The Psalmist

 

Dedication

To J, T & C

 

Epigraph

“I will turn the darkness before them into light, the rough places into level ground. These are the things I do.”

I
SAIAH 42:16

“There are some trees, Watson, which grow to a certain height and then suddenly develop some unsightly eccentricity. You will see it often in humans.”

S
HERLOCK
H
OLMES,
“
T
HE
C
ASE OF THE
E
M
PTY
H
OUSE,” BY
A
RTHU
R
C
ONAN
D
OYLE

 

Contents

 

Prologue

T
HEY SAY THAT
nothing happens in Tidewater County during winter, besides the weather. Sometimes they're wrong. March 14, a Tuesday, was one of those times.

Luke Bowers opened his eyes to the sound of wind whistling through the bare trees and the soft pelt of icy rain on the bedroom windows. He blinked at the dull light in the gauzelike bedroom curtains and knew what ­people were thinking as they woke across Tidewater County that morning.

Bowers pulled on his robe and stepped into slippers, careful not to wake his wife Charlotte. He stopped at the rest room in the hall and then padded to the small space off the entryway, which they called the sitting room.

Within two minutes he heard a familiar clicking on the hardwood floorboards. The door squeaked open and the leathery snout of Sneakers, their mixed Lab, appeared—­tentatively at first, as if he wasn't sure he was welcome. Then Luke said his name and Sneakers hurried in for a vigorous neck and head rub. Sated, the dog stretched out beside the antique rocker and lowered his chin to the floor, as if he, too, had come here for prayer and reflection. The two of them were silent for several minutes, although it wasn't a morning conducive to meditation. Gusts of wind rattled the shutters and windows, causing Sneakers to periodically lift his head and frown up at Luke. Once, when a particularly strong blast shook the house, the dog tilted his head and went into his drawn-­out growl, a menacing sound that temporarily seemed to still the wind.

“Let's go see what we can do about that,” Luke said.

Sneakers sat up alertly, his tail sliding back and forth across the wood as Luke shrugged on his overcoat. He opened the front door into a burst of freezing air, and the dog galloped out in the icy drizzle, then stepped gingerly into the yard. As he relieved himself, he watched Luke intently with his sad, pathetic eyes.

“I know,” Luke told him. “You just can't take it personal.” Sneakers was a rescue dog who'd come with his name but no explanation for it. Luke, too, had been adopted at an early age and never knew his real parents or the story behind his name; he felt a certain kinship with Sneakers.

Walking to the end of the driveway to retrieve the
Tidewater Times
, Luke realized that the pavement was a sheet of ice. Like a vaudevillian on banana peels, he lost traction under his right foot, then under his left, then his right again, nearly going down each time. He slid involuntarily along the slight incline before regaining his footing. “Jeez!” he muttered. He took tiny steps the rest of the way to the newspaper and then shuffled back to the house, as Sneakers watched from the porch.

The cold was on ­people's minds that morning in Tidewater County, as it had been for weeks. It was the greeting topic at the Main Street luncheon grills, at the post office, the harbor store, the pharmacy, the grocery: “Where's spring?” “Is this ever going to end?”

But it wasn't the cold that ­people would remember about March 14. It was something else. Something that had happened overnight.

A
FTER BREWING A
pot of coffee in the kitchen, Luke poured himself a cup, sat at the butcher block table and paged through the
Tidewater Times
, front to back, then folded it closed. Nothing to read, as usual. He poured himself a second cup, gazed out across the breezy grasslands behind their house as he sipped, watching the sunlight trying to emerge through clouds above the bay.

He had woken overnight again with an unsettled feeling—­as if things in his life were out of order, although he couldn't put a finger on what exactly those things might be. In fact, all evidence pointed to the contrary: he was in fine health, happy in his marriage and in his work. But the feeling drifted in early in the morning sometimes and seemed to linger like an ache in his soul, a debilitating yearning with no clear object or origin, the sort of ailment that occasionally prompted congregants to come to
him
for advice, not imagining that he, too, might suffer from it. He could only counsel himself as he counseled them: accept the gifts of grace, have faith and patience, seek guidance in Scripture. On mornings that began this way, Luke often drove to the office early and worked on his sermon alone for an hour or so; by the time Aggie, his office manager and receptionist, arrived at nine-­thirty, he was fine.

