A Sounding Brass (4 page)

Ray Harper was a cat of a different color, though. He stood behind Claire’s shoulder, making her entire right side feel sensitized
somehow, as though he was putting off a force field and her skin was tingling from it.

Right, Claire. The man is here to do his job. You mean as much to him as the chair you’re sitting on
.

Not that that was a bad thing.

“Would you like to use one of the empty bedrooms for your business with Dinah, Ray?” Rebecca asked.

A glance at his witness told her she wouldn’t be very comfortable doing that. “Uh, no. Maybe we could go outside.”

“It’s quite cool out there in the evenings. We’re at nearly a thousand feet in this part of the country.”

“It’s too bad you can’t just relax and hang out with us for once,” Tamara said. “You never know. You might learn something.”

He gave her the kind of big-brother look that made Claire’s lips twitch. “What, the latest tips in hair care?”

“For a start. Yours is long enough to braid.”

“It is not.” A little self-consciously, he fingered the hair that brushed his collar. “I’m undercover most of the time. If
I had a regulation cut, the bad guys would see me coming a mile away.”

“My kingdom for a regulation cut,” Claire heard herself say, and then wished she could grab the words back.

Dinah laughed, and even Rebecca smiled. “You said it. I haven’t had the guts to cut mine yet. It seems . . . irrevocable somehow.”

“Oh, come on, Di.” Tamara ran a hand through her short-cropped brown curls. “It grows back.”

Ray had glanced at Claire after her remark, a look that took her in from crown to chin. “Why would you want it off?” he asked.
“Your hair is pretty like that.”

Don’t blush. Don’t. Oh, dear. Urgghh!

“Aw, now you made her blush,” Tamara said with teenage insensitivity. “You’re such a charmer.”

“But think of the hours of agony it takes to produce that look,” Dinah said calmly, making him look at her instead of at Claire’s
scarlet face. “I would estimate twenty minutes just to get the front to behave, never mind the coil in the back.”

“You would estimate right,” Claire said.
Breathe. Don’t think about it.

“So wear it down,” Ray suggested.

Married women took their hair down for their husbands in the intimacy of the bedroom, but she wasn’t about to say
that
to a hard-bitten cop she hardly knew. “It’s part of our sacrifice,” she began, but Rebecca interrupted her smoothly.

“Women in our church traditionally wear their hair up. Come on, you kids, leave Mr. Harper alone. He needs to speak with Dinah.”

“Why don’t you go upstairs and use the kitchen table at my place?” Claire suggested, then wished she hadn’t. Good grief, when
was the last time she’d cleaned? And were there items of clothing lying on the floor? At least she’d done last night’s supper
dishes, but the bathroom was probably—

“Thanks, Claire. Good idea.” Dinah’s soft voice clinched it, so Claire had no choice but to help Rebecca clear the table while
Ray followed Dinah up the outside staircase.

Twenty minutes later, they heard light footsteps on the stairs and Dinah came in. Alone.

“Claire, Ray wants to ask you a few questions, too.”

“Me? What about?”

“No idea. Go on. Don’t look so scared. He’s not going to arrest you.”

Being arrested was the least of her worries. Being alone in her apartment with a man who gave her goose bumps definitely was.

She thanked Rebecca for supper, said good night to everyone, and climbed the stairs. She found Ray sitting at the yellow Formica
kitchen table that had been Julia’s when she’d lived here. She imagined a more appropriate backdrop would be a black leather
couch, or at the very least a nice, manly corduroy chair. He probably lived in one of those loft apartments in the warehouse
district, over a nightclub or something.

What was it to her, anyway? He was out of bounds, an Outsider, and she had no business speculating about a life that was practically
on a different planet from her own. If she were going to think about anyone, it would be Luke Fisher and that smile that could
light up an entire mission hall. Now, there was a man worth dreaming about. Equally out of her league, but at least he had
been accepted by Owen Blanchard and he had grown up Elect.

Luke Fisher would know what the ground rules were—the expectations between men and women. He would know that a dating couple
could never be alone in a room with the door closed, or that sharing a hymnbook was a sign of an approaching engagement. He
would know that engagement rings were worldly and a godly man gave his intended a wristwatch instead. Luke Fisher would understand
the sacrifice behind the clothing and the hair, where Ray Harper probably just thought they were all weird.

