendly little guy, but he digs out of his yard and into mine. If I had any sense, I’d pour concrete in the holes he makes, but he’d just find another place to dig. Anyway, he’s not there now so I don’t know where he is.”
/> “He ends up in your yard?”
“Most of the time. He loves my dog. Sometimes he wanders, but not often. He’s going to get hit by a car one of these days.”
“Especially in this fog.”
“Yeah, it’s not good. Rusty’s a little guy, too, and with no fear of traffic.”
“Rusty?” I asked, doing my best to appear unruffled.
“The dog.” The man frowned. “Are we talking about the same Jack Russell?”
“The Nickles’ dog,” I said.
“Yeah, his name’s Rusty. It’s Ray and Hattie’s only dog. They’ve had him for ages.”
“Oh, I know what happened. We thought his name was Jack”—I gestured toward Berg—“but we confused his name with his breed.”
The man wasn’t buying my line. “How long have you known the Nickles?”
“We met them at the church yesterday afternoon, when they were searching for Rusty.”
That cooled his suspicions. “Yeah, he did get out yesterday, but I haven’t seen him today. Well, gotta go. Freezin’ out here. Good luck.” He spun around and hurried inside.
“Not exactly smooth on my part,” I said, driving for the church, “but we got what we wanted. The address on his mailbox was 1043. Gotta remember that.”
Deep in thought—I was familiar with the expression on his face—Berg simply grunted his agreement.
Back at St. Michael’s, we called out for the Petersons but heard nothing. I locked the front doors behind us and made my way to the kitchen to put away my stash of sugar and caffeine.
“Mind making some coffee?” Berg said, taking a chair at the table. “I need to find a locksmith.”
“It’s going to be a long night, isn’t it?” I said, prying open the Schneider’s Coffee bag. “That was a rhetorical question.”
“Yes, it’s going to be a long one.”
He scrolled through his phone contacts and I started the coffee brewing. Then I took Carissa’s tin box from on top of the fridge, sat, and dug through her large assortment of business cards until I found mine. On the back I’d scribbled, “Anything about Cleary.” Voilà. The second Berg got off the phone, I showed it to him.
“Cleary. I remember that name,” he said. “This is from your second case, in Loveland.”
“I put that card directly in Owen Draper’s hands. He said he had a business acquaintance who could tell him about Cleary, but it turned out to be a bust.” I rose, retrieved my phone from my pocket, then took off my coat and slung it over my chair. “I’ll be out in the hall. Any success with a locksmith?”
“Not yet, hold your horses.”
Thank goodness I rarely culled my phone’s contacts, because Owen Draper’s cell number was still on the list. I dialed, and when I didn’t get an answer, I sent him a text, emphasizing that my request—to whom had he given that card?—was urgent.
In the kitchen, I poured two cups of coffee and found the stainless jug of milk in the fridge. “I should have bought cream,” I said. “Milk dilutes coffee, makes it too watery. Cream or even half and half is much better. It takes away the bitterness without altering the flavor too much. It just mellows it. Mellows the acidic taste, I mean.”
“Is that right?”
Berg was off his phone. In truth, I was talking about nothing and everything so he wouldn’t return to my run-in with Hattie. And though he knew what I was doing, as I babbled about milk versus cream, he let me off the hook.
“I found a locksmith,” he said. “He’ll be here in two hours.”
I set his cup down, sat down with mine, and spooned in a little milk. “It’s a Saturday miracle.”
“He’s an elder from my old church, so more of a kindness than a miracle. Anything from Owen Draper?”
“He didn’t answer his phone, but I texted him.”
“Good. Do you know anything about book binding?”
“Very little. I wonder where Ray worked as a binder. If he worked as a binder. Maybe he was self-employed.”
I proceeded to focus on drinking my coffee, on hating the taste of the watery milk, hoping that would drive Hattie’s demented little-girl grin from my thoughts. True evil roamed the earth—that was something I’d learned before meeting Berg—but I’d never encountered the sort of living, breathing evil that could—could what? Read my thoughts? Read my soul? Hit me where it hurt most?
“The Nickles don’t seem to be on social media,” Berg said.
“They’re not anywhere on the internet. Smart Satanists fly under the radar.”
How was it that Hattie had welcomed such evil into her heart? Had she made a bargain with it or had she simply caved to it, deciding evil was the easier path? It so often was. Evil had its earthly rewards, after all. True demonic possession of the soul was exceedingly rare, but how many people allowed evil to occupy their minds and hearts?
“I don’t think they’re Satanists the way you mean it,” Berg said, “with meetings and rituals. They strike me as an unaffiliated group of two, and that makes them much more dangerous.”
