“That’s not bad.” No greater proof that Clare was becoming acclimatized to the Adirondacks. Two years ago, a forecast of two to four inches of snow would have paralyzed her.

“That’s just to start.” Lois dropped into her chair and switched on an all-talk AM station that gave detailed forecasts every twenty minutes.

Clare surprised herself by saying, “I’m going to make my home visits this morning.”

“Home visits! But it’s Wednesday.”

“So?”

“You always work on your sermon Wednesday morning.”

“I do?”

Lois gave her a look that said, You put the less in hopeless. “Yes, Clare. You do.”

A reason. She needed a reason that wasn’t I’m clearing out so Russ Van Alstyne can use my computer while laying low from the state police. “Well… I want to beat the weather.” The rationality of this caused her to smile proudly. “If we are due for a dump, I might not be able to make it around to the shut-ins for a few days. Better get them now.”

“What about your sermon?”

“Oh, I’ll wing it.”

“You’ll wing it?”

Clare grinned. “Jes’ joking. I’ll-” The sound of footsteps in the hall jerked her around.

Elizabeth de Groot entered, in an impeccably cut red wool coat with fur collar and cuffs. “Good morning, Lois,” she said. “Good morning, Reverend Fergusson.” Her alert and helpful look didn’t quite cover up the wariness left over from last night.

Clare stared at her as the idea dropped like the last ripe pear of the season into her palm. “I’ll ask Elizabeth.”

“Ask me what?”

“To deliver the sermon this Sunday.”

The deacon wrinkled her brow. “Me? This Sunday? Why?”

“Can you think of a better way to introduce yourself to the congregation?”

“Well-”

“You don’t have to preach on the readings, if you don’t want to. Make it something personal, something that will let us all get to know you.”

“That’s an idea.” Lois’s voice was carefully neutral.

“You think so?” Elizabeth brightened. “Okay. I’ll do it.” She shrugged out of her coat. “Lois, do we have another computer I can use?” She turned toward Clare. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you yesterday, but Lois is putting me up in the copy room.” The copy room was a smudge of a space off the main office, originally intended to house the bulky files and mimeograph machine that were standard office equipment when the parish hall was modernized. The file cabinets had long since been replaced by Lois’s hard drive, and the smelly mimeograph drum by a tabletop Canon.

“I’m moving the copier in here,” Lois said to Clare. “It’s not a lot of space, but we can fit a desk and a couple of chairs in there.” She narrowed her eyes at de Groot. “You’re going to need a computer.” Her long, thin fingers drummed in calculation. “Maybe I can work somebody for a donation. In the meantime, why don’t you use Clare’s? She’s going out on home visits.”

“No!”

Lois and Elizabeth stared. Clare had flung one hand forward, as if she were about to forcibly prevent the new deacon from leaving. She dropped her arm. “I mean, I want Elizabeth to accompany me on the home visits. It’ll give us a chance to talk.”

“Really?” Elizabeth beamed. “Thank you. I’d like that.”

Oh, God, she was such a dissembler. She was going straight to hell, no passing Go, no two hundred bucks. “Okay, I’ll get the traveling kit from the sacristy. I’ll drive, and you can get a sense of where people live. Lois, maybe you can rustle up a map and one of the parish directories-”

“I gave her one yesterday.” Lois said.

Of course. “Great,” Clare said. “Um, I’ve turned off the heat in my office and shut the door.”

Lois nodded. They were so used to penny-pinching, Clare’s statement was unremarkable. “See you later,” the secretary said. She was already turning up the latest weather news.

Clare had to pass her closed door twice, to retrieve the traveling kit-did she hear the sound of a computer booting up?-and to leave by the back way to collect her car.

She and Elizabeth paused on the parish hall steps. The clouds piling up along the edge of the mountains looked like a fleet of battleships, menacing their small town from an arctic sea. Lois was right. Of course, Lois was usually right. Something caught at the corner of her eye-a movement behind the diamond-paned windows of her office. “We’d better get going,” she said, steering Elizabeth toward the new Subaru. She was careful to keep herself between the deacon and the building. “I want to make sure we beat the snow.”

“It sure looks like a storm’s coming, doesn’t it?”

“Oh, yes,” Clare said. “It sure does.”

The morning visits went better than Clare had hoped, considering she had trapped herself voluntarily with the bishop’s watchdog. Elizabeth de Groot never asked her outright about her “I had an affair with him” statement last night, a fact that would have eased Clare more had she not been sure that de Groot would find someone else to pump for details. Terry McKellan? Geoff Burns? One of the vestry was bound to get an invitation from the new deacon to meet for lunch. A very informative lunch. Clare found herself counting votes in her head, calculating who on the parish’s governing board would be for her and who against. Which is why she wasn’t paying as much attention as she should when de Groot complimented her on her new car.

“So practical for the weather around here,” the deacon said. “I had heard you had some sort of sports car.”

Would Norm Madsen be in her camp? He was conservative, which argued against it. “You’re thinking of my Shelby Cobra,” she said. “It got blown up this past November.” On the other hand, he was sweet on Mrs. Marshall. She might sway him to the pro-Fergusson side.

“It got… blown up?”

Oops. “In a manner of speaking.”

Elizabeth looked at her strangely. “That must be a manner of speaking with which I’m unfamiliar.”

Clare wrenched her attention away from vestry vote-counting and diverted the conversation by giving de Groot a complete rundown on the shut-in parishioners they would be seeing.

Elizabeth was good in people’s homes, a little formal, but with a well-honed gift for asking questions about photos and mementos that encouraged conversation. Year-round, there were always a few shut-ins, but the number tripled in the winter months, when snow and ice kept many of her frailer parishioners off the sidewalks and away from the roads.

“Have you thought about volunteer transportation for some of these people?” Elizabeth asked after they had left one lively old lady’s house. “It sounds like Mrs. Dewitt would come on Sundays if she had a ride.”

“I’ve tried,” Clare said. “It hasn’t been too successful. You get, say, a younger couple to volunteer to pick somebody up. Then two weekends later they decide to go skiing instead of coming to church, and the arrangement tends to fall all to hell after that.”

“When it comes to volunteer jobs, I’ve found it’s not so much having a rota of names to call, as it is having one person responsible for riding herd over them. I could take on the task, if you’d like.”

“Really?” Clare hadn’t seriously thought of de Groot as an asset to St. Alban’s. She felt a little embarrassed by her oversight. “That would be great.”

“I want to be of use.” Elizabeth’s face was serene and serious. Clare wondered if the woman ever laughed or cracked a joke. “You’ve taken on an enormous job all by yourself, when you think of it.”

“I don’t really think of rectoring as an enormous job. And I’m certainly not alone.”

“Well… I was under the impression you haven’t made a lot of connections with your fellow ministers here in town.”

“Dr. McFeely and Reverend Inman are supportive enough, I guess. It’s just they’re both a good twenty, twenty-five years older than I am, so we don’t have a whole lot in common. We’ve gotten together at a few ecumenical events. They both like talking about their grandchildren. They have these little photo albums.”