“Thanks for letting me use your space,” he said when she pulled out the other chair and sat down opposite him. He finished
making a note in his notebook and glanced up. “Julia sends her love. I should have told you that before.”

“Thank you. I guess the baby is due pretty soon, isn’t he?”

“About a month. But you can’t tell that to Ross. He has two cell phones. One for work and one for Julia to call with baby
updates. The guy is obsessed.”

“Babies will do that to you.” As if she knew anything about it, really. She’d held lots of them and done her share of cooing
and patting other people’s, but other than the arrival of her nephews a few years ago, she hadn’t had much experience.

She was a bit of an anomaly among Elect women, choosing a career at the bank over home and family. But there seemed to be
a sea change afoot among the Elect lately. Maybe in a few years she wouldn’t stand out so much. Then again, if a person could
get a date in this town, she wouldn’t stand out so much that way, either.

“I hope you don’t mind my saying so, but you and Julia sure seem different.”

Claire glanced at him in surprise. “Of course, we’re different. She’s left the church. I haven’t.”

“No, not that way.” He waved a hand, as if trying to catch the right word out of the air. “It’s not the external things. She’s
a happy person.”

“And I’m not?” Oh, great. Now perfect strangers were making judgments about her. And here she thought she only had Alma Woods
and her bevy of critical cronies to worry about.

“I don’t know whether you are or not. None of my business. She says you were best friends. Almost like sisters.”

“Yes, we were.” Still were, on Claire’s side. But Julia had a family and a home and a new life to fill her heart. It wasn’t
surprising that time and distance had amplified their differences instead of minimizing them.

Suddenly Claire felt lonelier than ever.
Thank you, Mr. Harper. Talking to you has just brightened up my whole day.

“Tell Julia I send my love back, doubled,” she said. “So, you’re heading back tomorrow?”

He frowned at his notebook. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not. I’ve got a case with a connection in this neighborhood. I might
follow it up, or I might take a couple of days off.”

“What kind of a case?”

He glanced at her. “Sorry. Can’t say.”

Of course not. How silly of her. “Did you have some questions for me?”

“No, I just wanted to let you know we wouldn’t be needing you as a character witness. Dinah and Tamara are pretty convincing.”

“Oh. Thanks.” She hadn’t expected to be asked to testify, and in fact, other than an initial contact by an investigator from
the D.A.’s office, she hadn’t heard a thing.

She waited, but he only frowned at his notebook as if he were trying to decipher his own handwriting. “Um, would you like
something to drink?” she asked. “Tea or coffee?”

Her apartment seemed unusually quiet. She couldn’t even hear the girls talking with Rebecca on the floor below. A breeze moved
the branches of the oak tree outside the window, and they tapped on the pane as though trying to get Ray’s attention.

He looked up and shook his head. “No. Thanks.”

“I’m not a witness. It wouldn’t be a conflict of interest.”

What are you saying? You want this guy out of here, don’t you? Or would you rather just sit here and listen to him breathing?

“That’s nice of you, but I have to go.”

But he made no move to get up. Just when she was about to do so herself, to give him a hint that maybe a person would like
to have her shower and curl up with a book, he looked up and she froze in his gaze.

He had hazel eyes. Funny she hadn’t noticed that before.

“Hey, you work in the bank, right?” When she nodded, he said, “There’s only one?” She nodded again. “So, you’re pretty familiar
with new people in town, then, coming in and opening up accounts and whatnot.”

“I’m the new accounts rep, as a matter of fact.”

“No kidding.” He leaned forward. “How many do you get?”

She shrugged, trying to figure out where this was going, then gave up. “A couple a week. The southerners from California and
Oregon are discovering us. The dot-com people are buying up the acreages, like the one Dinah used to live on. Plus a big discount
store is opening up on the edge of town, so people are moving in because of that.”

“The name Brandon Boanerges sound familiar to you?”

Claire thought back through a couple of weeks’ worth of new-account applications. “No. It’s an odd name. I’d have remembered
it, especially since it’s biblical.”

