Murder Mezzo Forte (A Preston Barclay Mystery) by Donn Taylor

Author:Donn Taylor [Taylor, Donn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lamplighter Mysteries
Published: 2016-06-08T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 24

A familiar chill ran through me as I read the warning note. I had no way of guessing who left it: Everyone I’d talked to lately had warned me to quit asking questions. But someone had no trouble breaking into my house.

I chewed on the question while I chewed my way through a ham sandwich and decided I’d better find out a lot more information a lot faster than I’d been doing. I’d started out only to combat a threat to my job, and then to disprove the allegation I’d had an affair with Mitra. But the more questions I asked toward those ends, the more I got tangled up with her death. Everyone thought I was investigating that anyway, so I might as well do it.

The best source of what happened on campus at night would be the night watchman, Elmo Koonz, but he would not come on duty until later. I’d have time for prayer meeting and could catch him afterward.

I drove to St. Mark’s Grace Church because I badly needed its prayer meeting. For a long time, I’d felt that my prayers simply bounced back at me off the ceiling. I hoped for a better result if I kept trying. The quiet of the sanctuary and the solemnity of the introductory hymns restored my sense that here things were actually right—that the values we’d struggled to maintain during the week were not imaginary, that the struggle was worth the toil and pain.

Nothing on earth is perfect, though. I felt a pang that Mara was not present. Was she angry over my encounters with Cynthia and Brill, or was there a more ominous reason? I pushed these thoughts from my mind and surrendered to the solemnity of the music.

Then Cynthia Starlington entered and sat beside me. Very close.

“I hoped I’d find you here, Press,” she whispered. “I need to talk to you.”

“Later,” I said and shushed her with a finger over my lips. I refused to give up this hard-found sense of rightness.

She made a show of pouting, but she did comply.

After an opening prayer, Pastor Tammons read Christ’s statement from the Gospel of John. “My Father is working until now, and I Myself am working.” God’s active work in this world does not cease, the pastor said, but to see its results we must think not year-to-year or even century-to-century. We must think in units no shorter than five hundred years. For it took a full five hundred years for the Church to halfway civilize our ancestors, the Northern European barbarians.

For thousands of years, he continued, slavery was a standard practice throughout the entire world. And it is only in the past few centuries, even then only in the nations with a Christian heritage, that God’s light has convinced us that slavery is evil. In this and in many other things, we can see the work of the hand of God ...

My mind raced ahead of him then. As I’d said, I had no doubt that God directs the great tides of history.

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