Nick was standing at the window in the big pastor’s office on the second floor of the church. Below him, the one-level school building that housed their Holiness Gospel School looked active and humming, even from the outside. He saw Alice McGuffie leave the diner and start on out of town in the direction of the public school complex. He was fairly sure he knew what all that was going to be about. Main Street was clogged through with reporters, and it was going to get worse before it was going to get better, but if somebody killed Barbie McGuffie before it was over, Nick wouldn’t be entirely unsympathetic.
There was a tap on the door behind him, and Sister Cleland poked her head in. They had to be careful with the finances of this church. There were a handful of well-off members, but most of them were either poor, or just in the process of climbing out of poverty, so it wouldn’t do to spend too much money where it didn’t have to be spent. Sister Cleland was a volunteer. There were three church women who volunteered as church secretary every week, and that way all of them could keep jobs at Wal-Mart and the church still got its typing done.
Sister Cleland’s name was Susie. If Nick had just met her, he would have remembered it. There was an old Scottish folk song about a girl named Susie Cleland. Susie met a man her fathers and brothers didn’t like, and they burned her at the stake when she wouldn’t give him up. This Susie Cleland had just been left with the debts from five no-account brothers, and the care and feeding of a father whose brain was lost to alcoholism long before Susie and Nick both had reached the fifth grade.
Susie came all the way into the office and shut the door behind her. She looked better now than she had when Nick had first come back from college. She took care with her clothes and her hair and had something done about her teeth. (Doing something about teeth was something Nick insisted on with all his parishioners. Dental hygiene was a big issue at every grade at their Christian school, and they even brought in a dentist for a free clinic twice a year.)
Susie looked over her shoulder at the door, as if the CIA were out there somewhere behind it. Then she turned back to him. “There’s somebody to see you,” she whispered. “Not somebody you know.” She hesitated a good long while. “It’s a reporter.”
“Is it,” Nick said.
Susie nodded vigorously. “From New York, I think. She seems like she’s from New York, anyway. It isn’t one of the famous ones, if you know what I mean. I think they want to interview you for the television.”
Nick considered this. He had, of course, expected it. Once the national media started pouring in, it couldn’t be long before they found out what a “Holiness” church was, or heard about the “holy ghost people.” One of the people in town would tell them, even if they didn’t ask. Alice McGuffie would tell them, and so would Franklin Hale. Nick supposed there were a dozen more just waiting to swing the spotlight away from the nice people of Snow Hill and onto the crazy stupid hill folk. He wondered if this woman was sitting in his waiting room, looking all around her for poisonous snakes. This was one of those times he wished he had a few.
“I saw Alice go out toward the schools,” he said. “Do you know what that’s about?”
Susie Cleland shrugged. “Something to do with Barbie, I’d guess. Why Alice McGuffie doesn’t know her own daughter is the next best thing to a terrorist, I’ll never know. Do you want me to send this woman away? She makes me nervous. She makes me think something is wrong with my hair.”
“Does she have a camera with her?” Nick asked. “Does she have somebody with her who’s carrying a camera?”
“No, not at all,” Susie said. “It’s just her. Dressed sloppy, if you know what I mean, so I don’t know why she makes me feel so self-conscious about my clothes. It’s odd, isn’t it, the way people are? She’s got a tape recorder.”
“All right,” Nick said. “We’ll ask her to leave the tape recorder with you.”
“She’s got a tote bag,” Susie said. “There might be something in that. It looks full. Maybe she has a camera.”
“Maybe.” Nick was pretty sure she didn’t. Here was something Oral Roberts University was probably much better at than Vassar. They understood what a media onslaught was. Christian preachers were the victims of media onslaughts every day. Oral Roberts himself had been a prime target. In this case, Nick was willing to bet that this woman was just advancing for another, more important reporter. She’d want to check him out and see if he was worthy of airtime.