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The First Abyssinian Church of the New Covenant was a once-grand stone building that had slowly, over the years, gone to seed. The velvet pew cushions, badly in need of replacing, had been repaired in far too many places with duct tape. The place was always cold, summer or winter: something about the stone walls and floor, that plus the fact that the building fund was suffering, and it cost a fortune to heat the cavernous interior adequately.
Attendance was sparse this morning, as it was on most Sundays except Easter and Christmas. There were even a few white faces: a couple of regulars who seemed to find the sustenance here they didn’t get in the white congregations. LaTonya’s family wasn’t here, which was no surprise, since they came only a few times a year. Early in their marriage, Leon used to accompany Audrey here, until he announced it wasn’t for him. She didn’t even know whether he was sleeping late this morning or doing something else, whatever else he’d been doing.
Leon was only one of the reasons why her heart was heavy today. There was also Noyce. That news had punctured her. She felt betrayed by this man who’d been her friend and supporter and who hid from her his true nature. It sickened her.
But this discovery, as much as it shook her to the core, liberated her at the same time. She no longer had to agonize about betraying him, going behind his back, end-running him. She knew there was no choice, really. Whether Jack Noyce was in the Stratton Corporation’s pocket, had been leaking to his old partner details of the investigation-or was simply compromised, trapped, by what Rinaldi knew about him-he had been working to defeat her investigation. She thought back to the many talks she’d had with him about this case, the advice he’d dispensed so freely. The way he’d cautioned her to proceed carefully, telling her she didn’t have enough to arrest Conover and Rinaldi. And who would ever know what else he’d done to slow things up, block her progress? What resources had he quietly blocked? Whatever the truth was, she couldn’t tell Noyce that she and Bugbee were about to get an arrest warrant for the CEO and the security director of Stratton. Noyce had to be kept in the dark, or he’d surely notify Rinaldi and do everything in his power to halt the arrest.
But here, at least, here she felt at peace and welcome and loved. Everyone said good morning, even people whose names she didn’t know, courtly gentlemen and polite young men and lovely young women and hovering mothers and sweet old white-haired women. Maxine Blake was dressed all in white, wearing an ornate hat that looked a little like an upside-down bucket with white tendrils coming out of it and encircling it like rings around a planet. She threw her arms around Audrey, pressing Audrey to her enormous bosom, bringing her into a cloud of perfume and warmth and love. “God is good,” Maxine said.
“All the time,” Audrey responded.
The service started a good twenty minutes late. “Colored people’s time,” the joke went. The choir, dressed in their magnificent red-and-white robes, marched down the aisle clapping and singing “It’s a Highway to Heaven,” and then they were joined by the electric organ and then the trumpet and drum and then Audrey joined in along with most everybody else. She’d always wanted to sing in the choir, but her voice was nothing special-though, as she’d noticed, some of the women in the choir had thin voices and tended to sing out of tune. Some had spectacular voices, it was true. The men mostly sang in a rumbling bass, but the tenor was more off-key than on.
Reverend Jamison started his sermon as he always did, by calling out, “God is good,” to which everyone responded: “All the time.” He said it again, and everyone responded again. His sermons were always heartfelt, usually inspired, and never went on too long. They weren’t particularly original, though. Audrey had heard he got them off the Internet from Baptist Web sites that posted sample sermons and notes. Once, confronted on his lack of originality, Reverend Jamison had said, “I milk a lot of cows, but I churn my own butter.” Audrey liked that.
Today he told the story of Joshua and the armies of Israel fighting the good fight, battling five of the kings of Canaan for the conquest of the promised land. About how the kings played right into Joshua’s hands by joining the battle together. About how it wasn’t the Lord who fought the battle, it was Israel. The five kings tried to hide in a cave, but Joshua ordered the cave sealed up. And after the battle had been won, Joshua brought the kings out of their cave, out of their hiding place, and humiliated them by ordering his princes to place their feet on the kings’ necks. Reverend Jamison talked about how there’s no hiding place. “We can’t hide from God,” he declared. “The only hiding place from God is Hell.”
That made her think, as it had so many times, about Nicholas Conover and the graffiti that had been repeatedly spray-painted on the interior walls of his house. No hiding place.
That could be frightening, as no doubt Conover found it to be. No hiding place: from what? From a faceless adversary, from a stalker? From his guilt, his sins?
But here in church, “no hiding place” was meant to be a stern yet hopeful admonition.
In his most orotund voice the reverend recited from Proverbs 28: “He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy.”
And she thought, because every single one of Reverend Jamison’s sermons was devised to mean something to each and every one in the congregation, about Nicholas Conover. The king hiding in his cave.
But no hiding place. Andrew Stadler had been right, hadn’t he?
Reverend Jamison cued the choir, which went right into a lively rendition of “No Hiding Place Down Here.” The soloist was Mabel Darnell, a large woman who sang and swayed like Aretha Franklin and Mahalia Jackson put together. The organist, Ike Robinson, was right up front, on display, not hidden the way the organist usually was in the other churches she’d seen. He was a white-haired, dark-skinned man of near eighty with expressive eyes and an endearing smile. He wore a white suit and looked like Count Basie, Audrey had always thought.
“I went to the rock to hide my face,” Mabel sang, clapping her hands, “but the rock cried out, ‘No hiding place!’”
Count Basie’s pudgy fingers ran up and down the keys, syncopating, making swinging jazz out of it, and the rest of the choir joined in at the rock and my face and cried out and no hiding place no hiding place no hiding place.
Audrey felt a thrill coursing through her body, a shiver that moved along her spine like an electric current.
And the instant the choir had finished, while the organ chords still resounded, Reverend Jamison’s voice boomed out, “My friends, none of us can hide from the Lord. ‘And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man’”-his voice rose steadily until the sound system squealed with feedback-“‘hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains.’” Now he dropped to a stage whisper: “‘And said to the mountains and rocks, fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb. For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?’”
He paused to let the congregation know that his sermon had concluded. Then he invited anyone in the congregation who wished to come up to the altar for a moment of personal prayer. Ike Robinson, no longer Count Basie, played softly as a dozen or so people got up from their pews and knelt at the altar rail, and all of a sudden Audrey felt moved to do it too, something she hadn’t done since her mother’s death. She went up there and knelt between Maxine Blake and her enormous rings-of-Saturn hat and another woman, Sylvia-something, whose husband had just died of complications from liver transplant surgery, leaving her with four small children.