A Light in the Window (54 page)

“Ma’am, we have a problem. I am too large to crawl through your basement window and fetch out your ladder, which is too wide to be fetched out in the first place. So there you have it, and would you care to change your address temporarily and move to the rectory, where a fire and a bowl of soup wouldn’t be a bad idea?”

“Don’t you have a boy?”

“A boy?”

“Yes, a boy who is small enough to crawl in the basement window.”

“We’re awfully short on boys right now, ma’am. In any case, the basement door to your hallway may be locked, which means we couldn’t gain access to your house even if I rounded up a dozen boys.”

She stared straight ahead at a garden hoe hanging on the garage wall and sighed deeply.

“Do you know if the hall door to your basement is locked?”

“I always lock it when I go away, so nothing can ... crawl up the stairs.”

“Quite,” he said, sighing also.

“I don’t suppose you could crawl up the coal chute?” she said, still not looking at him. Violet howled from her crate in the passenger seat.

“No ma’am, we aren’t trained to crawl up coal chutes. It’s company policy. We tried it once, but our men kept slipping back and landing where they started.”

“A definitive portrait of my relationship with my neighbor,” she snapped.

“Why, yes, it is,” he said, pleased with himself.

They sat at opposite ends of the study sofa with a box of Kleenex on the middle cushion.

Violet was curled on Cynthia’s lap, sleeping, and Barnabas lay on the kitchen rug, leashed to the knob of the back door. The rector had decided he had only a couple of choices: Leave his dog in the garage, feeling punished through no fault of his own, or leash him to the knob where, should Violet get loose, a door torn from its hinges would be the worst that could happen.

The rain lashed the windows, the fire crackled, the clock ticked.

“I love the ticking of a clock,” she said, sounding mournful.

He sneezed. “Does anyone else have a key?”

“Bless you. Not a soul, except David, who’s traveling on business in the Far East.”

He could break the glass pane in her storm door, but he didn’t mention that.”

She sneezed.

“Bless you,” he said.

“You could stand on the back stoop and Dooley could kneel on your shoulders and lean over the railing and pry up the window in the downstairs bathroom,” she said.

“That’s a thought.” He could see such a circus act crashing into the mud below, with only minor fractures as a result. He sneezed.

“Bless you. Maybe the locksmith will call you back.”

“Maybe.”

She hugged herself. “I’m freezing.”

“Why don’t you lie down, and I’ll stir up the fire?”

“I’ve been up since four o’clock this morning,” she said, looking miserable.

He brought a pillow from the armchair, and she lay down obediently. He covered her with the plaid afghan that was folded over the back of the sofa. “How’s that?” he asked, looking at her huddled form.

He could barely hear what she whispered. “Heaven.”

He put his hand on her forehead. “Warm,” he pronounced, and sneezed.

She spent the night on the sofa, under a pile of quilts, refusing the offer of his bed.

He had brought her a pair of his socks and sat at the end of the sofa with her feet in his lap, sleeping in an upright position until two a.m.

He awoke when Cousin Meg flushed the toilet over his head, and he added two logs to the fire. Then he crept up the stairs, feeling feverish.

After the locksmith arrived the next morning, he walked her through the hedge, lugging Violet’s crate in one hand and her carry-on in the other. He went back to his car for the two suitcases, which were easily as heavy as Meg Patrick’s, and popped those through the hedge and up the stairs to her bedroom.

She stood on the soft carpet in the room that he had never before seen and looked at him. He was somehow not surprised that he read his own thoughts and feelings in her eyes, though he had no idea what his thoughts and feelings were.

He took her in his arms and they stood for a moment, wordless.

Then he went down the stairs and home, where he searched for a handkerchief in his upper bureau drawer and found her house key.

He had breakfast with Dooley but stopped by the Grill for coffee.

“Edith Mallory is home,” he announced. “I’ll talk to her this week.”

“Better get a move on,” said J.C.

His muscles ached and his head felt the size of a Canadian moose. “For Pete’s sake, don’t expect miracles.” He’d rather take a whipping than see Edith Mallory.

“Percy’s decided it’s not going to happen,” said Mule. “He says somethin’s goin’ to come up that’ll stop it.”

J.C. wiped his face. “That’s called denial, buddyroe.”

“Let me ask you something. Do you think my cousin Meg is ... good-looking?”

“With those glasses on,” said Mule, “she’s ugly as homemade sin.”

“Without her glasses?”

“I’ve never seen her without glasses. Probably not bad. Tall, slim, nice legs, great hair. But too weird, you know what I mean?”

Percy came to the booth and sat down. “Yessir, I’ve lost my last night of sleep over this thing.”

Then why, the rector wondered, did Percy’s hands shake when he put cream in his coffee?

The crowd at the hospital called to ask if they might drop by before lunch.

He sneezed. Good! He could ride back with them and check into the emergency room.

At eleven, three nurses and Hoppy Harper in a Navy peacoat over a green scrub suit came through his office door with J.C. Hogan.

“Ta-daaa!” said Nurse Kennedy, handing him something.

Several bright flashes went off in rapid succession.

When he could see again, he read what was engraved in brass on the wooden plaque:

“I wrote it,” said Nurse Kennedy, grinning proudly.

“I told her what to say,” announced his doctor.

“I corrected their terrible spelling,” Nurse Phillips assured him.

Nurse Jennings threw her arms around his neck. “I didn’t’ do a blessed thing but come up with the whole idea!”

J.C. reloaded his camera as Emma took the plaque out of the rector’s hands and looked for a place to hang it. “Sit down and have a cup of coffee. And no offense, but it’s fourteen years he’s been runnin’ up th’ hill to th’ hospital,” said his proud secretary.

“Father, I believe you know who this is.”

And he did, more’s the pity. It was Dooley’s school principal, Myra Hayes.

“This is to inform you that Dooley Barlowe is being suspended for ten school days for the possession of tobacco products and for smoking on school grounds.”

There was a deafening silence. The decision might have come down from a Supreme Court judge, so awesome was Myra Hayes’s indignation.

He sneezed and his eyes watered. “When shall I pick him up?”

“Immediately,” she said.

And just when they needed the blessing of every teacher they could get their hands on ...

“Go to your room until I can deal with this thing,” he told Dooley. He was shaking with a chill, and all he wanted to do was to lie down.

He managed to get his clothes off and his pajamas on and haul the quilts from the sofa to his bed. Then, he put on the socks Cynthia had worn and crawled between the icy sheets.

He was asleep before he could turn the lamp off.