The Reverend James Willoughby pulled at an errant thread on his Episcopalian gown while discussing carpentry with Jerome Harper, the pimply-faced organist from Harwich.
“Notching it, there’s the challenge,” Reverend Willoughby muttered, staring at the thread as he yanked it from the seam like a fisherman testing the strength of his line. His head was down, his chin almost on his chest, causing the skin of his neck to fold and wrinkle like free-hanging fabric. “You ever notch a drawer front like that? Don’t have a pair of scissors, do you?”
“In my car.” Jerome Harper’s hands meandered along the keyboard, his fingers silently confirming the notes of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in E Minor. “Want me to get them, Reverend?”
The outer door of the church swung open and the sounds of footsteps and hushed whispers drifted in from the lower alcove.
“Never mind.” Willoughby smoothed the front of his vestments with pink-skinned and blue-veined hands, and drew his shoulders back. “I believe we may be having a service after all.”
Beneath its soaring white spire, St. Luke’s had ministered to the spiritual needs of Compton-area Episcopalians for almost two centuries, and, if the impact of its neo-Gothic magnificence had been diluted over the years by newer, more dramatic churches in Hyannis and Falmouth, the integrity of the building remained as virtuous as ever.
Set atop a gentle hill where Mill Pond Road met Main Street, St. Luke’s steeple boasted a mammoth-faced clock whose gilt-painted Roman numerals could be read from several blocks away. In contrast with the church’s classic and inspirational exterior lines, St. Luke’s interior decor was almost humble: old polished oak and weathered pine were its most dominant building materials, and the Gothic windows, while perfectly proportioned, shone clear and devoid of elaborate stained-glass scenes.
Passing through the church’s oversized outer doors, the three couples—Ellie Stevenson hissing at her husband, Parker and June Leedale with their hands thrust in their topcoat pockets, Bunny and Mike Gilroy hand in hand like high school lovers—entered an alcove stretching almost the width of the building.
Warped wooden stairs descended from the near end of the alcove to basement meeting rooms. At the far end of the alcove, a windowed door led to the minister’s private office. To the right rose seven oak steps ending at three sets of highly polished oak doors which led into the church proper. The architect’s goal was transparent and successfully achieved: entering the building from the outside world, worshipers arrived in the darkened alcove, a quiet and sparsely decorated midpoint, before proceeding to the inner chamber up the steeply angled stairs to emerge into the elevated and brightly lit place of worship.
Cresting the stairs and swinging open the doors, the three couples paused for a moment and blinked at the magically subdued light flooding through windows whose lower portions had been swung open to admit the cleansing autumn air. Pristine white-painted walls and ceiling reflected the sunshine throughout the interior, casting a soft, beneficent glow.
Sixteen empty rows of pews, finished in the same honey oak as the alcove doors, stretched to the altar, the rows separated by two wide aisles.
In front of the centre row of pews, an antique brass music stand displayed a framed photograph of Cora Meriwether Godwin, nee McGuire, retrieved from her home by June Leedale. The photo had been taken thirty years earlier, when the mischief of a carefree youth began yielding to the respectability of scarred middle age.
Reverend Willoughby beamed his warmest smile at the six mourners, spread his arms with palms up in a gesture of welcome and blessing and indicated the front pews. The organist segued smoothly from Bach to Handel.
“Sure, right in front where we’re trapped the whole bloody time,” Ellie Stevenson muttered before laughing nervously. There was much whispering between the couples as they arranged themselves in the centre of the front pew.
From the open windows a light autumn breeze stirred the air of the church, bringing with it a welcome sense of life and normality. Somewhere out on Mill Pond Road a dog barked, and birds chattered beneath the eaves of the church.
Reverend Willoughby smiled and nodded at each in turn, his lips compressed. “I am afraid we represent the totality of the mourners here to mark the passing of Mrs. Godwin, our dear, departed sister,” he said in his melodic voice. There was no sorrow in its tone. Nor in his expression, as he scanned the faces of the six men and women seated directly beneath him; the smile continued to beam, resting perhaps a beat longer on Bunny Gilroy than the others.
Clasping his hands together, he brought them to his chest before turning to Jerome Harper and nodding like a conspirator. Then he swiveled his narrow gray-haired head back to the small group in the pews and opened his prayer book.
