One Was a Soldier

Okay. I can get through today. She wouldn’t be tempted to drink before early evening, and she’d burn that bridge when she got to it.

It was a relentlessly busy morning; a 7:00 A.M. Eucharist, a stack of phone calls to get through, then a sermon to draft. She struggled with it; Sunday’s gospel was Matthew, the Great Commandment, but her attention kept circling back to the beginning of the passage. One of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. It brought back the nightmare she had had, with her old SERE instructor quoting scripture at her while Russ’s body burned.

She was grateful when Lois, the church secretary, interrupted her. “Your mother phoned. She asked me to tell you the florist is coming over this afternoon to look at the space and take measurements.” Clare had taken to letting Lois handle as many maternal calls as possible. The secretary actually seemed to enjoy debating the virtues of tulle versus netting for the sugared-almond favor bags. “Magnolia swags and gold-sprayed live oak,” Lois went on. “Very romantic.”

“For Tidewater Virginia in June. Too bad I’m getting married in November in the North Country.” Clare looked down at her crossed-out paragraphs and scribbled notes. “I guess I’m not going to be able to leave until after I’ve spoken to the florist. If I get a call from a Colonel Arlene Seelye, will you keep her on the line and track me down?”

“I will.” Lois retreated down the hall, humming “Here Comes the Bride.”

“No Lohengrin !” Clare shouted.

Her practice of writing her sermon on Wednesday served two functions: It gave her enough time between then and Sunday to come up with something else if her first try was crap, and it made her positively happy to have her solitude broken by the lunchtime vestry meeting.

This week’s meeting was brisk. Twenty minutes to cover Gail Jones’s education budget and the feasibility of an energy audit; forty minutes of Clare listening to Terry McKellan and Norm Madsen and Mrs. Marshall waxing on about their own nuptials. It was sweet and charming, and it made her uncomfortably aware that Russ had been part of this club, too, long married and happy to be so.

Clearly, I should keep out of your business. Like Linda did. God, she was an idiot. As if Russ needed a reminder of the difference between Clare and his late wife. His beloved wife.

She was cleaning up after the meeting when Glenn Hadley stuck his head in the door. “Summun in the sanctuary to see you, Father.”

She was always “Father” to the sexton. She handed him a tray loaded with uneaten sandwiches. “Thanks, Mr. Hadley. Would you put this in the icebox downstairs?”

“Ayuh.”

She sniffed. “Were you smoking?” The sexton’s granddaughter, Hadley Knox, had enlisted Clare’s help in keeping the seventy-six-year-old diabetic away from cigarettes.

“Me, Father? You know the doctors told me not to.”

She rolled her eyes as she walked down the hall toward the church. Short of following him around all day, she didn’t know how anyone could keep the old fellow from indulging. She switched on the nave lights and hauled the oak door open. If a heart attack and a quadruple bypass couldn’t convince him to-

Quentan Nichols was standing in the center aisle.

Clare froze. Behind her, the heavy door whispered closed. Despite the soaring space, the thick stone walls of St. Alban’s seemed to close in around her. Lois was running errands on her lunch hour. Mr. Hadley was in the undercroft. No one would hear her if she screamed.

Nichols took a step toward her. Frowned. She tensed, ready to bolt for the hall.

“Major Fergusson?” His voice was uncertain. He took another step toward her. “I mean, Reverend Fergusson?”

Clare nodded. Cleared her throat. “Chief Nichols. I’m…” Surprised didn’t begin to cover it. “What are you doing here?”

“It is you.” He relaxed, which wasn’t the relief it might have been, since he seemed to be all muscle. He was in mufti-khakis and a turtleneck sweater. “You look different.” He touched his throat. “I mean, beyond the collar and all.”

“I’m growing my hair out.” Idiot. The man was a possible killer, a probable thief, and likely absent without leave as well. And she was talking about her hair. “There are several people here. In the offices. And I’m expecting a visitor any moment.”

He held up his hands. “Whoa. I’m not gonna hurt you.” He took one step, two, and as Clare rocked onto the balls of her feet, ready to run, he sat in the first pew. At the far side of the aisle. He spread his arms across the back of the pew and rested his hands over the smooth, dark wood. “I need your help.”

Well. That, at least, was familiar. “Go on.”

“You knew Tally.”

“Yes, I did.” She relaxed enough to take a more comfortable stance. “I don’t know how you knew that, though.”

“She told me about her therapy group. The doctor, the cop, the Marine and Episcopal priest.” He shrugged. “I Googled ‘Episcopal church in Millers Kill.’ When I saw your name, I figured there’s no way there are two woman priests who were also vets. Leastways not in a dinky town like this.”

“Tally told you about her group.”

“We talked, yeah. A couple times. I was-” He shook his head. “It’s complicated. I don’t know where to start.”

“How about where you helped her steal a million dollars?”

“I didn’t! I mean, yeah, I guess in a way I did.” He looked ahead, at the stained glass triptych behind the high altar. Christus Victor. Christ, victorious over death and sin. “I didn’t mean to.”

This, too, was familiar. A person sitting opposite her, talking around and over and between the problem, taking his time because getting to the point meant getting to the pain. She sighed. Sat down in the pew on the near side of the aisle. Faced Nichols, her hands relaxed and open. Listening. “Tell me about when you met Tally.”

He smiled a little. “It was my second tour. Hers, too. I was stationed at Balad. After the insurgency took hold, it was the most secure airfield in the country. Crazy busy. Planes flying in from everywhere, day and night. Everybody in the world passing through-reporters and security contractors and politicians. I saw that guy from The Daily Show once. Anyway, Tally’s company was staging out of there. They had a construction project going, shoring up some old buildings. Tally told me it was going to be the in-country version of a Federal Reserve Bank. She was going back and forth between Balad and Camp Anaconda, which was stressing her big-time.”

Clare nodded. Ground travel was tense. Taking long trips over the same highways, you figured every time you didn’t get blown up just brought you closer to the time you would.

“We met at the club. She asked me if I knew where she could get some booze, and she just about died when I told her I was a cop.” He glanced at Clare’s collar. “We, um, started spending time together. You know.”

“Uh-huh.” She wondered where Wyler McNabb fit into the picture. “Did she ever mention her husband?”

“She said he was a civilian.” He shrugged. “At the start, I didn’t care. I mean, people were jumping in and out of the sack all the time. Nobody checking for rings. By the end”-he tilted his head back-“I pretty much convinced myself he was history.” He looked at her. Smiled humorlessly. “To look at me, you wouldn’t think I could get played so bad, would you?”

“She asked you to do something for her.”

“Oh, yeah.” He heaved a breath. “She did. Asked me to keep my patrol away from a storage building. Tell my team anything they saw around one of the hangars was authorized. For one day. That should have been the tip-off it was something big. People smuggle in booze or dope or other contraband, they’ve got drops. Regular customers. A supply chain. One-off, that’s got to be something big.”

“You didn’t know what was going on?”

“I didn’t want