Blessed Is the Busybody (13 page)

Carlisle’s quick response belied his age. He twisted his arm and snapped his elbow into Bob’s chest, thereby freeing himself and sending Bob—not the finest of physical specimens—sprawling. I was just close enough to catch my new boss as he stumbled backwards. I was barely able to keep us both from going down.

“Do you want to get arrested?” I demanded as I helped him straighten. “Or beat up by Carlisle’s bodyguards? Come on, Bob. Get a grip.”

“You think I’m going to close?” Bob turned to include Brownie, who was only a few paces behind and turning pale. “You think you can chase me out of here? Well, you’ve got another thing coming. I’ve got friends higher than either of you, and I’ll use them. I’ll expose you both for what you are. You hear me? Just try and shut me down. I’m staying. And I’ll use every last cent I have to end both your political careers! See if I don’t!”

Brownie really looked shaken now. “You don’t have to close down. I’m an advocate of any upright and decent business opening here. But you are offering—”

“I am offering you a chance to shut up and get out of here so my customers can get in the door. If you don’t and quickly, I’ll be calling my attorney.”

My eyes sought Cal’s. He looked as if he were lost in prayer. I hoped he wouldn’t find his way back.

“This is a peaceful, legal protest,” Frank Carlisle said. “If you make it anything else, you
will
need an attorney, Mr. Knowles.”

This was our cue. I took Bob by the arm and guided him toward the front door. To his credit, he let me.

Fifteen minutes later Carlisle and his escorts left, and the bulk of the other protestors began to drift away. By two when I went into the supply room to get my purse so I could leave for the day, we were down to maybe ten. This batch were good Midwesterners, polite enough and subdued.

Ed was waiting for me when I came back out front. This I hadn’t expected. Clearly he thought I needed an escort, since I knew he had a full schedule today.

“Hey, boyfriend. Are you here to carry my books?”

“I thought you might like a little company on the way out the door.”

I’m almost always glad I married Ed, but sometimes I like being reminded why. “How many of your colleagues are still out there?” I asked.

“Enough to organize a prayer meeting to save our souls.”

“Remember when we thought we were moving here for a quieter life?”

“When was that?” He smiled.

Ed has quite a smile. I felt hopeful. I linked my arm through his and squeezed. “Ready to run the gauntlet?”

“Ag, I’d run through fire for you.”

I kissed his hairy cheek. “Considering the way things are going around here, I’d be careful what I wished for.”

9

The next morning Ed was already at work when our telephone rang. I was barely conscious, having spent my hours in dreamland trying to reason with a crowd burning copies of
Peter Rabbit
. As the flames leaped higher Cal screamed a hell-and-damnation sermon about bad boy bunnies and cabbage theft.

Ed sent the girls off to school without my help.

I took my mug of coffee to the kitchen telephone.

“Agate, you sound as if I got you up.”

“Nan . . .” No one else could sound so sweetly accusatory. I took one huge steaming gulp. Nan without coffee was unthinkable. “You just missed Ed. He’s at work.”

“So early?”

“The birds have been singing for hours. Ed’s been gone for one of them.”

“I suppose he needs to look busy now and then.”

Sip number two. “Now and then,” I agreed.

“As a matter of fact, I was calling for you.”

This surprised me. I don’t think Nan really dislikes me. I just don’t think that anybody would have been good enough for her only child, and I was in the bottom 50 percent of the reject pile, at that. She likes me marginally better now that I have twice proved my fertility.

She continued. “I did some checking around for Railfords in Boston. There are some, of course, but none of them important. And all fairly new.”

Sip number three. I let the comment about importance sail over my head without grabbing and hanging on. “Interesting,” I managed.

“Then I mentioned it to my bridge club. Someone knows a prominent Railford family in Billerica.” This emerged as “B’ricka.”

“Hmm . . .”

“Well there are no
Gelsey
Railfords from Billerica, either.”

I was not sure what I supposed to say to this. I contemplated over sip number four.

“I imagine you heard incorrectly,” Nan said, while I remained in contemplation. “You’re certainly not from here, so you wouldn’t know the nuances, would you?”

I had a slight twinge in the region of my backbone. “It’s possible, isn’t it, that the bridge club might not know everybody in Massachusetts? Or is this unthinkable?”

“You’ll have to take my word for it, dear. My friends are very well-connected.”

I was not sure what they were connected to, but I hoped I was never stuck in that web. We chatted a moment about the weather, the safest subject I know, then Nan hung up.

