Wow, she wrote to her sister, underlining the word.
The next time Rydell comments on your appearance, Lydia wrote,remember that you can look like this whenever you want.
Beatrix imagined adding an hour to her brisk morning routine (anhour, for heaven’s sake), and almost snorted. But she didn’t want her sister to think she didn’t appreciate it. Lydia was beaming, her eyes shining, and a rush of feeling hit Beatrix in that moment: gratitude and love and loss, because her relationship with her sister would change now. That was inevitable, and they had only just begun to regain a bit of the closeness they had had when she was her sister’s age and her sister was a student in Rosemarie’s schoolhouse.
And Rosemarie—Beatrix had shortchanged herself of years and years of a mother-daughter relationship because she had instead seen her as a rival whose advice Lydiapreferred to her own. All along, Lydia had understood Rosemarie, and she had not.
She gave Lydia a long hug, careful not to wipe any of the makeup onto her sister. She slipped on her coat—long enough to cover every inch of the dress—and walked downstairs to find the rest of her family so she could hug her, too.
Rosemarie was on the couch in the sitting room, surrounded by the results of Rydell’s increasingly pointed columns. All the early hate mail had gone to Peter, but now it was arriving here, addressed to Beatrix. What had begun as a trickle on Tuesday filled up four boxes at Rosemarie’s feet. (“I’llread them, thank you very much,” Rosemarie had said, snatching a particularly ugly letter from Beatrix’s hands—saving her from a depressing and occasionally disturbing task.)
As Rosemarie glared at the letter in her grasp, fully absorbed by whatever it said, Beatrix looked at the tally on Rosemarie’s lap. The “Insults” column had too many marks to count at a glance, clearly hundreds. The “Support” column was up to a dozen. And in the final column … five, ten—eleven. The same number of threats as before, at least.
Lydia had received hate mail on occasion over the years and shrugged it off. It was harder to do than Beatrix had presumed as an outraged onlooker.
She peeked at the opened letters sitting beside Rosemarie, catching snatches of messages intended for her: “should be ashamed of yourself,” and “Peter Blackwell could do far better” and “ruined one man’s life by leading him on,and another’s by persuading him to join your cockamamie crusade.”
STOP. Rosemarie slapped that terse message on top of the letters, written in all caps. Then, moving her pen so fast that her normally beautiful handwriting went cramped and messy, she added,If you listen to idiots, what does that make you?
Beatrix really couldn’t do anything but laugh. Rosemarie was right, of course. She leaned in and kissed her on her forehead, thankfully leaving no telltale trace of red.
“Ready?” she murmured.
Rosemarie sighed. She added one more sentence to the page:I will miss you terribly, my girl.
CHAPTER 16
Rydell was not in his chair. One of his hired watchers slouched in it, half-asleep, and Peter wondered if the gossip columnist really had no notion of what they’d planned—or if he was already in the church, clutching his pen.
Mrs. Martinelli, who’d been surprised but willing to come to a seemingly random church dinner when he’d showed up unannounced an hour earlier, tsked under her breath. “Does he make people sit there all night?”
“At least until eleven,” he said. “That’s as late as I’ve bothered to look.”
He helped her snag the last empty seat in the sanctuary—no sign of Rydell—and then poked his head into the fellowship hall and every other nook and cranny of the building. Rydell wasn’t there, either. Yet.
Back in the sanctuary, he leaned against a wall, one eye on the doors, and sang the opening song by rote. When Rabbi Katz finished speaking and Pastor Hattington stepped forward for his turn, Peter was so distracted that he missed the beginning of the homily.
Then he heard “appalled” and refocused.
“Yes,” Pastor Hattington said, shaking his head. “Absolutely appalled. And so are Pastor Sarr and Rabbi Katz. I will tell you what has so appalled us, but first, let me share the words of Paul in his second letter to the church at Corinth. ‘For I am afraid that when I come I may not find you as I want you to be.’ He wrote, ‘I fear that there may be discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, slander, gossip, arrogance and disorder.’”
He paused, glancing at the town—and it did appear to be everyone in town. Peter held his breath. Was this going to be a general appeal against gossip, as he had assumed when Mrs. Hattington mentioned the topic, or …
“Do you see the problem now?” Pastor Hattington said. “Do you feel it in your bones? For what Paul feared was happening in Corinth is happening even now in Ellicott Mills! Discord aplenty. Slander, gossip and disorder. We whisper about our omnimancer, who has freely given us help and never asked anything of us in return. We whisper about a woman we have known her whole life, orourwhole lives, as if she is not the person who raised a sister, worked honorably for our mayor, and assisted the omnimancer as he assisted us.”
Peter suppressed a groan. This was like a teacher exhorting a class to stop bothering the smallest kid. It would only make things worse.
“Let Paul find us as he wants us to be!” Pastor Hattington’s normally tremulous voice rang out. “Stand up if Peter Blackwell or Beatrix Harper has helped you—stand up, stand up!”
The Clarks jumped to their feet. Others followed until finally—Peter struggling to swallow over the lump in his throat—there was no one left sitting except for Mr. Levin in his wheelchair and Mrs. Price.
“I would stand if I could!” Mr. Levin craned his neck to look back at Peter. “The arthritis in my hands is so much better thanks to your brews!”
It was at this point, lips pursed, that Mrs. Price got to her feet.
Pastor Hattington beamed at the three congregations. “I am delighted to see it, dearly beloved, because Omnimancer Blackwell and Miss Harper think so highly ofyouthat they have invited all of you to their wedding.”
This announcement set off such a buzz of whispers among the still-standing townspeople that Pastor Hattington had to raise his voice to add, “May I have all of your solemn promises that you willnotdiscuss the details of this wedding with anyone not currently here?”
