All Mortal Flesh

the church?”

He grinned. “Am I that obvious?” He held out his hand. “Ben Beagle, from the Post- Star.”

“Well, you have this slightly rumpled, Front Page kind of look going on.” She shook his hand, all the while thinking, Crap! What do I say? What do I do? She didn’t think that a word in the right ear, as Mrs. Marshall suggested, was going to do much good. On the other hand, looking at the reporter’s cheerful, intelligent face, she knew she couldn’t threaten him with a suit for slander. Or libel. Whatever.

Then his name registered. There couldn’t be more than one Ben Beagle. “You do investigative stuff for the Post-Star, right? Didn’t you win an award?”

He nodded, his cheeks pinkening. “Believe me, most of the day-to-day stuff is much less sexy. A few weeks ago the biggest story I had was a part-time farmer who lost a pig to somebody who decided to help himself to a Christmas ham right there in the sty.”

She blinked. Every once in a while, she got a visceral reminder of exactly how rural her parish was. “I see your point. I guess Woodward and Bernstein didn’t get to investigate many hog butcherings.”

He laughed. “No.” He pulled a small notebook out of his pocket and flipped it open. “I’m working on something much more significant this week. The death of Linda Van Alstyne. You’ve heard that she was killed.” It was not a question.

“A terrible tragedy.” How had he known? She didn’t think the murder victim’s identity had been released to the press yet.

Beagle was evidently a mind reader, because he tilted his head toward the other side of the church, where a woman sat hard against the stone of the north wall. “I was contacted by Debbie Wolecski, Mrs. Van Alstyne’s sister.”

Clare had crashed a helo once. She had walked away from it-barely-but she had never forgotten the anxious accumulation of problems, blossoming into the realization that she was screwed. She had that same feeling now.

“I don’t know if I can help you,” she said. “I only met Mrs. Van Alstyne a couple of times.”

“But you do know her husband.”

She decided to brazen it out. “Of course. Russ and I are good friends. We have lunch together almost every Wednesday at the Kreemy Kakes Diner, barring urgent police business or pastoral emergencies.”

“According to Mrs. Van Alstyne’s sister, you two were more than just good friends.”

Clare forced a small smile. “We live in a small town, and there are always people who are going to find it impossible to believe a man and a woman can be friends.” Lacking pockets in her alb, she slid her hands inside her sleeves and clenched her forearms. Her flesh was icy. “The chief of police and I have a lot of professional interests in common. We’re both trying to serve the well-being of the people of Millers Kill.”

“So… does the chief also have regular meetings with the Presbyterian and Baptist ministers?”

“Uh… I really don’t know,” she answered truthfully.

“You know that two weeks before she died, Linda Van Alstyne asked her husband to leave their marital home.”

Clare nodded.

“According to Debbie Wolecski, that was because Russ Van Alstyne told his wife that he was having an affair with you.”

Clare closed her eyes for a moment. “Mr. Beagle-”

“Call me Ben,” he said cheerfully.

“Ben. I don’t know exactly what the chief said to his wife before or after their decision to separate, but I’m dead sure it wasn’t that we were having an affair. May I suggest that thirdhand quotes from a grief-stricken family member who was speaking to a woman struggling through a crisis point in her twenty-year marriage might not be the most reliable information in the world?”

“So, you’re saying you and Russ Van Alstyne weren’t involved in a relationship?”

God, she hated this. If she told the truth, she’d be throwing Russ to the wolves, and if she sidled around it, she’d be painting Linda Van Alstyne as a jealous, paranoid woman.

That was it. She could tell the truth about not being able to tell the truth.

“Anything I say at this point is going to reflect badly on Mrs. Van Alstyne and probably cause pain to her sister. I’m not going to do that.”

He nodded. “How long have you been here at St. Alban’s?”

“Uh.” She thought he’d keep pressing her about Russ. His switch to another topic threw her. “A little over two years.”

“Where were you before this?”

She snorted. “At seminary. And before that, in the army.”

He grinned. “Interesting career choice.”

“It kind of chose me.”

“Hah. Right. Well, thanks for talking with me.” From the depths of his parka, a cell phone began to ring. “If I have any other questions, I’ll call you.”

I’ll make sure I’m out, she thought. Beagle checked the number and half-turned away from her to take the call.

She headed up the aisle toward the sacristy, eager to shed her alb and stole and get into her office, where there was at least an occasional wheeze of hot air from the vent. Something tickled in the back of her mind, something off, but it wasn’t until she was stripping the alb over her head that she realized: The woman who had been sitting near the north wall had disappeared. There was no way she could have gotten past Clare at the main entrance, which meant that she had to be back in the offices or in the parish hall.

Maybe Linda Van Alstyne’s sister had to use the ladies’ room before leaving.

Maybe the archbishop of Canterbury was going to come through the door to congratulate her on a job well done. Clare hung up the long white robe, checked herself in the sacristy mirror-hair still up in its usual knot, blouse buttons done up around her clerical collar, no obvious lint clinging to her long black skirt-and strode down the hall toward her office.

She didn’t make it very far. Debbie Wolecski stood in the doorway, arms crossed, glaring at Clare. Linda Van Alstyne had been a beautiful woman, and her sister had traces of her looks in her large blue eyes and her delicate bone structure. But Debbie Wolecski’s features had been dried to hardtack by a lifetime of Florida sun, and the roundness that had softened her sister had been ruthlessly banished. Clare could see Wolecski’s collarbones slicing across the neckline of her skimpy sweater.

“I want to talk to you,” the woman said.

“All right.” Clare gestured toward the door. “Do you want to come into-”

“My sister would be alive right now if it weren’t for you.”

Clare gaped.

“You ran around with her husband, and filled his head with lies about Linda, and then when push came to shove you gave him an ultimatum, didn’t you? You told him it was you or her.”

Clare meant her response to be a measured I’m so sorry about your loss. Instead, she blurted out, “That’s not true!”

“You must have brass balls to get up in front of a church and pretend to be all holy. You’re nothing but a cheap tramp home wrecker. You wanted my dear brother-in-law? Well, now you got him. Did you know he was a boozer? He used to drink himself into a stupor every night. And when he wasn’t drinking, he was off on deployment or on a case. Did he tell you that my sister had three miscarriages and he wasn’t there for a one of them?”

Clare went pale.

“Didn’t get into that during your romantic interludes, did he? Bet he didn’t tell you he left the army because he had a fucking breakdown and nearly got his whole platoon blown up, did he? Or that he dragged my sister back to this godforsaken hole because he was such a mama’s boy he couldn’t cut a real job in Phoenix?”

It was like being battered by a howling wind, her breath snatched away, her eyes tearing.

“What did you get? Flowers? Fancy dinners? Dirty weekends at expensive hotels? You know who bought that? My sister! Every penny he has comes from her, her work, what she got from our parents. I’ll see you in hell before I