The Almost Sisters(57)
I got my phone out and sent Frank a quick text: Where are you? The cops think the bones are Ellis Birch. It’s very bad.
“We were all so sorry to hear that you are ill,” Polly said to Birchie, loud, glaring around.
As we entered the sanctuary, Pastor Rick came gangling and tutting up the aisle, his long white hands flapping about like flustered birds.
“Oh, well, here we all are, then! Hello! Hello, Miss Birchie. Polly is right, we are all so sad to hear of your troubles. Your illness troubles, I mean. All your troubles. Oh, look! A visitor. Who is your pretty friend?” he asked, turning to me. “Has to be your sister, yes? Clearly little Lavender’s mother?” As if town gossip had not told him a week ago that Rachel was here, at most fifteen seconds after her car pulled in to the drive. He turned to Birchie. “May I walk you to your pew?”
She was now surrounded by friendly faces, Wattie on one side, Polly on the other. I was with Rachel, staunchly holding down the rear. Pastor Rick stepped right, as if he planned to replace Wattie.
“She’s in good hands, thank you, Pastor,” Wattie said in a quelling tone.
We all froze in tableau, Pastor Rick still angled toward Birchie, hands out for her arm, as if he expected Wattie to step aside for him. That was never going to happen. Wattie cast her eyes to heaven, as if asking Jesus to take a sec to see this nonsense. Birchie stared the pastor down, perfectly willing to wait for the trumpet blast and the first of the Apocalypse’s seven horses to come thundering over the hills before she’d ever displace Wattie for this pool noodle of a preacher.
Six endless, awkward seconds ticked by, and then Pastor Rick started walking backward, gesturing them forward with exaggerated hula-girl arm swoops. “This way, ladies! This way!”
I snuck a quick peek at my phone. Frank had sent me a text back: I’m on it. Meet me in the balcony?
“Go with them,” I whispered to Rachel. She nodded, and I turned back. There were stairs up to the balcony on both sides of the narthex. I hurried back down the aisle to the doors, turned left, and there was Cody Mack. I almost banged into him. I didn’t say excuse me. Neither did he.
I glared up at him, wishing I were taller, and said, “You keep your grandmother away from Birchie, you hear me?” I wasn’t playing to an audience. I kept my voice low but spoke as meanly as I could.
“Don’t mind Gran,” he said, but he didn’t sound apologetic.
“You’re only supposed to talk to us through Frank. Birchie isn’t herself, and what your grandmother did? That was low, and the courts could easily see it as you trying to back-door an interrogation.”
I made it into a threat. I didn’t think Cody had sent Martina—I thought Martina’s big fat mouth had actually done us a favor. But I wanted to make damn sure that Cody kept her viciousness at bay from here on out.
He said, “Birchie owes us answers, but I guess it must be right nice for her to be so rich.”
“Doesn’t suck,” I said with snarky cheer.
I didn’t get defensive, because it was true. Someone else’s poor and unprotected granny, sick or not, would have had to answer for herself to the police by now. My grandmother was a Birch in Birchville. She was the Reigning Birch. Watching his dart roll off me made him shift like he was itchy, and he couldn’t leave it. He leaned in, so close I could smell soured coffee and old bacon on his breath.
“Rich or no, the law takes patterside right serious.”
It took me a full second to realize that Cody Mack meant patricide, and then I had to stifle a trill of purely hysterical laughter.
It was a big leap from Is this Ellis Birch? to Murder! Except I couldn’t help but remember the deep fissure marring the crown of the old skull. Couldn’t escape Hugh Darian’s logic: Unmurdered bodies don’t get stuffed in trunks. Martina had had a lot to work with when she’d set out to turn our town against us.
I shook my head. Still, they couldn’t know that the bones belonged to Ellis Birch. Not this fast. They had to be guessing, and they could be wrong.
But in my head I could hear Birchie saying, You think it would be that easy to take my father out of this house? You could burn that portrait, but he would still be present.
Cody smiled an ugly smile at my gigged silence, his upper lip peeling back from his teeth like a smug donkey’s. “Maybe you should bring her down to the station. Get ahead of this. Let her tell the tru—” he began, but right then the old organ started the first chords of “Blessed Assurance.”
It startled both of us. The ten-o’clock church bells had yet to chime. Pastor Rick must have kick-started the service. Cody turned tail and all but sprinted toward the sanctuary.
I let him go, relieved, and headed just as fast into the left-side stairwell. No one but the youth group ever sat up in the loft, and when I was a kid, we had lined up along the right side. I got up to the balcony, and sure enough, the teenagers were sitting across from me. It was a smaller group these days. Birchville skewed a little more elderly every year, but there were still a couple-dozen teens, sitting with Lavender tucked into the thick of them. Frank wasn’t there yet.
I’m on the left side, I texted Frank, and walked to the front pew.
I looked down, seeking Birchie from this unfamiliar angle. My eye found Wattie first, a lone fleck of deep brown in a pinky-pale sea. Rachel was on Birchie’s other side. I used my bird’s-eye view to try to get a better read on how the congregation was reacting—to Birchie and her illness, to the bones, and to Martina Mack’s thinly veiled accusations.