A single high note, airy and delicate as a ribbon riding the wind, rose from the organ and hovered among the Gothic rafters, beginning the final ritual in the life of Cora Godwin, a life that had rejected rituals as empty gestures, demanding action and deeds instead.
The single note was followed by an introductory chord played by the organist’s left hand. Both were smothered almost immediately by the roar of a massive diesel truck pulling in next to the church just beyond the open window, the clatter accompanied by the crunch of gravel and the squeal of badly tended brakes. The tip of the truck’s vertical exhaust pipe extended above the level of the open windows and all eight sets of eyes in the church turned to stare as the black smoke from the exhaust stack began to drift inside on the autumn breeze.
Jerome Harper glanced at Reverend Willoughby, who frowned at the intrusion before lowering his head as though to begin his reading. But before he could speak, the restive grumble of the truck’s diesel erupted into an even thicker, blacker cloud of carbon and fumes. With an angry growl, the vehicle accelerated and roared away, its tires grinding on the gravel and various heavy pieces of metal on the truck clapping against themselves in broken rhythm.
Reverend Willoughby shook his head slowly, his smile broader than ever. A temporal irritation, his expression said, to focus our attention more intently on the eternal . . .
His head snapped up. Someone had entered the alcove through the outer doors. A series of quick, sharp footsteps echoed across the bare floor and began climbing the seven stairs to the main level.
Jerome Harper lifted his right hand from the keyboard once again and the sound of the single soft note decayed among the white-painted rafters.
The footsteps paused after the seventh step, as though the intruder were reconsidering his entry into the church. Then the door swung open to reveal a stocky middle-aged man, his tanned skin the colour of St. Luke’s oak pews and his unkempt hair a blend of pale brown and shimmering silver, reminiscent of pulled taffy.
The man removed his sunglasses and scanned the interior, his narrow, deep-set eyes alighting one by one on the others who stared back at him with expressions ranging from curiosity to hostility. He wore a lightweight green cotton jacket over a white cotton pullover and gray trousers. His feet were clad in soft tan leather shoes styled like sneakers, and a cheap canvas luggage bag hung from one shoulder. The line of an old and badly healed scar, almost white against his tan, angled across his upper lip to the corner of his nose. He held a bouquet of wilting red roses in his hands.
“My God, it’s him,” Ellie Stevenson whispered. She turned to Parker Leedale. “Is that him?”
McGuire shifted the canvas bag to his other shoulder and began walking up the aisle toward the altar.
“Is it?” June Leedale asked her husband.
“I think so,” he replied.
Acknowledging the mourners with a casual nod, McGuire strode directly to the brass music stand, laid the roses carefully on the ledge in front of Cora’s photograph and stood for a moment with head bowed and one hand resting on the cherrywood picture frame, the fingertips moving back and forth as though to caress the wooden frame, or perhaps the woman pictured within it.
Then, turning and avoiding the eyes of the others, he entered the third row of pews, where he sat and stared ahead at the blank wall behind the altar, lost in thought.
“It’s him,” Parker Leedale whispered with more certainty. “That’s her nephew.”
“Makes a hell of an entrance, doesn’t he?” Ellie said in a stage whisper, just as Jerome Harper began, for the second time, the baroque fugue chosen for the occasion.
“Friends of our sister, Cora Godwin,” the Reverend Willoughby said in his strong New England voice, the vowels flat but the tone like sawgrass, rough and reedy, “we are gathered to mark her departure from the cares of this world and into the hands of God, our Redeemer.”
As Willoughby spoke, yet another figure entered the church and slipped quietly into a rear pew. June Leedale turned to see the angular man sitting relaxed and upright, his long legs folded so tightly in the cramped space that his bony knees almost protruded through the tweed fabric of his trousers.
“It’s the doctor,” June Leedale whispered in her husband’s ear. “Dr. Hayward. What in heaven’s name is he doing here?”
Parker Leedale glanced quickly behind him, along with the others, and shrugged. Bunny Gilroy bit her lip as her husband and Blake Stevenson exchanged glances.
Reverend Willoughby acknowledged the doctor’s arrival with a nod, then scanned a sheet of writing paper on the pulpit in front of him. He began reading from it. “The present proceedings of life are not to be performed in private. For they are neither filled with passion nor satiated with sin. . . .”
