Secrets

Out Now on Poisoned Pen Press
Excerpt >> Read Chapter 1 of Secrets (pdf)

The church huddled in a small grove of pine and oak set back from the road at the town’s northern edge. Featured on postcards for decades, it was in great demand for weddings by Callend College women, area residents and, on occasion, visitors from as far away as Washington, DC. The previous vicar, in order to reduce the number of requests for those events from outsiders, imposed preconditions on its use. If you wished to be married in Stonewall Jackson Memorial Episcopal Church, you had to be a member in good standing for at least six months or you had to pay a user’s fee of five thousand dollars. Every year, membership rose from January to June, then fell off precipitously.

Constructed entirely of local grey limestone, it contrasted sharply with the rest of Picketsville whose architecture leaned toward antebellum. Nineteenth century tastes dismissed limestone as ordinary and ill-suited for erecting a modern city. The only correct façade for a building, they believed, was brick. Some of the town’s older buildings still displayed bullet holes chipped into salmon red bricks and acquired when the Union Armies began their descent down the Shenandoah Valley into the heart of Dixie.

At night, the church sank into the shadows cast by surrounding trees. On a moonless night like this one, it disappeared completely.

Waldo Templeton moved cautiously toward the church doors, jet black in the night’s palette of grays. His shoes, dusty from the gravel path, grated against stone steps. He extended his right arm its full length and pushed gently on the right hand door with his fingertips. Not locked. He frowned. Why not locked? It swung silently inward. He could smell oil recently applied to its ancient hinges. He paused. The church often went unlocked. So many people had keys; it probably didn’t make any difference. He moved forward to a second set of doors, his hand caressing their smooth glass surface. He pushed through them as well.