A Fountain Filled With Blood

He affected a pained expression. “I normally avoid gossip at all costs, but still, one hears things.” He leaned forward, and everyone else leaned in, as well. “I understand that the boy is what might have been called a gold digger by an earlier generation. What I heard is that he latched onto Bill Ingraham as his sugar daddy. At some point during their friendship, the boy introduced Ingraham to Peggy and she, evidently, put on the full-court press. Next thing you know, good-bye, white elephant, hello, Algonquin Spa.”

Clare sat back up. “But I heard Ingraham broke up with his boyfriend months ago.”

Sumner flipped his hand, as if to say, Life’s like that. “In the matchup between youth and wealth, only the wealth stays the same. The youth has to be replaced periodically.”

Corlew took a drink. “So the nephew is the missing piece.” Terry snickered at his pun, and both men began sniggering.

Sterling tilted his head toward Mrs. Marshall. “You see why I rarely gossip.”

Clare slung one leg back over the edge of the seat and propped her foot against the rail deck. Mal Wintour. What was it Peggy had said? “He’s just having trouble living a life of wealth and leisure without any visible means of support.” Even if she did have to wear high heels, she was suddenly looking forward to the party tonight.

Chapter Twenty-Two

“Marriage is meant to be for life,” Clare said, taking a kir royale from one of the caterer’s staff. “It gives ordinary people like you and me a chance to emulate Christ, to offer ourselves up for another person, to truly put another’s happiness first.”

The men and women clustered around her looked alternately interested, amused, and put off. Diana’s fiancé shook his head. “See? She just puts a whole new spin on it for me.” He gulped at his martini. “You should all take counseling from Reverend Clare. Keep you from screwing up so much.”

“Or screwing so much,” one corkscrew-curled young woman said to the man beside her. He was so tan and sun-bleached blond that his teeth appeared to be lighted from inside when he flashed a smile.

“Chelli!” The other woman, dangerously thin, with long nails that owed nothing to nature, frowned at her friend.

When Diana and Cary brought Clare into the enormous living room and announced her as their priest, she had immediately gathered a clump of interested listeners. She put it down to the curiosity value of her calling and gender, rather than a sudden desire for a conversion experience by anybody in the crowd, which looked as if it had been assumed bodily from the set of Sex and the City and set down in this three-story tumble of wood and windows clinging to the side of a mountain. Cary Wood—the name still made her shake her head—had dropped several interesting details about the counseling session they had just completed in the quiet home office next to the family room. “So we were talking about self-sacrifice and sticking it out, and tell them what you said about divorce, Reverend Clare!”

Clare flexed her feet inside her high-heeled sandals and thanked God for the thick carpet covering the floors. If she was trapped here, at least she wasn’t in shoe hell. She smiled at Cary. It was possible she had impressed upon him some essential wisdom he was going to need a few years down the road, but she suspected she was being asked for this tidbit again because of its thrilling break with current thinking. “I said that if marriage made two people one flesh, then divorce was like an animal gnawing its leg off to escape a trap before it dies. It should only be considered as the very last resort.”

“That sounds like me when I split from Annalise,” the bronzed sun god said. “Except she was the animal chewing on my leg.”

The perfect-fingernailed woman laughed. “You mean the only reason you can consider divorce is if you’re threatened with death? That sounds extreme.”

Clare sipped her drink. It was cool, tingly, and perfectly currant-flavored. “Not necessarily a literal death. Sometimes, a marriage can mean the death of your soul. The death of who you are. Or think of the traditional grounds for divorce or annulment: infertility, the death of your future, insanity—the death of the mind that made the vow—adultery.”

“Death if you get found out!” Chelli’s corkscrew curls bobbed as she laughed.

“What gets me, and no offense, Reverend Clare”—by this statement Clare understood that what the very tan man was going to say would offend her—“is how priests who have no experience with sex and marriage get off on telling the rest of us how to stay married.”

“My mother says that a doctor doesn’t have to have cancer in order to know how to cure it,” Chelli said.