Julia Spencer-Fleming - To Darkness And To Death

The blanket was stuck in the middle of the arrow slit. She bent again, rolling her head up against the dangling edge, forcing more material into the opening. It bunched fast. Half of it must be dangling from the outside right now. For a moment, she considered letting it stay like that, but then she realized people might walk by without ever lifting their eyes to see her banner. She pressed her face against the wool and sprang up as best she could, making an awkward en pointe in her boots.

It worked. The blanket slithered through the window and was gone. She heard nothing except a brief crack where it caught and broke a brittle branch. Was it spread out like a picnic cloth on the ground? Draped over a bramble bush? Hanging from a branch? It didn’t matter. It was large, it was white and red and yellow and green, it didn’t belong out there. Anyone who came by would notice it.

She thought of the way it had bunched in the opening, half in and half out. She looked at one of the remaining blankets, a fluffy, fuzzy lavender. She imagined a searcher spotting the wool blanket on the ground, glancing around, seeing another blanket flapping from an arrow slit high above the ground. Imagined friendly feet pounding up the stairs. Imagined someone saying, Hang on, I’ll have you out of here in a moment.

She shuffled over to the blanket pile and began kicking.

Clare was in the middle of listening to Courtney Reid’s litany of complaints when she heard a woman shout from the drive. The search and rescue team had completed their huddle, gone over the topo maps, and accepted assignments in different parts of the wood. The possibility that Millie had simply debunked to her boyfriend’s house had acted as a sort of antienergizer, making it that much more difficult to whip up the necessary enthusiasm for hours of careful searching through cold, bare woods. Even though she was privy to Russ’s doubts about the existence of the alleged boyfriend, Clare’s zeal was starting to flag as well. She kept thinking about the whirlwind of activity that must be going on at St. Alban’s. Next to Christmas and Easter, the bishop’s annual visit was the most important Sunday of the year, at least in terms of polishing silver and waxing wood and laying out the fatted calf. Or the individual puff-pastry quiches, in this case.

“She was supposed to pick up individual pastry shells from the bakery,” Courtney was saying. “Instead, she got phyllo dough. We now have phyllo dough for two hundred and no quiche pastries. What am I supposed to do with that?”

“Hang on just a second,” Clare said. “Someone’s hollering out in the drive.” When she had asked Eugene if she could use his phone, he had escorted her to a small den on the opposite side of the foyer from the living room. He had shut the door to give her privacy, but John Huggins, whose ideas of delicacy were somewhat different from van der Hoeven’s, had stuck his head in the door and reminded Clare in no uncertain terms that she’d better not sit yapping on the phone all morning. When he left, the door was still ajar. If she stretched to the length of the cord, she could see out the wide window to the drive. Her view of the porch was restricted; she couldn’t see Eugene, but she could hear him. He must have left the front door open.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

So the young blonde in barn coat and jeans walking toward the porch wasn’t Millie. Clare sighed. It would have been too much to ask, she supposed.

“Reverend Fergusson?” Courtney Reid demanded from the vicinity of Clare’s chest.

Clare brought the phone back to her ear, keeping her eye on the people outside her window. “I’m here.”

“Okay, so my problem is, what am I going to do? Serve baklava? I could send one of the other volunteers to the baker’s for the puff pastries, but I don’t think our budget will stretch that far.”

Eugene had stepped off the porch. The young woman approached him. She said something Clare couldn’t make out, then gestured to the two-no, three men clustered behind her. Like the blonde, they were dressed in sturdy coats and jeans. One of them carried a clipboard. One had a camera looped around his neck. All of them had metal measuring tapes hanging off their belt loops.

“You can use the phyllo dough to make the shells,” she said into the phone. The unheard conversation continued. The woman’s body language said, I’m being polite, but I’m in charge here. Eugene was stiff, as he had been when Clare met him. A shy man shielding himself with an aristocrat’s hauteur. “You’ll have to separate the dough and bake them before you fill them, of course.”

“I thought of that,” Courtney said impatiently. “We don’t have any individual-sized tins to bake them in.”

Clare couldn’t remember why full-sized quiches, sliced up, were unacceptable. She suspected raising the issue would be a lost cause at this point. “There’s a great kitchen supply store in Saratoga. Send someone down to pick up a couple stacks of disposable baking tins.”

“To Saratoga?” Courtney screeched.

The woman handed van der Hoeven several sheets of paper. Clare could spot a letterhead but couldn’t make it out. Eugene bent his head over the documents.

“It’s a forty-five-minute drive,” Clare said, in as reasonable a tone as possible. “Surely you can find someone willing-” Courtney cut her off with a wail of reasons why it would be impossible, impossible, to spare one of the already-too-few volunteers for a daylong trip to Saratoga. Clare let her rattle on. It never ceases to amaze me, how many folks jump straight over ‘I’ll try’ to ‘I can’t,’ Master Sergeant Ashley “Hardball” Wright drawled.

Eugene turned and disappeared into the house. No farewell, no acknowledgement that the blond woman still stood there. Clare blinked. Not that she was an expert on Eugene van der Hoeven, but that seemed out of character. She heard his footsteps ringing over the floorboards, headed away from her into the living room.

“… and Judy Morrison hasn’t even shown up like she promised…,” Courtney was saying.

The young woman turned to the men gathered behind her and began speaking. She motioned toward the house, the garage, the utility shed. One of the men snapped the measuring tape off his belt, and another produced a fat, dog-eared notebook from the depths of his jacket. Surveyors? Tax assessors? They couldn’t be painters-it was far too late in the season to paint outdoors.

She heard van der Hoeven’s tread returning through the foyer and out onto the porch. Through the front door, she heard his voice. “Hey. You.”

The young woman and the men looked up. The woman’s eyes and mouth widened. Everyone froze in position, except the man holding the notebook, who dropped it, bent over, scrabbled it off the ground, then hotfooted back several paces.

“Get off my property,” van der Hoeven yelled. He descended from the porch into Clare’s view. She nearly let go of the phone. Eugene was carrying a rifle. Not carrying it, aiming it, stock up and butted against his shoulder, sights pointed toward the pale-faced, motionless group in his drive. “Get off my property, I said.” He was shouting; Clare could hear every word.

“Courtney.” She cut off the banquet preparation committee chair ruthlessly. “Find someone to go to Saratoga.” She let her command voice out, the one that crackled with authority. The one that brooked no disagreement. “I don’t care who, just do it. Something’s come up. I’ll call you back as soon as I can.” She stalked to the phone, replaced the receiver, and hurried back to the window.

The young woman, with more guts than sense, had stepped forward. Clare couldn’t make out what she was saying, but whatever it was, it didn’t have the effect of calming van der Hoeven.