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“I couldn’t risk it, Garrett. Nobody should be using those stairs.”
“If you took them in through the parish house you realize they now have access to everything there?”
“I’m afraid they had it already. The side door wasn’t locked. It sticks and sometimes the lock doesn’t catch.”
“We really need to get every lock on the property fixed and rekeyed.”
“I wonder why I didn’t think of that.”
He laughed. Garrett had a nice baritone laugh. Reportedly his wife had left him for a younger man. Analiese had always wondered if thicker hair and six-pack abs had been worth the end of a twenty-year marriage.
“All the office doors are locked,” she said. “And I can’t imagine them carrying off any of the furniture in the meeting rooms. Where would they put it?”
“We don’t know anything about these people. Maybe this is a scam.”
She knew this wouldn’t be the last time she heard that. “That’s always a possibility, but I don’t think so. The mom is genuinely ill, and they didn’t ask for a single thing. They said they were going to spend the night on the lawn and steal away early in the morning. I believed them.”
“I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do. Do I call the rest of the council?” He hesitated, but she didn’t answer because she knew he was just thinking out loud.
“I could call the head of the building and grounds committee,” he said. “Joe’s a good guy. He’ll understand. And if they’re gone by tomorrow, maybe nobody else will need to know.”
“That’ll backfire. If somebody else finds out, the rumor mill will crank into full gear. And we have a seminar tomorrow morning, so people will be in the building.”
“I suppose.” He hesitated, then asked the question she least wanted to answer. “What’s going to happen to them tomorrow?”
“There was too much going on to question them about their plans. I don’t know if they intend to stay in Asheville. I think the dad was looking for work today, which is how they ended up waiting at the church. He was probably walking the area on foot making inquiries.”
“He didn’t find anything?”
“I doubt he will, not until things have stabilized. He needs a haircut, better clothes.” She added something else she’d noticed when Man had managed a smile. “And dental work, I’m afraid. These people really fell on hard times.”
“I wish I had something for him at one of my shops, but I don’t.”
“Even if he finds a job, he’s not going to find one that pays enough for rent. Not even if he puts every cent he makes toward it. They have to get on their feet and save a little for a deposit and cushion, and they’ll need a lucky break.”
“Ana, are you suggesting we might be their lucky break?”
She sidestepped. “I don’t know if they want to stay in town, Garrett. They may want to head back north.”
He was too astute to be fooled. “And if they do stay?”
“They have two children. From what I can tell they haven’t gone to school for a while. Shiloh, the daughter, seems especially smart. She’s running the family without much help. Dougie, the son, is bright-eyed and energetic. They deserve so much better.”
“Why is this our problem?”
“Why isn’t it?”
This time the silence was awkward.
“I’ll call council members,” he said at last, all business again. “I think we’ll need to have an emergency session of the executive committee tomorrow morning.”
She had expected this, but her spirits plummeted. “Of course.”
“You can’t make these decisions alone. If you do, they’ll come back to haunt you.”
“I think they may anyway.”
“Eleven o’clock? If that changes, I’ll let you know.”
Saturdays were the days she polished the sermons she wrote on Thursdays. She had a feeling this one might remain a diamond in the rough.
“Fine,” she said. “And they may be gone by then, I don’t know.”
“With the church silver.”
“If we had silver, I would hand it over to them. I’ve seen Les Misérables.”
He laughed a little, but he still sounded worried. “I wouldn’t mention that to the committee.”
They hung up, and she sat staring at the wall and the framed photograph of her older sisters. Growing up, Elsbeth and Gretchen, respectively six and four years her senior, had been her lifeline. As young children the three Wagner girls had bonded, aware that if they wanted love and support at home they would best find it in each other, not their emotionally distant parents.
She thought of Shiloh, who didn’t have the support of anyone, but who by herself was clearly in charge of the clan. Her heart ached for the girl whose burdens were too large to bear.
She considered calling Gretchen, always a no-nonsense sounding board, but Gretchen had three active daughters who would be going to bed about now. Elsbeth and her partner, Joan, had no children, but they did have a busy social life, and it was unlikely they would be home until much later.
