Mrs. Marshall surprised her by rising, too. “But then we’d be robbing Peter to pay Paul, dear. You agreed, as did I, that preserving St. Alban’s unique history and beauty was worth the cost. I believe you described it as ‘big, honkingly expensive.’ ”

Despite herself, Clare’s lips twitched.

“Are you going to back out now that the price turns out to be more than you wanted to pay?”

Clare looked down at the intricate carpet. She thought she would have learned by thirty-five that saying yes to one thing meant saying no to something else.

“Before we all agree to this, I want to state my objections in the strongest terms.” Clare and Mrs. Marshall both turned to Norm Madsen. “It was Mrs. Ketchem’s intention that the money from the trust be used to support the clinic. Only when the trustee judges that the clinic no longer needs the funding is the principal to be disbursed. And you cannot convince me, Lacey, that you honestly think they no longer need that ten thousand a year.” He shook slightly from the force of his tone. “Your mother would not have wanted this.”

She sat down again. “Maybe not. But she left me to decide, