1

Sam Gardner had been the pastor of Hope Friends Meeting a scant four months when Olive Charles, aged ninety-eight, drew her last ragged breath and expired. On the four occasions Sam had spent at Olive’s bedside, she hadn’t said a word. She had appeared dead then, in fact. So when the funeral home had phoned Sam at 6 a.m. on a Monday, his day off, to report her demise, he hadn’t been at all surprised. Her funeral had been a small one. She had never married, but did have one niece in Chicago whom she hadn’t seen in forty years, who’d showed up at the funeral bawling her eyes out at the sight of Olive lying stiff in her casket, but had recovered quickly, pulled Sam aside, and asked him if the will had been read.

“I have no idea,” he’d told her.

“Do you know if Aunt Olive had any other relatives? I’d kind of lost touch with the family. Did anyone ever come visit her at the nursing home?”

“Just me and folks from the meeting,” Sam said.

“Did she say anything about money?”

“Not to me, but then she’d stopped talking about a year ago.”

“We were very close,” the niece said. Sam hadn’t caught her name—Ramona, Regina, Rowena, he wasn’t sure—and after only five minutes with her had no interest in learning it.

The following Sunday morning at meeting for worship, Ruby Hopper talked about Olive and showed slides from their vacations.

“Olive was one of our founding members,” Ruby said, by way of introduction. “Very kind. Very dedicated to the meeting. We vacationed together until three years ago, when her health turned. She was an absolute joy.”

“Smart, too,” Hank Withers said. “She was on the building committee when they hired me to design it. She would have made an excellent architect.”

Hank was a retired architect and thought it high praise indeed that Olive could have been similarly employed.

Olive’s attorney had phoned the meetinghouse office two days later, early in the morning, to inform Sam that Olive had left to her beloved Quaker meeting her entire estate, consisting of one house and its contents, a 1979 Ford Granada with four snow tires, barely used, and a bank account a dab north of eight hundred thousand dollars. Sam had never cared for lawyers, but in that moment he felt a general warmth toward the profession and probably would have hugged the man had they been in the same room.

Ramona, or Regina, or whatever her name was, phoned a few minutes later, screeching about suing the church and everyone in it and coming down there and getting what was rightfully hers, since she’d been the only one who’d ever loved Olive. Sam let her rant a little while, then hung up the phone.

Sam Gardner loved nothing more than to be in possession of a juicy morsel of news no one else knew, so he savored the situation for several minutes, sitting in the quiet of his office, then phoned the members of the church, summoning them to an emergency meeting that evening. He couldn’t tell them over the phone. He had to tell them in person, all at once, so they would hear the same thing. He would see them at seven.

“Should I bring a pie?” Ruby Hopper asked.

“Several,” Sam said. “Can you make one of those apple pies with the crumbly things on top?”

“A Dutch apple pie? I certainly can.”

It was shaping up to be the finest day Sam Gardner had ever had in thirty years of ministry.

Barbara was at work, at Hope Elementary, where she served as the librarian. Sam walked the five blocks there, caught her in between classes, and told her what had happened.

“That’s two hundred thousand dollars a visit,” he pointed out. “Not bad for an hour’s work.”

“Sure beats library pay,” Barbara said.

“Her niece is madder than a wet hen. She called to tell me she’s going to sue the meeting and everyone in it.”

“This is the niece who hadn’t seen her in forty years?” Barbara asked.

“That’s the one.”

“They come out of the woodwork when they sniff a little money, don’t they?”

Sam was too distracted to work on his sermon, so he spent the rest of the day fending off curious church members who happened to be in the neighborhood and dropped in to visit.

“Is the yearly meeting going to throw us out?” Wilson Roberts asked. “They better not, that’s all I can say. Not five years ago I donated a brand-new toilet and sink for the superintendent’s office. They throw us out and I’m going over there and taking them back.”

“No, the yearly meeting isn’t throwing us out,” Sam said.

“Then why did you call a meeting?”

“You’ll find out tonight, along with everyone else. I don’t want to have to tell the story a dozen different times. You’ll have to be patient, Wilson.”

When Wilson realized he couldn’t wear Sam down, he took his leave. No sooner had he gone than Wanda and Leonard Fink stopped past. Sam’s phone call had wakened them; they had been speculating ever since and had concluded that Sam had become an atheist and was announcing his resignation, which didn’t trouble them in the least. Indeed, they were relieved, and not at all surprised, ever since they had seen a book on his office shelves titled The Pastor’s Secret: The Rise of Doubt Among Clergy.

“We know what the meeting is about,” Wanda Fink said, cutting to the chase.

They probably do, the big snoops, Sam thought.

“I would prefer not to discuss it right now,” Sam said. “I want to tell it only once.”

“I never thought I would live to see the day when something like this would happen,” Leonard said. “Have you given any thought to what this will do to our church?”

“I’ve been thinking of nothing else,” Sam said. “It will be a test for us, that’s for sure. But I prefer not to say anything more until tonight, when everyone is present.”

“How can you sit there and be so calm?” Wanda said. “It’s like you don’t even care.”

“I care a great deal. I just don’t think it’s anything to get all worked up about. It’s happened to other churches and they dealt with it. So will we.”

“We? What do you mean we? You’re not planning on staying, are you?”

“I most certainly am,” Sam said. “The meeting needs steady leadership at a time like this.”

Wanda and Leonard stormed from the office. As long as he lived, Sam would never be able to figure out some people.