A New Song by Jan Karon Read Free Book Online

was telling him.
    “Ah, well, Timothy, there isn’t a choir director.” His bishop sounded strained.
    “Really? Why not?”
    “Well . . .”
    “Stuart!”
    “Because the choir director ran off with the organist.”
    “Is this a joke?”
    “I wish.”
    “Surely you can come up with something slicker than that. Good heavens, man, we had a jewel thief living in the attic at Lord’s Chapel, not to mention a parishioner who tried to buy the last mayoral election. Tell me something I can get my teeth into.”
    “Sorry. But I’ve just given you the plain, unvarnished truth.”
    There was a long silence. “What else do I need to know?”
    The bishop told him. In fact, he told him a great deal more than he needed to know.
     
    He stepped into the downstairs bathroom and took his glucometer kit from the medicine cabinet. With all the hoopla going on, and the radical changes in his diet, he figured he should check his sugar more often.
    Once or twice, he’d felt so low, he could have crawled under a snake’s belly wearing a top hat. Other times, his adrenaline was pumping like an oil derrick.
    He shot the lance into the tip of his left forefinger and spilled the drop of blood onto a test strip. Then he slid the strip into the glucometer and waited for the readout. 130.
    Excellent. He didn’t need any bad news from his body. Not now, not ever.
    “Thank you, Lord,” he murmured, zipping the case shut.
     
    He and Dooley loped across Baxter Park with Barnabas on the red leash, then turned left and headed up Old Church Lane.
    They ran side by side until the hospital turnoff, where Dooley suddenly looked at him, grinned, and shot forward like a hare.
    As he watched the boy pull away toward the crest of the steep hill, he saw at once the reason for his greater speed. Dooley Barlowe’s legs were six feet long.
    He huffed behind, regretting the way he’d let his running schedule go. Oh, well. Whitecap would be another matter entirely. All that fresh salt air and ocean breeze, and a clean, wide beach that went on for miles . . .
    He would even walk to his office, conveniently located in the basement of the church, only two blocks from Dove Cottage. Nor was he the only one whose physical fitness would take an upturn. Cynthia was sending her old blue Schwinn down with their household shipment, and would leave her Mazda in Mitford. For an island only eleven miles long and four miles wide, who needed a car? Even many of the locals were said to navigate on two-wheelers.
    “Better watch your step down there,” Omer had advised. “Them bicycles’ll mow you down, they ride ’em ever’ whichaway.”
    “Wait up!” he shouted to Dooley.
    Dooley turned around, laughing, and for a crisp, quick moment, he saw the way the sun glinted on the boy’s red hair, and the look in his blue eyes. It was a look of triumph, of exultation, a look he had never, even once, seen before on Dooley Barlowe’s face.
    He didn’t know whether to whoop, which he felt like doing, or weep, which he dismissed at once. Instead, he lunged ahead, closing the gap between them, and threw his arm around the boy’s shoulder and told him what must be spoken now, immediately, and not a moment later.
    “I love you, buddy,” he said, panting and laughing at once. “Blast if I don’t.”
     
    They sat on the cool stone wall, looking into the valley, into the Land of Counterpane. There beyond the trees was the church spire, and over there, the tiniest glint of railroad tracks . . . and just there, the pond next to the apple orchard where he knew ducks were swimming. Above it all, ranging along the other side of the valley, the high, green hills outlined themselves against a blue and cloudless sky. It was his favorite view in the whole of the earth, he thought.
    “There’s something I’d like you to know,” he told Dooley. “I believe we’ll find Sammy and Kenny.”
    Father Tim had gone into the Creek with Lace Turner and retrieved Dooley’s younger