“I think one of them killed Weston Meyer.”
“Or had him killed. I can’t see Hattie cutting the throat of a man who’s thirty years younger and a foot taller.”
“Nor Ray, really. But I can see both of them spreading red paint around the sanctuary.”
“I’ve been reading that book, A History of St. Michael’s. It begins with its construction as a Methodist Church and ends ten years ago, before its sale to the Episcopal Church. I’m surprised the book was in the office, actually. It’s not a church book, it was written by a professor at the University of Colorado, and it goes into great detail about the controversy surrounding its construction.”
My text tone sounded. I flipped my phone right side up on the table. “It’s Draper. He says he was at a dinner party, mentioned my name and yours, and gave my card to Madame Lebec, who asked if he had one.” My gaze rose to Berg.
“The woman who acted as if she didn’t want either of us here—”
“Was responsible for bringing us here. But she already knew how to contact you.”
“I doubt she knew your name, Teagan.”
“So she gave my card to Ray Nickle?”
Berg rested his elbows on the table. “Who then, out of neighborly goodwill, I’m sure, handed it to Carissa.”
I texted a thanks to Draper and finished my coffee, my thoughts tumbling in a dozen different directions. “Lebec and the Nickles,” I said after a minute. “They’re in this together. Maybe Meyer too, in some way.”
“It’s starting to look like it.”
“What were you saying about that history book?”
“That this church’s construction was controversial to some in town. In order to build it, they had to tear down a house belonging to an occultist by the name of Thaddeus Meyer.”
“Meyer?”
“I don’t know if there’s a family connection.”
“What are the odds?”
“The house was falling apart, becoming an eyesore, so most of the town wanted it gone, but a handful wanted to help Meyer fix it up. He died of a heart attack during negotiations, and the town took over his house, tore it down, and built this church. Meyer’s followers wanted to bury him in what used to be his back yard, but that was out of the question.”
“Where’s he buried?”
“The book doesn’t say.”
“Maybe his followers buried him in the basement and now he’s a poltergeist.”
“That ‘house built on a haunted Indian burial ground’ stuff is ridiculous, but others might believe in it. Or they might believe that the land this church is on is by rights theirs.” He shrugged halfheartedly. “Well, it’s another scrap of information that may or may not lead to anything.”
We finished our coffees, and I took our cups to the sink, telling Berg I was going to the sanctuary to do some research, including trying to discover who Weston Meyer’s descendants were. He said he’d be there in a minute. He didn’t follo
w me down the hall, as I thought he’d do, but then it was daytime and quiet in the church. He knew I was relatively at ease.
Something was weighing heavily on his mind, but I knew from working with him that he wasn’t going to offer me fragments of a fledgling theory. Theories, if well thought out, were important to our cases, but for Berg, throwing any old theory against the wall just to see if it stuck diverted us from finding a real explanation for the phenomena we encountered.
When I’d said Lebec and the Nickles were working together, he’d held back a bit, saying it was starting to look like it. Maybe, possibly. But I was certain.
Berg had probably found himself on the wrong track often enough that he knew when not to make a definitive statement, and all the more since taking me on as a colleague. He didn’t want me going off half-cocked, as was my nature. He once told me that my new name on the New Earth, written on a white stone and given to me by Jesus himself, would be “Warning: Dynamite.” He was only half joking.
To be fair, he’d also said my half-cocked theories turned out right more often than wrong.
I sat in my pew, my still-open sleeping bag at my feet, computer on my lap. I began my research with Thaddeus Meyer—at which point Berg returned and began to pore over the church office binder—and moved on to Lebec and Weston Meyer, exploring websites, news stories, and even social media and paranormal forums. An hour later I’d compiled some juicy information.
Needing to recharge my laptop, I took it to the kitchen, plugged it in, and then went back to the sanctuary, Quick Mart donut bag in hand.
“Berg.”
He looked up from the binder and twisted back in his pew.
“Thaddeus Meyer was Weston Meyer’s great-grandfather.” I moved up a pew and sat directly behind him. “Something well known in the psychic community, if you’ll pardon the expression.”
“Weston and his great-grandfather died on the same Meyer piece of land.”
“Weston was into the occult too—I mean, beyond his psychic cleansing—though not nearly as much as Thaddeus, who was a bona fide snake in the grass. No wonder the people of Wells were in favor of tearing down his house. But listen, if we’re dealing with an evil presence and occultists, why would Weston be murdered? If anything, Weston would be the killer, not the victim.”
Chasing Angels (Teagan Doyle Mysteries Book 1) Page 11