He washed out his coffee cup and loaded a new pot for Charlotte, who would be up at eight-­thirty. His wife was a historian who worked at home, in an office nook beside the kitchen, which was only slightly larger than the sitting room. Two days a week she volunteered at the Humane Society, which was where she'd discovered and rescued Sneakers. Their house was an old captain's cottage, on the edge of a marshlands preserve, with a distant, windy view of the Chesapeake. It was too small for both of them to have offices, but they made room for each other.

Before leaving, Luke glanced in the bedroom and saw that Sneakers, whom he'd toweled down and given treats, was now asleep on the bed, the dog's chin resting contentedly on his pillow. Charlotte was turned away from the dull light slanting through the curtains. Luke admired her profile for a few seconds; she was the only woman he'd known who always looked elegant while sleeping.

As he stepped backward, a floorboard squeaked.

“Be productive,” she whispered, without opening her eyes.

Luke smiled. He hadn't always made the best decisions in his life, but marrying Charlotte was one that he never regretted.

H
E FOLLOWED
B
AY
Drive past the American Legion hall and Tommy's Marina, where a corner of the parking lot was piled with crab traps. Summer afternoons this two-­lane was bumper-­to-­bumper, tourists cruising the produce and fruit stands and the open-­air seafood markets. But it all looked pretty desolate right now, the wind gusting sheets of dried snow across the fallow corn and soybean fields.

At the intersection of Bayfront Drive and Highway 22, he turned right toward the water, steering into a blast of wind that nearly blew his Ford Fusion into a gully. Then, ahead, through the leafless birch trees, he began to see the whitecaps of the Chesapeake and the great twin bridges in a suddenly brilliant glare of sunlight. Bayfront Drive dipped, cleared a small rise, and the old cedar-­shingled church building and its giant majestic cross came into view—­the building angled haphazardly, it always seemed, on a bluff above the bay as if it had fallen there from the sky.

Luke parked in the gravel lot beside the offices and ran to the door, ducking into the wind as he fumbled for his keys. It was always colder here on the bluff, without a tree break, the air stinging his lungs and watering his eyes.

He clicked the lights on and breathed the warmer air inside—­an old, reassuring smell. No matter how many layers of clothing he wore, though, the cold seemed to get inside of him and stay in his lungs. He adjusted the thermostat, listening for a moment to the strange chorus of creaks the wind made on the wooden building. “If these walls could talk,” ­people said. These walls
did
talk, every time the wind kicked up, although no one could understand what they were saying.

It had taken the congregation fifty-­four years to outgrow this old building. But come next winter, a larger, more modern church would be constructed in its place. There were fervent disagreements about that, still—­over size, cost, and location—­although most congregants had finally agreed that a new church was needed.

The thermostat clicked and heat breathed through the vents. Luke opened the door to his office, set his knapsack on the desk. He walked down the long unlit corridor that connected the offices to the sanctuary, still feeling some of his early morning apprehension. He opened the choir door and peered in on the sanctuary: sunlight streamed through the second-­story rear windows and lit the tall, east-­facing stained glass, the dust motes resembling colored snowflakes. All places of worship were bridges to the eternal, he thought, and there was a stark, simple beauty to this place, particularly in the mornings, that could be awe-­inspiring and rejuvenating
.

He stood at the front of the sanctuary and looked up at the rafters and the second-­story seating, where sunlight glazed the polished wood banisters. Then he let his eyes roam the rows of empty pews on the ground level.

That was when he saw her.

She was seated alone in a slant of sunlight toward the back of the sanctuary, off to the left in the next-­to-­last row—­dark-­haired, hunched forward, her elbows extended over the pew back. Her chin was lowered into her joined hands, as if she were praying; her eyes, it seemed, lifted to the altar cross.

“Hello?” Luke walked several steps toward her. She couldn't have come in to worship, he thought. He'd locked all the doors himself the night before. Or had he missed one? He felt his heart accelerating.

For a brief moment the sunlight seemed to form a wreath around the woman's face, an accidental magnificence. But as he drew closer, Luke realized that something was off, the woman's pose seemed theatrical, not how someone would actually pray in church. He even wondered for a moment if she might be a mannequin, something kids had left as a prank. Stuff like that happened here in the long off-­season.

