The Almost Sisters(58)

The congregation had rearranged itself, throwing the church into an odd imbalance. Only on wedding days did families leave their traditional pews to align themselves by their affiliation to the bride or groom. Now every jackass present had rowed up over on the groom’s side, behind the Macks. A few staunch families stayed with us on the left, and most of the old families who usually sat in the center had moved to join them: the Alstons, the Gentrys, Frank Darian’s sister and her kids. The bulk of the congregation had moved to the middle, crowding up, undecided, shifting uncomfortably in their new, wrong pews.

I had thought that Birchie’s illness would buy her more slack, but she’d kept the Lewy bodies secret, and she had ruined two marriages and cost the church an underpastor. Plus, I would have bet cash money that Martina Mack had been dripping poison about the bones into every ear she could find. Birchie, on the other hand, had hidden up on her hill, inside her big white house. Our silence looked like an admission. The town’s unhappiness with our family had risen every minute that Birchie stayed inside and offered up no explanation.

Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine! Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine! the choir sang, swaying in their long blue robes.

I saw why Cody Mack had turned tail and run away from me. He had the opening prayer and so was seated up on the stage in one of the three chairs backed against the choir loft, right beside the pastor. The associate pastor’s chair was empty, of course, and Jeannie Anne was not present either.

Heir of salvation, purchase of God, born of His Spirit, washed in His blood, the choir sang, and half of them faltered on that last word. I wished to heaven that Pastor Rick had had the foresight to choose hymns with no mention of body parts. If they sang “Days of Elijah” next, we’d have a riot when they hit the line about the dry bones.

Pastor Rick was nearly through a sermon that I hadn’t heard a word of when Frank Darian finally appeared, slipping into the pew beside me.

“Sorry. I’ve been on the phone,” he said into my ear. “I have a friend in the prosecutor’s office who owes me, so I called him. It’s not good.”

“Tell me,” I said, eyes forward on Pastor Rick. Birchie was right. He was a very sweaty preacher.

“Regina Tackrey got the preliminary report from the forensic anthropologist. He says the bones are more than fifty years old. But not much more.” My heart sank. Ellis had died about sixty years back. That was bad enough, but Frank wasn’t finished. “It’s a male, Caucasian, left-handed. The left leg was once broken in three places—”

“Which all points to Ellis Birch,” I said.

“Points pretty firmly, especially the leg,” Frank confirmed. “They have a theory, now they have to prove it.”

“Shit,” I said, right there in church. “How do they do that?”

“Tackrey’s going to ask for a DNA test. Birchie and the bones.”

Pastor Rick had finished, and now the congregation stood up for the closing hymn. Only about half of them were singing, so that the harmonies were odd and off, the voices coming unevenly from all the wrong places in the room:

My hope is built on nothing less

Than Jesus’ love and righteousness;

I dare not trust the sweetest frame,

But wholly lean on Jesus’ name. . . .



“Here’s the worst part,” Frank whispered. “The damage to the skull. If this is Ellis Birch . . . well, the anthropologist says he got his head bashed in with something like a ball-peen hammer. From behind.”

On Christ the solid rock I stand;

All other ground is sinking sand. . . .



I shook my head against this ugly information. I could not imagine Birchie with a hammer and some bad intentions. Or even with a hammer. A wooden spoon, a tiny garden spade, a pan of toffee cookies, sure. A hammer? I’d never seen Birchie so much as bang a nail to hang a picture. She had old-fashioned ideas about what men and women ought to do around the house. She called Frank for things like that.

“Can they do that? Make her take a DNA test?”

Frank dipped his head in a small affirmative. “I think so. The preliminary report gives Tackrey probable cause, Leia. I’ll fight it, but yeah. I think she’ll get her motion.”

All other ground is sinking sand. . . .



I looked down at Birchie. She stood close to Wattie, their heads bent over a shared hymnal. They knew all these words, of course. Even if they hadn’t, the lyrics were projected onto the big screens hanging on either side of the baptismal pool. Still, there they stood, sloping shoulder against sloping shoulder, round hip against round hip, looking at the book as if the screens did not exist. At the sight of Birchie’s soft white bun tilting in toward Wattie’s silvery halo of curls, a feeling came over me in a wave, so fierce I barely recognized it.

It was love, though. Love, or some other, nameless feeling that was sister to it. I was racked with it. It thundered through me, shook my frame. In that moment I didn’t care whose bones were in the trunk, what hand had held what hammer years ago. It didn’t matter.

This, I thought. This is how supervillains start.

Because in that moment I was looking down on the thing I loved and being told that it was standing squarely in the wrong. Had Birchie and a ball-peen hammer set this ugly story into motion? I did not care. And if this town turned? If this town came after my grandmother? I would eat it. I would eat it up alive.