Chapter 30 2025
The sheriff sits with Grace at the back of the chapel.
The closed casket is in front of the altar.
An American flag is draped over it, and blue and white flowers adorn the top.
A great assortment of mourners—students and faculty from the school, soldiers in uniform, family, and a host of curious townspeople—have come to pay their respects and to get an up-close look at the unfolding saga of the great Moosewood whodunit of the century.
The young woman who found the body, Melissa, is here. She sits in the pew opposite the sheriff and Grace with a man who is not the same man she was with on the day she discovered the body. The sheriff greeted them when they arrived.
“I came to pay my respects,” she’d said with a shy blush.
“I know I didn’t know him, but I can’t stop thinking about him.
” She looked at the floor, then back at the sheriff.
“When I read in the paper that he was younger than me . . .” She stopped, and her mouth skewed to the side as if she didn’t quite know how to finish the thought.
The sheriff smiled in understanding. “Witnessing death up close has a way of putting life in a new perspective.”
“Yes. Exactly.”
She glanced at the man she was with, and he smiled at her the same way the sheriff often smiles at Grace, like he’s stumbled upon a great treasure he doesn’t deserve, and the sheriff thought, Silver linings, believing had it not been her .
. . or actually her dog . . . who spotted the reverend, she might still be with the numbskull she was with that day instead of the loving man beside her.
He tipped an imaginary hat to the couple and rejoined Grace, twining his fingers through hers on the pew between them.
As they wait for the service to begin, he sizes up the crowd and wonders if the murderer . . . two murderers . . . or one murderer and one accomplice . . . might be among them. One tall, one small.
There are two attendees clearly over six two.
Toward the back of the chapel, sitting with Ms. Bamford, is the school’s librarian.
Erudite and thin with a paunchy stomach and spindly legs, he certainly doesn’t look like a killer, but the sheriff knows looks can be deceiving.
He makes a mental note to interview him to see where he was the day the reverend went missing.
A soldier near the front also fits the bill.
Built like an offensive lineman, his large forehead protrudes over deep-set eyes, and he holds himself in the way of a man ready for a fight.
He greeted Heddy when he walked in and sits apart from the other soldiers.
The sheriff will ask Heddy who he is after the service.
Heddy sits with the reverend’s mother in the front pew. He feels bad for them, the service for their beloved turned into a spectacle. Outside, news vans line the curb, and the chapel is packed with nosy strangers, whispering and gossiping and sizing them up to see how they are coping.
Heddy sits stoic with her eyes cast at the floor.
The reverend’s mother sits beside her, her thin shoulders moving with sobs of emotion for which there are no words, as if, only now, with the coffin in front of her, she’s fully come to grasp the reality that her only child is truly, permanently gone.
Murmurs cause the sheriff to crane his head back toward the door.
Meryl Fairbanks, wearing a deep-burgundy dress, stands just inside the opening, the morning light haloing her like a spotlight.
With her is a man in his late sixties. At least six four, he carries himself like an ex-athlete, and the sheriff adds him to his mental list of tall attendees to be considered.
Meryl Fairbanks offers a celebrity smile, the kind that says “I know you are looking at me, and I’m fine with that.
” Her Marilyn Monroe hair glints beneath the twinkling chapel lights, and despite her frailty, the tremors in her hands, and the cane she holds, she is the picture of elegance.
Unwittingly, the sheriff feels his boy-in-knickers crush return, and he imagines it’s the same for half the people in the church, all of them knowing they’re in the presence of someone truly extraordinary.
She makes her way forward, her steps tentative and unsteady, somehow adding to her allure.
People shift and crush together, and their postures straighten, hoping she’ll choose them to sit beside.
Halfway up the aisle, she lowers herself carefully to a pew and leans her cane against the wood.
She lifts her head and turns to look at Heddy, who is looking back, watching her with everyone else.
Their eyes connect, and Heddy’s chin quivers, and the sheriff thinks she might start to cry.
But then Meryl Fairbanks gives the slightest nod, as if transmitting her strength to the younger woman, and Heddy’s spine braces, and she turns away and returns to her stoic pose with her eyes cast at the floor a foot in front of her.
The man Meryl Fairbanks walked in with remains standing near the door, a noble gentleman who will not take the seat of someone less able.
The sheriff finds himself hoping the pair had nothing to do with the reverend’s death, but the brief exchange between the two women has his spidey senses tingling.
His plan had been to visit Meryl Fairbanks tomorrow, Sundays typically reserved for Grace, but he thinks he’ll change that to this afternoon.
One tall. One small. He can’t imagine Meryl Fairbanks being able to pull a two-hundred-and-thirty-pound man into the water, but love has been known to give people the strength to do the seemingly impossible, and the path to where he believes the reverend was murdered leads straight to her home.