Читать книгу Glory Be! - Ron/Janet Benrey - Страница 12

Daniel Hartman peered into the church’s refrigerator and allowed himself to sigh. “No real cream, and no milk,” he said. “All I can offer you is powdered creamer.”

“That will do me fine,” Sara Knoll replied. “After twenty-five years as an international journalist, I’m used to tight rations and impromptu meeting places.”

“In that event, let’s talk right here. What could be more impromptu than our kitchen?” He handed her a ceramic mug full of coffee and gestured toward a pair of wooden stools next to a stainless-steel food preparation table. “I don’t want to keep you long tonight, but I do want to review the progress your committee is making.”

Daniel sipped his own coffee. The church’s Elder Board had appointed a committee to recommend how to spend the Caruthers bequest. Sara was its chair—an excellent choice, given her background and experience. Daniel considered Sara a no-nonsense, get-the-job-done professional. She would have made a fine army officer had she chosen a different career path.

“What progress?” She shrugged. “We’re deadlocked.”

“How can you be? You have five members. That means no tie votes.”

She smiled wryly. “We agreed from the start to require a minimum of four votes to make a final recommendation. Alas, our committee consists of two inflexible Contemporaries, two unyielding Traditionalists, and me. I abstain whenever we vote because that’s the only way I know to stay friendly with both sides.”

“Has it worked?

“So far.” Sara added a nod. “I’m perceived as neutral—which has helped both sides to remain civil to each other during our meetings.” A frown spread across her face. “But our civility hasn’t translated into progress. I can summarize what the committee has done with a single word—nothing.”

Daniel paused to gather his thoughts. “I fear for the future of Glory Community Church. Our highly polarized rift is the kind of conflict that can wreck a church fellowship. What bothers me most is that I don’t know how to get our people to back down from their sincerely held positions.” He added, “The elders rightly expect me to get everyone working toward a solution that will make the whole congregation happy.”

“Isn’t that a trick that pastors learn on the job?” she said with another smile.

He grinned back. “I spent twenty-one years in the U.S. Army and rose through the ranks to become a colonel, commanding a cadre of other chaplains. My experience taught me leadership, not conflict resolution.”

“I presume that shouting ‘Attention!’ has a greater effect in the army than in a church.”

“Oh, I can yell loud enough to stop a fight in the choir loft, but what do I do next? I wish that your ‘Martha’ books included a volume on compromise and forgiveness.” He toasted Sara with his coffee mug. “Your new book on working with stained glass will come in handy should we have to replace broken panels in the sanctuary.”

“Sorry, but Stained Glass Made Simple is the next book in the series. The one I have to deliver the day before Thanksgiving is called Finding Undiscovered Treasures in Your Attic.”

He chuckled. “That’s bound to be a bestseller in Glory. The older houses in town have upward of a hundred fifty years of accumulated junk in their attics.”

“All of which someone wants to buy. Thanks to the auction sites on the Internet, ‘junk’ is an obsolete concept. The trick is to locate the one person somewhere in the world who actually covets the trinket or doodad or knickknack your great-great grandmother stuffed into a cardboard box all those decades ago.”

“Getting back to our problem…” Daniel began.

Sara interrupted. “I think you’re being too hard on yourself. After all, fights about music in church are a recent phenomenon, a challenge that’s caught pastors by surprise.”

“Actually…” He spoke softly to avoid sounding like a schoolteacher giving a lecture. “Traditional music versus contemporary music has been a battleground for two thousand years. During the first century some Christians argued that the use of musical instruments of any kind during worship was either too much like the old Hebrew ceremonies or too pagan. Fifteen hundred years later the fight centered on whether secular music, harmony and folk melody should be banned from church, and whether all musical instruments except the organ should be eliminated.”

Sara made a face. “I stand corrected. Our fight is clearly part of a long tradition, but I can’t help feeling that the battle is unnecessary. We have two services, one traditional and one contemporary. The Caruthers bequest provides more than enough money to keep both sides happy.”

“True. We have plenty of cash but only one sanctuary, which both groups want to redesign. That’s really the crux of the disagreement.”

She threw up her hands. “Exactly! The Traditionalists want it to look like a European cathedral. The Contemporaries want to give it the feel of a modern megachurch.” She added, “The Traditionalists and the Contemporaries have both lost focus. We worship to please God, not ourselves.”