“Hello?” he said again, and stopped, seeing more clearly now.

The woman was real, certainly, but her eyes weren't right. From the front of the sanctuary she'd seemed to be worshiping, looking reverentially toward the altar cross. From here, he saw that her eyes, although open, were blanks, the corneas coated with film. They were eyes that couldn't see, that wouldn't see again.

I
N
T
IDEWATER
C
OUNTY
,
the Emergency Operations Center was based in the new Public Safety Complex, a huge block-­shaped building of concrete, brick, and glass just inside the Tidewater city limits, which consolidated municipal, county, and state police departments, fire companies, EMS, district and circuit courts.

As a member of the county's Public Safety Advisory Committee, Luke had been among those who'd pushed for a centralized twenty-­four-­hour call center, now standard throughout the state. But this was the first time he'd actually had to use it himself.

“Nine-­one-­one, what's your emergency?”

“This is Luke Bowers,” he said, seated now at his desk, his eyes absently scanning the parking lot and the distant whitecaps on the bay. “I've just found a woman in our church. She's not breathing.”

He instantly recognized the throat-­clearing sound on the other end.

“Pastor Bowers?”

“Hello, Mary.”

“Hi, Pastor Bowers. Are you all right?”

“I'm fine.”

It was Mary Escher, a single mother of three who still chided herself for thinking she had any business singing in choir two years ago.

“What is your location?”

“I'm at the church, Mary. Seven Bayfront.”

He heard her typing. Then clearing her throat again.

“Does she appear to be visibly injured or impaired?”

“No, she appears to be dead.”

He listened to her type some more, waiting, taking in his own sparsely furnished office—­the pictures with Charlotte in Rome, in Kenya, and here, on the deck of a sailboat last summer, the evening sky the color of cotton candy.

Before going out to wait for the sheriff and state police investigators, Luke called Charlotte. It was eight-­forty now and she was up, fixing breakfast, her classical music playing in the kitchen.

By the time Luke returned to the sanctuary to have another look, the light had changed a little, brightening the back of the room, and he saw things that he hadn't noticed at first.

The woman was older than he'd thought, probably in her thirties, and there was an exotic, slightly Asian or Hispanic cast to her features. She wore a dark leather jacket, buttoned against the cold.

Then he noticed her legs, which were splayed grotesquely out to the sides, dressed in dark stockings and expensive-­looking black shoes.

Luke Bowers closed his eyes and prayed, for the woman and for the community. Then he went outside to wait for the police.

S
TANDING UNDER THE
cedar-­shingle overhang out of the wind, Luke studied the two entrances to the parking lot—­one from the east, the other more or less from the north. Raising his collar, he began to walk in a wide arc around the offices, the parlor, and the church itself, looking for anything out of order or left behind, for shoe prints, signs of a struggle.

Deputy Sheriff Barry Stilfork arrived as Luke was returning to the front of the building, patrol lights spinning blue in the raw morning light.

Stilfork's breath frosted the air as he walked over, his legs stiff as stilts.

“Pastor.”

“Barry.”

Stilfork had irregular features—­a very long nose, dark close-­set eyes, a wide, slotlike mouth. Some of the locals affectionately—­and some not so affectionately—­called him “Beak.”

As Luke was explaining what he'd found inside, Sheriff Calvert pulled up, skidding his Jeep at a hard angle in front of Stilfork's car, as if there was any cause for urgency. Before becoming a seminarian, Luke had worked as an EMT and as a paramedic; he'd been to plenty of scenes like this where there was nothing anyone could do.

The men greeted each other by title rather than name, the sheriff dressed in jeans and a flannel coat.

“Pastor.”

“Sheriff.”

“What've we got?”

“Nothing good, I'm afraid.”

“Let's have a look.”

Inside, the light had changed again. The woman cast a longer shadow across the pews, which resembled an arrow now, pointing, it seemed, to the altar.

“Who is she?” the sheriff asked.

“No idea. First I've seen her.”

Calvert squinted at Bowers for a moment as if he wasn't sure whether to believe him. The three of them walked to the end of the pew and the sheriff nodded to Barry Stilfork. Stilfork left a trail of wet and muddy shoeprints across the wooden floor before placing his right hand on the woman's neck.