The Garrettsons were next. Clare took a large slug of coffee and threw another log on the fire. Tim and Liz were always a bit of an ordeal. They entered either bickering or in a stony silence, which was worse. This morning it was silence.
“So,” Clare said. “How are you?”
Liz gazed at her husband with Laser Beam Death Ray eyes.
“She’s hacked off about her mother,” Tim said. “Again.”
Clare picked up her coffee mug. Wished she had thought to pour some whiskey into it first. “Last week we agreed we were going to stay off the subject of-”
“I brought her back from the hospital and her cats were dead!”
“You can’t blame me for her dead cats, Liz.”
“I’m confused,” Clare said. “I thought there was a neighbor who looks after your mother’s house when she’s away.”
“A very responsible neighbor who brings in the mail and the paper and leaves the check for the snowplow and feeds the damn cats,” Tim said. “We slip her thank-you money in a card every few months.”
“We wouldn’t need someone else to help Mom if she were living with us.”
“We wouldn’t have to worry about any of her needs if she was in the Infirmary!”
“What happened to the cats?” Clare asked.
“The cats are a side issue,” Tim said. “There’s always something that’s going wrong. It’ll always be something going wrong until we put her in a home, where she belongs.”
“They were killed,” Liz said, ignoring her husband. “It was horrible. I went into the barn to get the rock salt to scatter on her walk and steps”-her angry glance at Tim led Clare to guess that was supposed to be his job-“and there they were. Sliced to pieces.”
“It was probably a fisher,” Tim said.
“A fisher would’ve eaten them,” Liz said. “Not left their little frozen carcasses behind.”
Clare frowned. “When I saw her in the hospital, your mother said something about someone trying to kill her cats.”
“It’s not about the cats,” Tim repeated. “It’s about the fact that Liz’s mom isn’t competent to manage her own household anymore.” He turned to his wife. “It’s going to be one disaster after another until you realize putting her in the Infirmary isn’t setting her out on a goddamn ice floe.”
Liz gasped. “You didn’t do it, did you?”
“Oh, for chrissake, of course I didn’t kill your mother’s cats!”
“Did you report it to the police?”
Both Garrettsons looked at Clare as if she were crazy. “They were cats,” Liz said. “It was awful, but it’s not like, you know, Quinn Tracey’s mother discovering the police chief’s wife’s body.”
Clare’s first thought was,
The Garrettsons looked at each other again. “We figured… you probably had heard about that,” Tim said tactfully.
“No, I mean, why call her Quinn Tracey’s mother? Instead of Meg Tracey?”
“Oh.” Liz’s face cleared. “I guess I thought of her that way because we know Quinn. He’s the one who does Mom’s plowing for us.”
____________________
Clare normally walked the Garrettsons to the church door to bid them goodbye. This morning, she shook their hands, abandoned them where they sat, and was in Lois’s office before they had gotten their coats on.
“Lois, what was the name of the family that wanted me to pray for their lamb?”
Lois was never flustered by Clare’s more unusual outbursts. “The Campbells. Abigail Campbell is the mom.”
“Can you get me their number? Is she likely to be at home?”
Lois was already flipping through her personal copy of the parish directory, hand-annotated with all sorts of facts not readily available to the general public. “She works at Sheehan Realty in Glens Falls.”
Clare grabbed the Glens Falls phone book off the shelf.
Elizabeth de Groot was by now standing in the doorway of her minuscule office. “What’s going on? Did I hear you say someone wanted prayers for a lamb?”
“A memorial service, really,” Lois said.
The new deacon’s winged eyebrows knitted together in a delicate frown. “Is this metaphorical?”
“I assure you, it’s quite flesh-and-blood.” Clare trapped the number beneath a finger and gestured to Lois for the phone.
“I have to point out it’s probably chops and stew meat by now,” the secretary said. “Maybe a couple of little legs for roasting.”
A bland voice answered the phone. “Sheehan Realty.”
“Could I speak to Abigail Campbell, please?”
“May I say who’s calling?”
“Her priest.”
There was a pause. Then: “Oh! Of course. Please hold.”
Clare looked up to see de Groot nervously glancing back and forth between her and Lois. Then the Muzak cut off and she was live.
“Hello?”
“Hi. Abigail? Clare Fergusson here.”
“Oh, Reverend Fergusson.” The woman on the other end of the line sounded embarrassed. “I’m sorry I left you that message last week. It’s just that the kids were so upset, and I was, too, of course, and we were trying to come up with something to make us all feel better, you know, and not so
“I have a question that’s going to sound a little odd,” Clare said.
“-but we had a sweet do-it-yourself service and we donated his body, as it were, to the food kitchen, so he didn’t die in vain-”
“Abigail?”
“-and frankly right now I think that having you do anything, you know, official will just open up the wounds again.”
This time Clare waited a moment to make sure she had run down. When she was sure there was nothing else, she said, “No service, then?”
“No service. Maybe we could do something else to remember him.”
“Abigail, do you have someone plow your driveway?”
This time, there was a definite pause. “Ye-e-es,” Abigail said. “I’m divorced. It’s one of those jobs I’m willing to pay someone to do.”
“Who does your plowing?”
A longer pause. “A young man named Quinn Tracey. I sold his family their house a few years back. Why?”
THIRTY-NINE
As soon as she got off the phone with Abigail Campbell-Clare agreed to insert the lamb’s name in the weekly prayers for the dead-she whipped through the pages of the phone book, looking for the number of the Glens Falls newspaper.
“Who are you calling now?” Elizabeth asked.
“A reporter from the
The deacon looked at Lois, who shrugged. Clare found the number, stabbed it in, and, getting an automated directory, punched in the first three letters of her party’s last name.