Analiese was alone tonight.
She thought about Isaiah, as she had intermittently since that afternoon. He would offer exactly the right words of counsel, but unless he really was the man who had helped her off the ground today, she hadn’t seen or heard from him in such a long time that calling would be inappropriate and awkward.
Still, she could email.
The simplicity appealed to her. Isaiah remained on her contacts list. She could write a quick email, tell him that for a moment today she’d thought she might have seen him in a crowd, and now she wished she really had, because she had an ethical dilemma in her congregation he would enjoy discussing.
She imagined how good it would feel to have him respond, to have him offer to call and talk in person, to laugh with her and say that apparently he had a twin in North Carolina.
Then she imagined how bad it would feel to receive no reply because these days Isaiah considered her a thorn in his side, one he thought he’d already removed.
The air in the house suddenly seemed weighted with regrets, unfulfilled expectations and decisions. She was one of a long line of clergy who had lived here, and tonight, as she had before, she almost felt their presence. Sometimes her male predecessors condemned her, sometimes they praised her. Tonight they seemed to be hovering in the air waiting for her to do anything so they could pounce.
She never really felt she belonged in this house. Tonight it almost felt dangerous to stay.
Her laptop lay on the desk in front of her. She opened it, and as it booted up, she told herself not to over think this.
When her email program was on the screen she began to type in Isaiah’s email address, and the program finished it for her.
All these years, and the computer remembered him, too.
She quickly composed the email she had imagined, finished by telling him she hoped he was well and happily doing the work he loved. Then she ended with All my best, Ana, and hit Send before she could reconsider.
She couldn’t bear to sit and wait for a reply that would probably never come. She closed the computer, turned off all the downstairs lights, and climbed the stairs by the light of stars shining through the stairwell window.
* * *
Isaiah Colburn knew where Analiese lived. She was in the telephone directory, so finding her address hadn’t been hard. He had parked almost a mile away and strolled the picturesque streets of her neighborhood for most of an hour. While he wasn’t delusional enough to pretend he was just taking a walk before bedtime, at the start he had given himself permission to turn back before he reached her house.
Now he stood in front of it.
When he’d arrived a minute ago there had been lights downstairs. But now, one by one, they disappeared until the house was dark.
He wondered if she was alone. He had seen a man fight his way into the crowd after she was attacked at the rally. He had seen the quick hug, seen the man brush her cheek and walk her to the speakers’ platform. He didn’t think she was married. He had read her bio on the Church of the Covenant’s website, and he was fairly certain if a husband existed, or even children, they would have been mentioned. But Analiese was a beautiful, dynamic woman, and he couldn’t imagine she was ever lonely.
He was the one who had taken the vow of chastity, not her.
He considered walking up the sidewalk, knocking on the door, and waiting for her to answer.
He considered just how awkward it would be if a man answered instead.
The walk back to his car was shorter. The night itself was interminable.
chapter seven (#ulink_0a8ceb8c-09b8-5602-a05c-08af6b22e1c0)
AT 7:00 A.M. when Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A Major suddenly filled her room, Analiese wasn’t ready to get out of bed. She considered pulling the pillow over her ears, but during her last visit, Gretchen’s oldest daughter and budding clarinetist had downloaded every major work in the clarinet repertoire to Analiese’s new MP3 alarm clock, and the concert could go on for hours. Analiese hadn’t had the heart to tell her beloved niece that if she were ever asked to choose the instrument she liked least, the decision wouldn’t be hard.
At least the concerto gave her another reason to get up, and quickly.
After chopping off a trill midnote she went to the window and stared out at a gray, cheerless morning.
“Boy, I just can’t wait to start this day.” It wasn’t exactly a prayer, more like a “to whom it may concern.” She tried to think of all the reasons why she should be grateful for the hours ahead. Then she shrugged and headed for the bathroom.
After one shower, real prayers and a small bowl of cereal with blueberries, she was ready to go. Saturday Seminar, a three-month series of speakers on the Old Testament, was starting at ten, and she was responsible for the invocation. Then at eleven she had the emergency council meeting. She had left enough time to stop for bagel sandwiches and fresh fruit to take to the Fowlers.
While they ate, she would question them about their plans.
If she was supremely lucky, Man—or more likely Shiloh—would tell her that today they were traveling to a place with better job opportunities and friends who could shelter them until they got on their feet. Analiese would enlist Felipe to help them carry their meager belongings downstairs, and she would slip Shiloh all the money in her wallet to help the family buy gas and continue on their way.
Realistically she knew nothing was going to be that easy.
Just before she left the house she took a moment to check her laptop email, but there was only the usual: loops she belonged to, announcements, and a newsy email from Elsbeth that she would read later. There was nothing from Isaiah. That didn’t surprise her, although it certainly would have turned her day around.
After minimal traffic and a short line at the bagel shop, she knocked on the door of the apartment with a brown paper grocery bag clutched in front of her and waited for someone to answer. She wasn’t surprised when that someone turned out to be Shiloh.
“Breakfast,” Analiese said, holding out the bag.
Shiloh looked as if she’d just stepped out of the shower: hair wet again, feet still bare, clothes wrinkled as if she’d just pulled them from her suitcase.
“My mom’s worse,” she said, with no preliminaries. “I think she’s going to die. And she won’t go to the hospital, no matter what.”
* * *
At seventy-five Dr. Peter Thurman was nearly retired, or so he claimed. A self-proclaimed “country doctor,” he had handled nearly everything in his long career: bringing babies into the world, setting bones, delivering the bad news of terminal cancer. These days he saw only the devoted patients who refused to go elsewhere.
Peter was also a longtime member of the Church of the Covenant, and not always a supporter of the changes Analiese had nudged into place. Worse, when she got to her study phone and pleaded with him to make a house call to the church, he had been preparing for a well-deserved day of golf.
“What have you gotten yourself into?” he demanded.
“Lots of trouble.”
“And I’ll get into a lot more if this woman dies on my watch.”
She pictured him on the other end of the line, white hair buzzed into a military crew cut, blue eyes fierce under bristling eyebrows. She knew he liked her, even if he didn’t like change, and she also knew she could be honest with him.
“She may die without you.”
“You’re like all your kind, Ana. Great at inducing guilt.”
“First class I took in seminary. I think if you tell Mrs. Fowler she needs to go to the hospital and you’ll watch over her there, she’ll do it. But I’ll tell you what I think. I think she’s scared that when anybody in authority sees the way the family’s living, she might lose her kids.”
“Taking children away is nobody’s first response. Even when it ought to be.”
“She won’t believe that.”
“Damn you, woman.”
“When will you be here?”
“Give me fifteen minutes.”
Analiese hung up the phone and stared at her bookshelves. The awards she had won as a journalist sat in a recently dusted row. One seemed to stare back at her now, an Associated Press broadcast news award for a story she had done about crowding at a homeless shelter. She swallowed something too close to tears and took the stairs back up to the apartment. This time she let herself in.
“There’s a doctor on the way,” she told everyone but Belle, whose rattling cough filled the apartment from the bedroom, even with that door closed.
“We can’t pay much,” Man said. “But we’ll give him all we got.”
“He won’t take a cent, but, Man, you have to do whatever he asks you to. Please? If he says she has to go to the hospital, then we have to get her there, even if she doesn’t want to go. Nothing’s going to happen to anybody except that Belle’s going to get better.”
“They threatened to take Dougie and me away from Mama and Daddy,” Shiloh said, earning a glare from her father.
Analiese tilted her head in question.
“Shiloh didn’t want to go to school,” Man said.
“In Atlanta,” Shiloh said. “So we left.”
Analiese nodded. “And you didn’t want to go to school why?”
“I hated it.”
Analiese knew that was the most she would get. But she could imagine the scenario. New girl. Homeless girl at that. Old clothes. Smart mouth. Disaster in the making.