Nan’s desire to imprint her values on our daughters is one of the reasons we left New England. She dotes on Deena and Teddy, and her love for them pleases me to no end. But as I finished my coffee I hoped that if our stay in Emerald Springs was fated to be short, we would continue moving west.

Ed wasn’t in his office when I found my way to the parish house after lunch. Harry Grey, our secretary, was watering the plants when I arrived.

He didn’t wait to be asked. “Ed got a call from Tom Jeffrey. Some sort of emergency.”

I like Harry. He’s sixtyish, a sharp dresser, and financially independent. He took this job years ago to get away from his partner, Greg, an architect who works at home, and because the job gives him lots of free time to travel.

Harry hails from just outside Chicago. Decades ago the Grey family stopped milking cows and turned to milking commuters. The family pastures are now a bustling bedroom community, complete with tract housing, condo developments, and enough strip malls to satisfy even Crystal O’Grady. Although none of the Grey heirs are still pitching hay, Harry invested his portion of the sale in Wal-Mart before the rest of us had heard of Sam Walton.

I rearranged the collection of hand-blown glass paperweights on his desk. “When Ed took this church he expected emergency to mean a plugged toilet. You don’t suppose someone in the congregation robbed a bank? Burned down the hotel? Had a torrid affair with Hillary Clinton or Katherine Harris?”

“He looked glum.”

“Not good.”

“If it’s any consolation, Gelsey Falowell is not one of my favorite people.”

“Oh?” I wasn’t surprised. Ed and I couldn’t be the only people in the world who saw Gelsey’s dark side.

“She tried to get me fired, too. Said I wasn’t a good influence.”

“Come on!”

“I stayed. I hope Ed stays, too.”

“I’m glad you prevailed.” I looked around. We seemed to be alone in the building. “You’ll be here awhile?”

“I’m typing up the new address directory. I’ll be here the rest of the afternoon.”

“I’m going up to the storage room to get more stuff from the archives. My last trip over here didn’t end well. If I don’t come back in half an hour, call the cops.”

My PowerPoint presentation had been so lame I was determined to make things up to the Women’s Society. For the most part, these are the kind of older women I hope to be someday. Generous, intelligent, committed. I wanted to make them happy. Clearly the best way was the old-fashioned way. Nothing that plugged in or went “beep.”

Last night, waking from one of Cal’s sermons against wascally wabbits, I came up with a solution. I would assemble my presentation—and then some—into a scrapbook.

Unlike Junie I’m not crafty by nature, but I am capable of cutting and pasting in real life, if not on a computer screen. This I could do, at least as a stop gap until Deena and I could work out the kinks in PowerPoint. Perhaps if this went well, I could have the pages copied and bound for those who wanted their own. I wasn’t expecting to make bestseller lists, but it was an idea with merit.

The storage room is at the back of the building on the third floor. There’s not much on this level since it’s really just a finished attic, hot in the summer and cold in the winter, home to squirrels, mice, and occasional leaks. It really was exactly the wrong place to keep precious documents and photos, and I was determined that if nothing else, I would find a new place for them.

I unlocked the door and left it wide open while I turned on the light, a pull chain hanging from a bare lightbulb in the center of the room. In defense of my predecessors, most of the archival material had been stored in varmint-proof containers of thick plastic or metal. An old trunk held compilations of sermons, thoughtfully transferred to tape when almost everyone had a reel-to-reel tape recorder to play them on.

I had come for a box of photos from the 1950s that were quickly fading. I was hoping to do a decade by decade collage of church events. I would assemble them and have them copied at the local office supply store. When someone else pushes the start button, things always go better.

I had already done something similar with the few photos left from earlier decades, except Deena and I had scanned those to the computer for my presentation. Once I had worked my way up to the twenty-first century, I would decide what to do with the originals.

I knew exactly where the box was that I planned to take home with me. A metal shelf system rested against the far wall, the basic gray model most people buy for garages or workrooms. The photos had been haphazardly placed there, with no thought to order, so I had arranged them chronologically.

The box I was seeking wasn’t there. I stopped and reconsidered, inspecting the room as I did. The changes were suddenly so obvious to me I was perplexed I hadn’t noticed them the moment I walked in. Someone had been in the storage room since my last visit.

This really isn’t that surprising. The storage room is a hodgepodge of old tables and chairs, banners too worn for decoration but too beloved to discard, candleholders, boxes of mismatched cutlery and chipped china. The list is long. But the archives take up one wall and a portion of another, and that area is clearly marked. No skull and crossbones, but you get the picture. This is clearly not the correct side of the room to store outdated religious education curriculums or checkbooks and receipts from fiscal years long past.