McGuire, lost in memories of his aunt and the pleasant summers he had spent at her Cape Cod home, was unaware of the doctor’s presence. He leaned his head back and stared up at the ceiling. He was never comfortable with the rituals of religion, the singing of hymns, the recitation of homilies, the vestments of the ministers and choir members. Yet on the rare occasions he entered a church, he felt himself relax as though he were temporarily safe from some undefined menace. He breathed deeply and closed his eyes.
Willoughby’s voice droned on. “. . . and not in reality but in parables do we speak, finding the truth as foreboding as it may be, in tales often told and tales concealed, hidden within the unbending folds of love . . .”
Hearing “the folds of love,” McGuire thought again of Barbara, why she wasn’t here with him, why he wasn’t with her, walking on the beach, sitting in the shade, peeling remnants of sunburned skin from her nose and hearing her laugh, softly, coyly. . . .
“. . . as in the tale of the three young men and the black sheep, their paths crossing, footprints in sand, confused in alarms of trouble and flight . . .”
McGuire’s eyes opened. Black sheep? Three young men?
Willoughby faltered. He frowned at the words on the paper in front of him and began speaking again.
“For who we are and who we wish to be are never one and the same unless we accept the truth, both painful and pleasurable. It is through the eyes of the Samaritan that truth will be finally perceived and justice delivered.”
Doesn’t make any sense, McGuire thought. No sense at all. He sat back, his arms stretched across the back of the pew.
Willoughby’s voice droned on, talking of the Samaritan gathered among them and fearing the face in the shadow, while McGuire permitted his mind to drift away to memories of Cora and his cousin Terry and of picnics near the Compton lighthouse overlooking the offshore sandbar. The few summers he had spent with the Godwin family would be forever golden to him, and McGuire recalled the melancholy mood that would envelop him when his visits ended and he had to board the bus back home to Boston, back to the grime and indifference of his life.
It was a time when McGuire envied his cousin’s comfortable home, cultured and caring parents and the respectability of middle-class life.
But more than twenty years had passed since Terry Godwin died, twenty-odd years that saw McGuire storm through a career as a Boston homicide cop and two failed marriages to discover himself living alone on an isolated Caribbean island wondering how he had arrived there and whether it would be his final destination in life or simply another way station, another pause in a chaotic and unplanned life.
Everything we encounter is haphazard, McGuire told himself. No matter how well we plan, how much we prepare for life, it’s haphazard anyway. It could have been me blown to pieces in a war. It could as easily be Terry sitting here now, doing what I’m doing, trying to figure where the hell so much of my life has gone.
“. . . and only through the eyes of truth can justice be finally perceived.”
The Reverend’s words rang with finality, and McGuire glanced up to see Willoughby shuffling the sheets of paper together. “May the Lord be with you and bless you all,” he said, looking above the heads of the small congregation, a puzzled expression on his face.
The organist began the opening bars of Bach’s “Come Sweet Death.” Ellie Stevenson was the first to rise. “Strangest damn sermon I ever heard,” she said with a giggle.
The others followed and gathered at the end of the pew where McGuire remained sitting.
Parker Leedale was the first to speak. “McGuire? Joe McGuire?”
McGuire looked up and nodded.
“Parker Leedale,” the lawyer whispered, extending a hand. He and McGuire shook once, then Leedale withdrew his hand to retrieve a business card from his pocket and hand it to McGuire. “We’re having a small tea in Cora’s memory at our house, my wife and me. That’s our address at the bottom of the card, right across the lane from Cora’s house. Will you join us?”
Another nod from McGuire, and Leedale smiled tightly before leading the others down the aisle and out of the church.
“Mr. McGuire?”
The voice was deep and modulated, and the rolled “r” in McGuire’s name rang of heather and peat smoke.
McGuire looked up again, this time into the blue eyes of Dr. Ivan Hayward, who extended a hand and introduced himself before sitting next to McGuire. “I wonder if you and I could have a chat.”
“About what?”
“Your Aunt Cora.”
McGuire shrugged. “What do you want to know?” He reached for his canvas bag.
“It’s not what I want to know. It’s what you should know.”
McGuire lifted the bag to his lap and stared at Hayward.
“Your aunt died from heart failure, it’s true,” Hayward said. At the end of the aisle, the heavy oak doors closed as the Gilroys, Leedales and Stevensons left the church. From the altar, Reverend Willoughby watched McGuire and Hayward intently.
“But it wasn’t a natural death,” Hayward continued. “Your aunt was murdered. I’m convinced of it. I just can’t prove it.”