“Why did Meade suggest that it was?”
She looked at the two-carat diamond on her left ring finger, and when she spoke, she didn’t look up. “Roy really didn’t want me on the staff at all, even as a volunteer, and I know it bothered him that I was part of the Circle of Faith, too. But he wasn’t about to say anything that would bring him into a direct confrontation with my husband. As it was, Barney had been on Roy’s case lately about the way he treated other staff members.”
“It seems like Meade caused more trouble than he was worth,” I observed.
“But he was an awfully good preacher,” Elise said in a whisper, finally looking up. “And as I mentioned before, he did the work of a small army.”
“It probably wouldn’t surprise you to hear that what I know about churches wouldn’t fill one side of a sheet in a loose-leaf notebook,” I told her, “but I still don’t see why your husband didn’t go out and find himself a Number Two person who got along better with the rest of the crew. No matter how good a preacher and worker Meade was, you can’t tell me he was indispensable.”
She shook her head sadly. “No, no, I can’t tell you that. Only the Lord is indispensable. Apparently nobody’s mentioned what happened when they were in the seminary together.”
“I have a feeling I’m about to learn.”
“It’s not something that gets discussed often. In fact, I’m not sure everyone in the Circle of Faith even knows about what happened,” Elise said, still almost whispering. I wanted to reach across the table and give her hand a squeeze.
“This was a few months before I met Barney,” she went on. “He was in his last year of seminary, that was down in Georgia, and Roy was two years behind him, but they’d gotten to be casual friends. On a long weekend or a break between terms, I forget which, they went to one of those Gulf Coast resort towns along the Florida panhandle that college kids like so much — Panama City, I think it was. Anyway, Barney, who never has been a very good swimmer, went out a little too far off shore and got caught in an undertow. Roy swam out and carried him in. Barney was unconscious — blue, the way Roy told it — and he gave Barney artificial respiration for a long time, by whatever method they used back then. A crowd gathered. Barney told me that the first thing he remembered when he regained consciousness was this mob of people standing around him on the beach. Roy was a hero.”
“And your husband owed him his life.”
“Yes,” she said soberly, “and it’s a debt that he’s been paying off for almost fourteen years now, Archie. I don’t mean to sound bitter, and I certainly didn’t mean to go on this much. Forgive me.”
“There’s nothing to forgive. I assume your husband brought Meade in as an assistant because of this debt.”
Elise ran a finger along one nicely arched eyebrow. “It was about a year after Barney got here, and all we had then was that small church building — we call it the Cana Chapel now — that you probably saw on your tour with Nella the other day. Roy came looking for work; he’d had several positions since seminary, the last one as an assistant minister at a little parish someplace in the Tennessee mountains, and it hadn’t worked out, something about a difference in philosophy between him and the senior pastor. He asked Barney for a job, and you can guess what happened.”
“Barney couldn’t say no.”
“That’s right,” she answered, setting her jaw. “At that point, we were just getting started here, and we weren’t in a position to afford another pastor, but as you phrased it, Barney couldn’t say no. I urged him not to hire Roy. I reminded him they had never really been all that close before the swimming incident, but he went ahead anyway. He said he owed it to Roy.”
“That decision couldn’t have been too much of a calamity, given the way the church has grown since then.”
She leaned back in her chair and let her shoulders sag. She still looked dazzling. “I wouldn’t call it a calamity, by any means. Roy played a big part in the success of the Silver Spire,” she said, “but...”
“But you never liked him.”
Her shoulders sagged some more, making me wish I could do something to perk her up. “No, you’re right. I hope I loved him, as one Christian loves another — I know I prayed for him regularly, and for all the other members of the Circle of Faith and the staff. But I never really liked him. And I wanted to like him, I honestly did.” She stopped herself abruptly and looked up at me with an expression of surprise. “How do you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Get people to talk. I haven’t said as much about my feelings toward Roy Meade in the last ten years as I have today, except maybe to Barney, and then mostly indirectly. Then you come in here and hardly ask any questions at all, and I start spouting like Old Faithful.”
“It’s a trick I learned many years ago in the Orient,” I said with a thin smile. “Now that I’ve got you gushing, tell me what happened on the night Meade was shot. The meeting was right here, wasn’t it?”
She nodded, her eyes moving from one end of the big table to the other. “Right in this room. As I’m sure you know, the whole Circle of Faith was here. And Mr. Durkin, of course. I don’t mean to sound like I’ve got ESP or anything like that, but I had a bad feeling about that meeting even before it started.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure. It wasn’t those notes that Barney had gotten; they never really bothered me all that much, and I frankly thought bringing in a private detective to find out who wrote them was kind of silly. So the notes, or whoever wrote them, didn’t frighten me. Any man in the public eye as much as Barney gets accustomed to dealing with cranks. I don’t know, I just had a... feeling that something was going to happen.”
“Who do you think wrote the notes?”
She chewed on her thumb and shook her head. “Somebody who was disturbed, obviously. We get some pretty weird people here occasionally. I don’t know if it’s because we are on TV and that draws them to the tabernacle, or what. I’m glad we’re well-publicized — anything that brings folks to the Lord is good — even though you also risk, well, the kind of person who devised those horrid messages.” She shuddered delicately.
“So I gather you don’t see any connection between the notes and Meade’s murder?”
“Good heavens, no. Archie, I know he’s your friend, but I don’t doubt for a second that Mr. Durkin killed Roy.”
I leaned back and stretched my arms over my head. “But anyone in the meeting could have done it, right? There was plenty of time, while the rest of you were all closeted in offices meditating for fifteen minutes or so.”
She frowned. “Technically, that’s true, but in the first place, good Christians — and I certainly include everyone in the Circle of Faith in that category — aren’t murderers. Second, why would any of them — any of us — want to murder Roy? And third, how would we even know where to find Mr. Durkin’s gun?”
“Those are all good questions, Elise, and I can’t answer them. But then, I’m not the question answerer on our organizational chart, I’m the fact collector. Mr. Wolfe answers the hard questions. All I can tell you is that Fred Durkin isn’t a murderer, either. How did you learn that Meade had been shot?”
“From Marley Wilkenson — he burst into the office where I was; he was hysterical. He’d just found Roy.”
“And you were in a vacant office?”
“It’s used by one of the membership secretaries,” she said. “And it’s right next to Roy’s office.”
“But you didn’t hear shots?”
A shake of the head. “No, but you really can’t hear anything through these walls. I remember sitting in Barney’s office with him one time when Sam Reese, who was right next door, opened one too many drawers on his filing cabinet at once, and the whole thing tipped over and almost fell on him. Sam told us it made quite a thud hitting the floor, but we never heard a sound.”