Our church sexton January Godfrey is a neat freak, and for a moment I assumed he had been here dusting shelves and setting mousetraps. But cobwebs hung engagingly in the corner, and the general storage area clearly hadn’t been touched. I also knew from experience that January would put things back where they belonged. He would clean but not rearrange. Even Deena’s power strip had been shelved in the most obvious place he could think of.

Fifteen minutes later I was sure that someone had been rummaging through the archives. Seriously rummaging. No sin, really, since there’s nothing valuable here, but baffling. I found the box I was looking for behind another. Not as if it had been hidden, but as if it had been shoved there as someone pawed through the materials.

Now I was curious. Exactly why would someone be up here in the first place? And why not take the time to put everything back? I was more than a little exasperated as I straightened and reshelved. I even found a few things from the archives across the room. Fern Booth had accused me of subjecting historical materials to rampaging children, but someone, most probably an adult, had done some genuine rampaging here.

I had finished and started out the door when I realized that something was missing from the shelves. Today I’d had more than enough room on the third one for the boxes I had straightened. But that hadn’t always been true. Last month the third shelf had been packed so tightly I had removed a box of slides and placed them elsewhere, just to make a little room. So what was missing now?

I went back, snapped on the light, and sorted through the boxes again. And by the time I got to the end, I remembered. There had been a box of 8 mm movies here. I had kept them at home for months, hidden from childish eyes in the pullout storage drawer under our guest room daybed. I had been sure the temperature extremes in the storage room would seal their doom and had hoped to get a little money from the budget so we could have them put on a DVD. In the end, I had brought them back here to wait for the board’s verdict. The drawer was packed to the brim and one day, simply wouldn’t close. I just hadn’t had room for everything.

Fifteen minutes later I was digging through piles on the other side of the room when Harry came up to check on me.

“You’ve had your half hour,” he said. “I thought I’d check before I call the cops. I’m armed.” He held up his letter opener, which is shaped like a shark and no doubt intimidating to tropical fish. If a neon tetra was my culprit, we were in business.

“Harry, has anyone asked you for the key to this room?”

“Nope.”

“There’s a box missing, and things have been rearranged.”

“Any number of people have keys. Religious education teachers, January, the folks who put together the rummage sale.”

I sat back on my heels. “It was a box of old home movies. I didn’t get to view more than a couple. Somebody’s ordination. A couple of potlucks and outdoor events.” I shrugged. “Probably more of the same. Why would anybody want them?”

“Maybe somebody decided to have them restored.”

“Wouldn’t they let me know? Or Ed?”

“You think they’re over here?” He squatted beside me.

“Enough stuff was out of order to make me wonder. I found a box of photos there.” I pointed to the top of the pile beside us.

Harry helped me search, and in the end he was the one who found the movies. They were buried under a pile of costumes from an old production of
Noah’s Ark.

“Now, that’s strange,” I said. “I can’t imagine how they ended up over here.”

We both stood and I took the box. “I had these at the house awhile ago. I guess they all go back to the parsonage for safekeeping. Maybe I’ll borrow the projector some time this week and catalog them.”

“You’ll need caffeine. Intravenously.”

We locked up and I headed home with the box of movies. I was trying to decide whether adding beef bouillon cubes to my homemade vegetable soup constituted a violation of principles, when Teddy arrived. We exchanged hugs, I marveled over her crayon drawing of Moonpie eating my house-plants, then I sat her at the kitchen table with a mug of warm cider and a peanut butter cookie.

Deena was next, trailing Carlene. I’ll have to admit I gawked. Carlene was wearing a three-layered white skirt that barely covered her bottom, a pink T-shirt that did not cover most of her midriff, shoes that looked to be a cross between hiking boots and strappy sandals, and hair that looked as if it had been styled with a butcher knife.

“Carlene and I are in the same group in history. We’re all doing a paper together and Carlene and I are supposed to do the research. Can we do it here on my computer?”

I had suppressed my first comment about Halloween being early this year. “Would you like me to bring cookies and cider upstairs for you?”

Carlene’s eyes widened. “I haven’t had a peanut butter cookie in years and years.”

She had only been alive for eleven, although you wouldn’t know it to look at her today. “They help grow strong bones and teeth,” I told her.

“You are so funny!” To my ears, the phrase sounded rehearsed, as if she had been practicing this dulcet uttering with a tape recorder.

We monitor sugar intake in our house, but this child needed to remember what childhood felt and tasted like. At that moment I wanted to drag her mother down to Don’t Go There for a little old-fashioned mud wrestling.