A Fountain Filled With Blood

“See you then. Bye.” She pressed the transfer button before he could reply. She was getting a handle on the different personalities on her vestry. Robert Corlew was a well-intentioned bully, a man who knew he was right in most everything he held an opinion on and who didn’t hesitate to wield his big voice and brusque manner like a blunt instrument. She thought of Msgt. Ashley “Hardball” Wright, her survival school instructor at Egeland Air Force Base. He had been big on turning other people’s weapons against them. You spot someone hunting for you with a gun, you remember: That’s not his gun. That’s your gun.

She punched the main office button. “Lois? Mr. Corlew is holding. We’re having an impromptu vestry meeting on his boat Friday. You get the time and place to meet and notify everyone who isn’t out of the country. He may want to wiggle out of it. Don’t let him put you off.”

“As if,” the secretary said. Clare hung up and looked at the window in front of her desk with an expression of smug satisfaction. Now. If she could deal with one old fossil stuck in his tracks, she could surely deal with another.

That afternoon was her weekly hospital visit, but she would have gone anyway, to look in on Todd MacPherson. She sat and visited a while with Mr. Ellis, who was in for his second hip replacement, and with Mrs. Johnson, who was getting a biopsy after she had started bleeding from her uterus. The seventy-year-old already had diabetes, a pacemaker, and high blood pressure, and her surgeon, a sympathetic woman Clare’s age, was cheerfully upbeat in front of her patient and considerably more cautious when speaking to Clare. The unvarnished truth about Mrs. Johnson’s chances put Clare in a somber mood as she entered Todd MacPherson’s private room.

She had expected to see family—and there was, his sister Trish—and perhaps someone from the police department—there wasn’t—but she was surprised to see two men whose expensive clothing firmly stamped them as not from Millers Kill, as well as a photographer carrying fifty pounds of cameras and light meters around his neck.

Trish, sitting in a corner chair, noticed her first and waved her in.

“I don’t want to interrupt,” Clare said, hesitating.

“No, it’s all right,” Trish said. “Todd, you remember Reverend Clare. She’s going to marry Kurtis and me. She came and stayed with us while you were in surgery Saturday.”

Todd, lying propped up on a stack of pillows, was a patchwork of bruises, but already he radiated more energy than Clare would have expected. One of the benefits of being twenty-four, she guessed. “Hi, Reverend Clare,” he said.

“I just wanted to pop in and see how you were doing,” she said, taking his proffered hand. “You gave your family quite a scare there.”

“It gave me quite a scare, too.”

One of the well-dressed men, a fair-skinned blond who had been staring at Clare, snapped his fingers. “Clare Fergusson,” he said.

She looked at him, surprised. “Yes.”

“You’re the one who found Bill Ingraham’s body,” he said.

“Oh, that was just—”

“Nils Bensen,” he said, extending his hand and grasping hers. “This is my colleague Adam Coppela.” Coppela was also blond, although from the coloring of his skin and eyebrows, this was more a monumental act of will than anything to do with his genetic heritage.

“They’re from the Adirondack Pride team,” Todd said, beaming as much as his battered face would allow. “I’m going to be on the cover of their next magazine.”

“That’s right,” Bensen said. “Todd here illustrates the terrible trap of simply conforming to the strictures of the straight establishment.”

Coppela clapped a thick-fingered hand on Todd’s shoulder. “The kid tries to fly under the radar, giving no offense—”

“A promising young businessman, paying his taxes—”

“And what happens? Wham!” Coppela smacked his fist into his palm. Clare and Trish both started. “He gets the crap pounded out of him because he’s queer. You can hide, but you can’t run.”

“I’m going to speak at the next regional meeting,” Todd said.

“You’re going to be our star,” Bensen said, smiling down at Todd like a coach looking at his first-round draft choice. He glanced up at Clare. “Since the story broke, we’ve already gotten triple our usual volume of calls asking about donating.”

“Ah,” she said. “That’s wonderful.”

“Maybe we can do an interview with you as a sidebar to Todd’s article,” Bensen said. He framed a headline in the air. “The church’s official representative speaks out against homophobia.”

Clare raised her hands. “I’m not the church’s official representative. I’m not even sure I’m St. Alban’s official representative. If you want a statement, I suggest you contact the diocesan office in Albany.”

“Yeah, but that’s not as sexy as a young hip priest with—” Bensen broke off, his eyes thoughtful. “You aren’t a lesbian, by any chance?”