All Mortal Flesh by Julia Spencer-Fleming Read Free Book Online Page B

was saddling her with. The thought should have made her grimace, but even annoyance was too much for her to compass this morning.
    She rose; she dressed; she stripped the bed and threw the sheets, along with the napkins and the tablecloth, into the washing machine. Her attempt at morning prayer was flat; she had no words to offer. It felt as if she were kneeling inside a refrigerator box. Finally, she simply read out the Fifty-first Psalm.
The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise
.
    Well. She might not come up to snuff in any other way, but she had the troubled spirit and the broken and contrite heart down pat.
    She pulled on her parka and gloves and went out to shovel her car free. The clouds had shaken out all their snow and moved on overnight, leaving the morning stars burning clear and bright in an indigo sky. Her brand-new Subaru, purchased with a combination of insurance proceeds and what she couldn’t help thinking of as blood money from the family of the man who destroyed her last vehicle, was a featureless mound of white. She brushed off the windows, the lights, and the door handles, then attacked the driveway behind the car. She figured two paths, each about ten feet long, would give her tires enough traction to make it the rest of the way down the long, narrow road. She was carrying two twenty-five-pound bags of kitty litter in the trunk and had her own snow shovel wedged in the backseat. Between them, she ought to be able to get out of any deep spots.
    By the time she finished, she had stripped off both her parka and her sweater and was working in a sweat-dampened turtleneck. She tossed her coat into the Subaru and went inside to put the wash in the dryer. She packed her clothes and her rucksack, wiped down the kitchen and straightened the stack of old
New Yorker
magazines, knocked the snow off her snowshoes and poles, and had the whole shebang loaded in her car by the time the dryer was finished. She folded the sheets, left them on the end of the bed, and walked out of the cabin for the last time.
    The rising sun made Mondrian patches of reddish-orange between the black lines of the trees. She got into the car and watched it ascending in her rearview mirror. She had spent an hour and a half in a continual round of motion. She had not stopped sorrowing for a single moment.
    She leaned her head against her hands, folded atop the steering wheel. “A little help, here, God,” she said.
    She turned the ignition, and David Gray poured out of her big, balanced speakers.
Well if you want it, come and get it, for cryin’ out loud. The love that I was giving you was never in doubt…
    She wondered what it said about her spiritual fitness that her clearest messages from the Almighty seemed to come from the alternative rock station.
     
     
    At the rectory, she debated acknowledging she was back on the job by wearing clericals, versus pissing the new deacon off by meeting her in her civvies. She compromised by wearing a black blouse, dog collar, and subdued black cardigan over a pair of old undress-green fatigues.
    “Interesting look,” Lois said when Clare checked in for a report on the past week.
    “It’s a clerical mullet,” Clare said. “Business on the top, party on the bottom.” She took the handful of pink message slips the St. Alban’s secretary handed her. “Miss me?”
    “If I say yes, will I get a raise this year?”
    “You have to miss the vestry and the finance committee for that, I’m afraid. I could preach a special sermon for your birthday, though.”
    Lois tucked a shining strand of her strawberry blond bob behind one ear. “Please. At my age, my birthday’s already a religious holiday. Passover.”
    Clare grinned, while one part of her head marveled that she could smile at all. She shuffled through the messages. “The Ketchums want to know about baptism—” She looked up at Lois. “Why didn’t they bring the kid in on January