“Both groups think they have that angle covered, too. Lily told me that God enjoys hymns and could not possibly be pleased with an insipid rock song that repeats the same simple words ten times over. Debbie Akers insists that God must be ‘bored off his gourd,’ as she put it, with a thousand years of dull hymn music and even duller words. Consequently, she says contemporary services have become wildly popular thanks to divine intervention.”

Sara laughed. “I’m sorry, Daniel, but the battle at Glory Community does have a humorous side.”

“I might have agreed with you a few months ago, but the truth is I don’t find our fight funny anymore. I’m too worried that someone will get hurt.”

Emma deftly carried a tray laden with an insulated carafe, two mugs and a plate of shortbread cookies as she led Simon Rogers to the gazebo in The Scottish Captain’s back garden. The old wooden octagon was a pretty spot for a chat after breakfast, and also far enough away from the main house that it afforded a measure of privacy. The sun felt delightfully warm that Thursday morning. The weather forecast called for the temperature to climb into the high sixties by lunchtime.

“Thank you for rescuing me,” Simon said. “The other travel writers in our group are going fishing for striped bass in Albemarle Sound. I would rather chew on ground glass. I would certainly get seasick and, with my bad luck, I would catch a dozen fish and be required to eat them.”

“Assuming you could find someone to clean and cook them for you. We don’t clean and fry fish for our guests at The Scottish Captain.”

“Now I’m doubly glad I stayed behind. Today will be a perfect opportunity to recharge my batteries. There’s a day trip to the Outer Banks tomorrow.”

“Then you have no plans for this morning?”

“Not really. I shall pretend that I’m a road weary New England snowbird who decided to spend a down day in Glory, North Carolina. The tour of the grand houses and local museum yesterday was fascinating. I shall continue to browse around the town and soak up the ambience.” He brushed a cookie crumb out of his beard. “With luck I’ll find another Beetle on another porch.”

Emma hoped that Simon didn’t notice how she winced. The last thing Glory needed was a rowdy reputation among travel writers. Emma had her future tied up in The Scottish Captain. Her B and B must succeed and that would only happen if Glory prospered as she’d predicted it would.

“Please don’t get the wrong idea about Glory,” she said evenly. “We specialize in quiet, prank-free vacations.”

“Oh yes, Glory is definitely a quiet place—which leads me to ask an impertinent question. Why would someone like you decide to abandon Seattle, a vibrant big city, and move to a pastoral southern town that even the Union Army avoided during the Civil War?”

The jolt of astonishment she felt came out as a nervous hiccup. She hadn’t shared her biography with Simon Rogers, but he seemed to know a lot about her. Emma took a sip of coffee to help clear her throat. “You mentioned that I moved here from Seattle. Where did you come across that tidbit of information?”

“On the Internet, of course. Yesterday, I visited the Glory Public Library and typed your name into Google. Several ‘hits’ pointed to your biography.” He grinned. “That’s what happens when you become well-known enough in your field to make presentations at national hotel management conferences.”

Emma bit her tongue. When she’d calmed down, she said, “My presenting days are over. I didn’t realize that my bio was still online.”

“Oh, yes, once on the Internet, information seems to linger forever. I must say that your hostelry credentials are impressive. As I recall, you earned your bachelor’s degree from the prestigious Cornell University School of Hotel Administration, and you were appointed general manager of the Pacific Monarch Hotel in Seattle at the tender age of thirty-three. I’ve stayed at the Monarch—it’s one of the most elegant hotels in the west. You obviously know your stuff.”

Emma smiled. “Thank you. I like working in the hospitality business.”

“I’m equally fascinated by your athletic prowess. Imagine, a champion women’s softball pitcher serving us breakfast.”

“I loved softball when I was a kid. I played on an intramural team at Cornell, and I joined a women’s league in Seattle. My team, the Pacific Princesses, did manage to win the league championship three years ago. Softball is great fun and good exercise. End of story.”

“To restate my original question in different words,” Simon said, “why did you give up managing a world-class Seattle hotel and decide to run a small B and B?”

