Diane Davidson - The Last Suppers

Outside, frozen pellets of snow began to drop, making a staccato noise on the windshield. So we would have had a snowy wedding. I could imagine the snow falling in soft waves past the diamond-shaped window above the St. Luke’s altar, my parents with tears in their eyes. Marla weeping unabashedly, Julian giving Tom and me the V-sign.

Arch beaming.

Stop.

Helen Keene’s voice murmured into the receiver about my delay and helping the authorities. Helen did not mention that Tom Schulz was missing. I was grateful for her help; my voice would give me away, I knew.

After Helen carefully clicked the cellular phone back in its holder, she turned back to me. She had wide-set brown eyes, thick dark eyebrows, and her long brown hair contained much gray. From the thing folds of dry skin on her square face, I judged her to be older than fifty, possibly even in her early sixties. I wondered if she had ever been an advocate for a bride before.

She said, “My background is in crisis counseling. My training is in psychology. Schulz told me that was your training, too.”

“College major. I cook for a living.”

She smiled, showing large teeth streaked with yellow. “And you’re a mother. So am I, although my children are grown now.”

I pulled the quilt over my shaking knees. I’d never talked with one of the Sheriff’s Department victim advocates, although their existence was well-publicized in the county. The advocates, both men and women, brought teddy bears and homemade quilts to the victims of accidents and crimes. Tom had told me that after a recent landslide, the advocates had spent the day in a hospital emergency room, giving out over forty quilts. They did a lot of good work, he’d said, with people who were hurt, with people who had lost loved ones …

Helens’s smile held through my silence. Tom would have said, Tell me how you see her. What he meant was describe her. Suddenly I could imagine Helen Keene bringing an oversize container of Kool-Air into her children’s elementary school classes on Field Day. When the Shriners’ circus came to town, I saw her shuffling onto a schoolbus to help chaperone the boisterous class on its bumpy trip. Now her gentle smile faded to seriousness. “Goldy, we need to talk. You’re going to have to decide what people you’re going to tell to about this. Among your friends, I mean. If you’re going to keep it together and help us, you need to take care of yourself.”

“Decide who I’m going to tell about the canceled wedding, Tom disappearing, what? I want to help find him,” I said, without adding a doubtful comment on how effective I was afraid the Sheriff’s Department could be without Tom Schulz.

Again Helen put her hand on my arm. Her short nails were spotted with chipped orange nail polish. Outside, the snow shower thickened; Boyd turned on the windshield wipers. “It’s like any kind of assault,” Helen told me. “It’s a personal violation. Your fiancé has disappeared. So maybe you feel stranded. High feelings, emotional vulnerability.” In the front seat, I heard Boyd snap his match between his teeth. I flinched. Helen went on, “But people won’t think of you as being in need of care. They’re going to think of you as a switchboard operator, full of information. They’ll feel they have to call you to find out the latest developments. Or maybe they’ll just be nosy to see how you’re holding up.” She continued firmly, “You need to decide. Who’re you going to tell how things are going? Who are you going to talk to about how you feel?”

“All right,” I murmured, I did not know what I would say and to whom. I just wanted Tom back.

“Something else.” Her voice was still matter-of-fact. “People are going to talk. They’re going to joke. They’re going to say Schulz staged this disappearance to escape getting married to you.” She chewed her bottom lip and looked at me expectantly.

My face became hot. A spasm of pain swept over me. I said, “They already have. Or at least one woman at the church has. And of course my parents think he’s skipped,” I said with an absurd squeak of laughter.

Helen shook her long hair. The police car turned right by a row of mailboxes where a sheriff’s Department car was stationed. Its lights flashed blue and yellow in the snowy gloom. We started up a rutted, muddy road. “Look, Goldy, part of my job as victim advocate is working on how people are going to respond to unexpected cruelties. One of the hardest things I have to deal with is when a child is kidnapped, and the neighbors insist he ran away.” She said firmly, “I know Schulz loved you very much.”

“Helen – please. Loves.’”

“Sorry.”

Our car skidded through an ice-covered puddle before stopping by the broken-down split-rail fence that led to Father Olson’s house. With my nerves put on edge by Tom Schulz’s disappearance, I needed to find significance or clues in every detail. Had the fence been broken when I catered a vestry dinner here last month? I could not remember. A lanky policeman standing by another Sheriff’s Department vehicle motioned Boyd through.

Boyd gunned the engine up the precipitously steep driveway. My mind snagged on a memory. The inclined driveway had been one of the reasons Father Olson had insisted to the vestry, that group of twelve lay people elected to run the temporal affairs of the church, that he needed a four-wheel-drive vehicle. And not just any four-wheel-drive, vestry member Marla had laughingly told me, but a Mercedes 300E 4Matic. The vestry, charged with raising and managing the church finances, had balked. But eventually, according to Marla, the group had acquiesced. This year, they’d even agreed there was sufficient money to hire a curate. Olson had hired the fidgety, overtalkative Father Doug Ramsey. What the vestry had grudgingly admitted was that unlike Father Pinckney, who only visited his favorite parishioners, Father Olson was diligent when it came to visit shut-ins, even when they lived in the most remote locations. And when those shut-ins died, the treasurer meekly noted, they often left money to the church in direct proportion to how much the priest had come to call. The parishioners whom Father Pinckney had visited had, apparently, not been so generous. In the three years since Olson had arrived, only five shut-ins had died. Nevertheless, parish giving was way up.

Not only that, Marla told me darkly, but Father Olson had hinted during the heated negotiations for his Mercedes that there was interest in him from another parish seeking a new rector. Forty thousand for a Benz was a lot cheaper than the hundred thou it would cost the parish to search for a new priest, especially since they had just gone through all that when they were looking for a replacement for Pinckney. A hundred thousand dollars? I had asked Marla incredulously. Absolutely, she’d replied, what with putting together a parish questionnaire, crunching and publishing the resulting data, making long-distance calls and flying candidates and committee members hither and yon for interviews, looking for a new rector was absolutely a far more expensive undertaking than buying a German luxury car. And besides, Marla said with a laugh, with the latest bequest, the parish could afford any vehicle or assistant Olson wanted.

As we passed the first of what I judged to be a dozen police cars, I hit the button to bring down the window, then greedily inhaled icy air. What had happened to the parish with the interest in Olson? With Olson dead, our own church would eventually have to begin a rector search; unlike the Vice President, Doug Ramsey didn’t automatically step into the leader’s shoes. But we were a long way from all that, and the hiring of a new priest was the least of my worries.

The Sheriff’s Department had to find Tom. I squeezed my eyelids shut as we passed the coroner’s van. Either that, or I would try to find him, I thought absurdly. I would not consider any other outcome. I summoned up Tom’s wide, handsome face, his laconic manner and affectionate smile. I clung to these images. What were Helen’s words? You need to take care of yourself.