A Fountain Filled With Blood

Clare followed Terry along the edge of the deck and dropped beside him onto a well-padded bench in the boat’s cockpit. Mrs. Marshall and Sterling Sumner were occupying the opposite bench, Sterling holding the wheel steady with one hand. His ever-present scarf, in deference to the eighty-degree weather, was of jaunty striped silk rather than wool, and one long end fluttered in the breeze.

As she bounced into place, Robert Corlew leaned out of the hatch, his wide shoulders nearly filling the space. The developer had unusually thick hair that sprang with suspicious abruptness from his forehead. Clare had thought today might be the day when she would finally be able to verify that it was a rug, but Corlew had a captain’s cap jammed firmly onto his head, hiding everything underneath. He handed two tall glasses up to Mrs. Marshall. “Lacey, gin and tonics for you and Sterling.” He turned his attention to the other bench. “Reverend Clare, Terry, what’s your poison?”

“Beer,” said Terry. “If I don’t keep working on it, this belly will disappear.” He laughed again.

“Same here,” Clare said. Corlew ducked out of sight and reappeared a moment later with two bottles, ice-cold and dripping. Clare handed Terry Wright his bottle and tilted hers back, drinking down a third of the beer at one go. “Boy, this sun sure makes you thirsty,” she said, lowering the bottle.

Mrs. Marshall was staring at her with exactly the same expression Grandmother Fergusson used the time she caught Clare in a burping contest with her cousins. Too late, Clare noticed the pair of glasses Corlew was holding in his other hand. Silently, he handed one to Terry, who proceeded to pour his beer. Corlew proffered the other glass to her.

“Unless you’d rather…” Swill it down like that, Clare thought, finishing the sentence for him. She smiled weakly and accepted the glass, then dutifully poured and handed her bottle back to Corlew.

I’m thirty-five years old, she reminded herself. I’m these people’s spiritual adviser. I’m not going to be intimidated by the fact that they’re all old enough to be my parents. She glanced at Mrs. Marshall. Or grandparents.

Robert climbed back out of the hatch with his own beer, in a glass, and slipped behind the large wheel to sit on the transom locker at the very stern of the boat. “Cheers, everyone,” he said, and raised his glass.

“Cheers,” they all replied.

Clare twisted in her seat to look back at the shoreline slipping past them. A boardwalk jutted into the water, crammed with arcades, T-shirt shops, and rickety stands selling Italian sausages and fried dough. A redheaded man, bearded and bespectacled, was trying to keep a pair of skinny kids from falling off the edge of the pier. The children, holding clouds of cotton candy bigger than their heads, waved energetically at the boat. Clare waved to them and turned back toward her companions, inexplicably buoyed up again. It was too beautiful a day to feel bad, and the thought gave her another epiphany. The long, hard winter had given her an appreciation for the summer that she had never had before. The sun, the clear blue sky, the green and growing things were blessings that she enumerated day by day, because they would be gone in a twinkling, in a heartbeat. Winter was the default here, with summer a brief and glorious escape. She felt that this ought to provide her with some solid spiritual insight, but all she could think was that she now understood why no one was attending the Sunday services.

“You’re looking particularly thoughtful, Ms. Fergusson.” Mrs. Marshall, silver-haired and elegant, could never bring herself to address Clare either by her first name or as Reverend Fergusson. Clare couldn’t blame her for the latter—she herself had grown up hearing that the word reverend was an adjective, not a title. Her grandmother Fergusson would no more have addressed a priest as Reverend than she would have attended services without a hat. Of course, Grandmother Fergusson’s priests had all been male. Father was not a title that Clare would choose. She supposed she would have to either get her doctorate in divinity or rise to a post in the Episcopal hierarchy in order to get a proper gender-free title. Bishop Fergusson…

“Isn’t this the point where you say, ‘I’m sure you’re all wondering why I brought you here’?” Sterling Sumner said. The word Clare usually applied to Sterling, in the deepest recesses of her mind, was disagreeable. In vestry meetings, the architect was impatient and prone to dismiss the opinions of others as uninformed. Today, his face was pinched into an expression that suggested irritable bowel syndrome.

Robert Corlew broke in before she could answer him. “I think we all know what we’re here to talk about. Let me try to frame the issue. We’ve had some very unfortunate episodes of violence this summer around Millers Kill.”