Emma tried to look thoughtful, as if she were pondering a difficult question. In fact, this was a question she had faced dozens of times, always with a pat answer that seemed to satisfy people—and had little to do with reality.

“After working in large hotels for more than a decade,” she said, “I decided that I prefer the personal touch of managing a B and B. Back in Seattle, I dealt with crises from dawn to dusk. I had no time to think, much less talk to the guests. I prefer sharing a pot of coffee with you and enjoying a pleasant fall morning.”

Simon grinned with apparent delight. Emma grinned back.

She could hear the conviction in her voice. She had become uncomfortably adept at avoiding the truth, but how could she admit that her chief motivation for moving to North Carolina’s coastal Albemarle Region was its distance from Seattle, Washington? A small B and B in a dot-on-the-map town seemed the last place in the country that her ex-husband or his vast family would ever visit.

More to the point, Emma thought, the “truth” was rapidly becoming irrelevant. So what if she ran away from a bad situation? After a year at The Scottish Captain her perspective changed. She now realized that she’d actually run toward a much happier life.

Emma poured a second mug of coffee for Simon.

“Now, as for choosing Glory,” she went on, “I applied every scrap of economic forecasting and financial-planning experience I’d acquired working at large hotels. I concluded that Glory is an undiscovered treasure, an unspoiled little town with lots to see and do, that is destined to become a highly regarded attraction. I invested every cent of my savings in The Scottish Captain. I truly believe that I selected the right place at the right time.”

Emma punctuated her words with an emphatic nod. Here, she was expressing the way she really felt, even though she knew that little Glory was still overshadowed by its well-known neighbors. Edenton, some twenty miles west, had more history to offer tourists—including its own Revolutionary-era “tea party.” And Elizabeth City, fifteen miles north, was the region’s commercial center, a popular stopping point for yachtsmen traversing the Dismal Swamp Canal on the Intracoastal Waterway.

“I agree with you,” Simon said. “Glory is a surprising little town, and I am difficult to surprise. What has impressed me most are the people I’ve met so far. Really top notch. Lots of fascinating characters.”

“Characters?”

“That came out badly. Let me start again.” He poured cream into his mug and stirred. “Travel writing is fun, but I don’t want to mass-produce travel articles for the rest of my life. I hope to write fiction some day. Consequently, I’ve made it a habit to make note of interesting people who have the potential to become great characters in a novel. Glory added several new possibilities to my collection.”

“So that’s how novelists do it,” she said. “You adapt real-life people.”

“Sure. A good example is Glory’s high school football coach. I met him yesterday morning. He’s a hoot.”

“Tom Yeager,” she said with a sigh. “A man who knows how to strike a tough bargain.”

“Exactly! He’s an unusual blend of zeal, skill, confidence and cunning. That’s what makes him a good coach.”

Emma saw no point in arguing with Simon, who clearly thought himself a great judge of character. He wouldn’t want to hear that the Glory Gremlins had a losing record that most townsfolk blamed on Tom Yeager’s lack of coaching skill. “Who else have you met?”

“Sam Lange, the fellow who owns the Glory Book Nook. I don’t think I’ve come across a more knowledgeable book expert anywhere, and I love to visit bookstores. The fascinating thing about Sam is that he combines great expertise with a healthy dose of curmudgeonly behavior.” Simon threw back his head and laughed. “And I wouldn’t have it any other way. A sour temper is an integral part of his persona. It’s like the splash of malt vinegar on a plate of fish and chips.”

“Very perceptive.” Emma drank from her mug and imagined the “recipe” that Simon might assign to her. Mix a can of hospitality with a cup of wishful thinking. Season with a dash of rotten luck in choosing a husband, then bake for thirty-seven years. Yields one healthy serving of Emma McCall. Or perhaps he didn’t see her as a fascinating character. “Did anyone else in town catch your literary eye?”

“Rafe Neilson, of course. A cop in a small town, but hardly a small-town cop. I could write a whole novel about the past five years of his life.”

“Really? I don’t know much about him,” she said, then immediately regretted her choice of words. They made her sound disconnected from the rest of Glory.

Simon hadn’t noticed her gaffe. He was far too busy retelling what he had learned about Rafe the day before. Emma settled back in her chair and let him prattle away.

The things I have to put up with to run a bed-and-breakfast.