Dogs.
Great.
Just what she didn’t need.
“Quiet!” she yelled in her most authoritarian voice, and, miraculously, they stopped barking.
For the moment.
But who knew how long that would last?
Quickly, she walked to the side of the house where the one lamp was burning, visible through the window. A wooden desk was situated in front of open French doors and flanked by filled bookcases. Nothing out of the ordinary, she thought, but who knew what lay behind closed doors?
No sign of the dogs.
In one word, she’d managed to quiet them?
Weird, she thought, but she surveyed the perimeter, walking a few feet away from the house, hoping to keep the dogs from hearing or smelling her. There was nothing particularly out of the ordinary, other than an empty chicken coop and dog run behind the parsonage. The coop seemed to have been abandoned long before, as the grass was tall and no feathers littered the wire cage surrounding the henhouse. However, the matted grass, dirt trail, and half-filled water dish within the long, chain-link enclosure confirmed what she already knew.
As she walked around the back, she noticed an exterior entrance to a basement, now-locked doors that would open, she thought, to a staircase leading into some kind of storm cellar, and though there were a couple of window wells on this side of the house, the basement area was dark, like most of the house. Aside from the den and the front hallway, where some of the light spilled through the glass doors, the rooms inside the home were in shadow.
Well, what did she expect? Something linking Westin Stark to the Savannah Slasher? Bloodstains? Polished rocks?
She didn’t have time to think about it.
At that moment, a car pulled into the short driveway, beams from headlights washing against the house. Nikki flattened against the siding, hiding behind a scrubby bush, and hoped beyond hope that Stark hadn’t seen her. She wanted to talk to him, but she didn’t want to be caught snooping.
Too late.
“Nikki?” he called, climbing out of his car, a blue sedan of some kind—an import, she thought. His keys jingled as he pocketed them. “Nicole Gillette?”
She shrank inside. How could she explain herself?
Deciding she couldn’t hide or cower, she walked toward him.
“What’re you doing here?” he asked, standing by the front walk, his face half in shadow, half-illuminated by the porch light.
“Waiting for you,” she said.
“Hmm.” He didn’t hide his disbelief. He glanced around the darkened streets. “At this time of night? Don’t tell me, Nikki, that you’ve had some existential crisis? Need some reaffirmation of your faith?” He was mocking her. Taunting her. Dressed in a black shirt and pants, the clerical collar white in the night, like a Cheshire cat’s smile, he asked, “Is that it? You came here for spiritual guidance?”
“I just have some questions.”
“For me?” he asked, placing a hand over his chest. “But you didn’t call? Why am I not surprised?”
“I wanted to talk to you about Mavis Greenlee.”
“You’ll hear all I have to say about her tomorrow at the funeral.” His smile was beatific. And false. Beneath his clerical collar and calm, patient veneer, he was still the same bully he’d always been.
“I don’t think you’ll be talking about her enemies.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Well, no, that wouldn’t be appropriate at the service.”
“So tell me now.”
“You want me to discuss the personal life of one of my parishioners? A woman so recently deceased? Taken from us so heinously?”
“It’s not like you’ve got some kind of client-lawyer privilege.”
