huge parish hall past Clare’s office, the church office, and something labeled “the Chapter Room” and then doglegged into the church. This time, the lights were on. Clare was at the high altar again, putting out the candles with a four-foot-long brass snuffer. As it died, each candle sent a ribbon of smoke streaming up toward the gloomy reaches above, veiling the elaborately carved wooden reredos mounted on the wall behind the altar. The air was full of the smell of smoke and beeswax and stone.
“So, nobody came to the service tonight?” he asked, stepping hard on the floor so as not to startle her.
“Hmm? No, I hadn’t scheduled Evening Prayer. I just wanted to read the office of Compline for myself. I could have done it at home, but every once in a while I like to come here without it being a job requirement.” She finished the snuffing and swung the gently curved brass pole over her shoulder. “I’m discovering that I have to work at making this my place of worship, and not just my place of employment.” She descended the steps from the high altar and slid the end of the candle snuffer into its wooden stand near the wall. “Sometimes, when I’m leading the whole congregation in the Eucharist, I find myself thinking about what I have to do next—whether I remembered to tell the crucifer to stand up before the final hymn, and if I’ll able to get Mrs. so-and-so to volunteer to lead the white-elephant sale. I didn’t expect that when I became a priest.”
“Huh. I never thought about it like that. I imagined someone could easily get burned-out doing the social-work part of the job. I guess I always figured priests and ministers kind of entered another world when they did their”— he stopped himself again, this time before saying “mumbo jumbo”—“worshiping thing.” Lame.
She dug into her chinos and pulled out a jangle of keys. “I wish. Maybe there’s something to be said for religions that engage in ecstatic rituals.”
He wasn’t sure what that was—it sounded sort of sexual. He figured it was better not to ask.
“As for me, I get charged up by the social-work side of it, as you aptly put it. I love counseling and visiting and helping people. Ah, here it is.” She dangled the key ring from an old-fashioned long key that looked as if it had been cast a century ago. “Main doors. No, for me, it’s the sacramental side I have difficulty with.” She headed off down the center aisle. He fell into step beside her. “I wish I could be more like some of the students I knew at the seminary. You could just see the Holy Spirit working through them. Like it came out of their eyes. Makes me feel like a ‘sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.’ ”
He wasn’t sure what that meant either, but he could guess it wasn’t someone with spirits shining from their eyes.
She swung one of the great double doors open. “Get the lights, will you? There, on the right.” The air outside was warm and flower-sweet. She tugged the door into place and locked it.
“I’m glad to see you lock something,” he said.
She looked up at him as she pocketed the keys. There was just enough twilight to see the prim expression on her face. “The church,” she said, “does not belong to me.”
“I’ll walk you back to your place before I go.”
“The rectory is the first house on this street. It’s all of fifty yards down the sidewalk.”
“Yeah, well, I also parked my cruiser in your driveway.”
“Ah. Okay, then.”
They walked in silence to the rectory. He opened his cruiser door, and she stopped on her lawn, halfway to the front porch. “Good night, then,” he said. “Thanks for letting me use your office. And you did right, letting Lyle know right away about McKinley.”
She shrugged. “I just hope you don’t find he’s loaned his truck to his aged mother and has been spending his nights working at the food pantry.”
“I don’t think there’s much chance of that.” He leaned on the door frame a moment, instead of sliding directly into the car.
She looked down at her sneakers. “So.” She looked up at him, her face faintly etched by the light from the corner lamppost. “Am I forgiven?”
“What, for speaking your mind?”
He saw the flash of her grin. “No, I can’t honestly say I’ve ever repented speaking my mind. I meant for how I did it. Hurting your feelings.”
He was going to say his feelings didn’t matter one way or another, that you take a hit and you keep on going, but he realized he would sound like an outtake from a Knute Rockne biopic. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, you are.”
A flash again in the darkness as she smiled. She turned toward the porch. “Hey, Clare,” he said. She turned back toward him. “You know that Holy Spirit thing?”
“Yeah?”
“I think you’ve got a little shine, too.”
Chapter Seventeen
Russ was parked behind number 2 Causeway Street when Elliott McKinley finally made it home. Russ’s squad car was strategically wedged between the sagging two- car garage moldering at the rear of the lot and the rooming house Dumpster behind it. No one had emptied the Dumpster in a long time. He tried rolling his windows up to keep the smell to a bearable level, but as the sun rose and the morning heated up, he began to feel like a hunk of grizzled beef in a slow cooker. He wound up opening his door and praying for an upwind breeze.
He had been there since their shift change at 6:00 A.M. The neighborhood had been emptying out when he arrived, since even those who had had Monday as a holiday were back to work today. He had listened as the Chevy Camaros and the ten-year-old Skylarks and the occasional tiny import fired up and headed off for the first shift at the G.E. plant in Hudson Falls, or the software-packaging plant in Fort Henry, or to construction sites and auto- repair shops. Causeway Street was a neighborhood that worked in shifts, round the clock. At 4:00 P.M., all the bartenders and waitresses and bouncers would be off to the honky-tonks or the fake rodeos that lined the roads up to Lake George, or to hushed white-linen restaurants that had been serving the summering rich since Teddy Roosevelt’s administration. Finally, at 10:00 or 11:00 P.M., the cleaning women and the night clerks would leave, returning too sleepy-eyed in the morning to give much thought to a few cop cars passing them in the streets.
Russ, Noble Entwhistle, and Eric McCrea had taken over from Lyle and Mark. Eric and Noble were in an unmarked car parked a few doors down from the rooming house. Eric made a radio check religiously every fifteen minutes, reporting that nothing had happened in the last quarter of an hour. That, the bluebottle buzz of flies