“Biblical?” He flipped open the notebook and clicked his pen.

“The disciples James and John were named Boanerges. It means ‘sons of thunder.’”

He wrote it down, and the frown lines between his eyes grew a little deeper.

“Can I ask why you need to know this? Is this guy a witness in Dinah and Tamara’s case?”

Snapping the book shut, he got up, then reached across the table and shook her hand. “No. Something else. Thanks for the info
and for letting me work up here. Good night.”

She watched him thump down the stairs and climb into his truck. As he drove off, she found herself shaking her head. Why on
earth was the strong, silent type so popular in those romances in the used-book section in the back of Rebecca’s bookshop?
It was completely impossible to hold a conversation with one.

* * *

RAY HARPER TOSSED
the backpack with his case files in it—he wasn’t a briefcase kind of guy—onto the small, round table in his motel room. He
toed off his boots and fell on the bed in a tired, loose-limbed heap.

Could he have acted any dumber or failed to impress any more . . . impressively?

With a sigh, he punched up the bag of wood chips the motel called a pillow and stared at the ceiling, where Claire Montoya’s
wide green eyes and flawless jawline seemed to be superimposed over the light fixture.

It wasn’t like he was a total zero as far as ladies were concerned. He’d had his share of girlfriends and had even managed
to sustain a live-in relationship for two years before she got disgusted with all the double shifts and left. So, why had
he reverted to Mr. Neanderthal when he’d been alone with Claire? Not that he was interested or anything. But hey, it was natural
for a man to want to impress a pretty, intelligent woman, and she was certainly all that.

Too bad she belonged to this whacked-out religion Julia had come out of. Julia was the nicest person he knew—a woman without
a malicious bone in her body when, in his opinion, she had good reasons to bear malice. Claire seemed to be cut from the same
fine cloth, which was probably why he’d tanked in the good-impressions department. He just couldn’t think of a thing to say.
For Ray Harper, who had a reputation in the OCTF for having the fastest comeback in the department, that was just plain ridiculous.

This motel room was way too quiet. He needed something to distract him until he was ready to reread the files to see if a
clue to the whereabouts of either Emile Johan Rausch or Brandon Boanerges popped out at him. The clock radio on the nightstand
picked up a grand total of one station—KGHM. Some guy on quaaludes was reading stock reports—did people still care about the
price of pork and beef? He supposed out here in ranch country, where the grassy foothills rolled up to break against the Rocky
Mountains, they did.

The guy’s voice was like listening to a history professor drone on about the factors contributing to the Boer War, a class
Ray had suffered through on the way to his degree in justice administration. The OCTF didn’t take anyone without a four-year
college degree, and five years as a street cop hadn’t cut it with the recruiting officer. So, Ray had gone back to school
at the ripe old age of twenty-six. Funny how different an education looked on the dark side of twenty. He’d never regretted
it.

At eight o’clock the stock reports ended, and an electrifying bass voice said, “Good evening, Washington! This is Luke Fisher
coming to you live from KGHM in Hamilton Falls, where from eight to midnight, we’ll rock and God will talk!”

Something screamed in Ray’s head, and he reached automatically for the off button on the radio. If there was anything he couldn’t
stand, it was “Jesus rock.” He could tolerate a nice hymn sung in four-part harmony at somebody’s funeral, the way he tolerated
history lectures and any attempts to explain modern art, but Jesus rock?
Run away! Far away!

“We’re lucky tonight to have a new CD from Sixth Hour, who as you know, takes bluegrass where it’s never been before—straight
to the throne of grace. Here’s the first cut, ‘Holy Grail.’”

Ray’s hand froze on the radio dial. Hang on. The alarm signal in his head wasn’t about the music, it was about the DJ’s voice.

And now he had to wait three minutes, or six or nine, before he heard it again. Instead, he heard a very talented guy fingerpicking
a banjo, an instrument he’d always liked because his grandpa had played it at family hoedowns.

Ray yanked his cell phone out of his jacket pocket and hit the first number on speed dial. His partner, Ross, picked up on
the second ring. “Hey, Ray.”

Ray didn’t waste time on opening remarks. The DJ might come on again, and the band was already into the second verse. “Are
you at the office?”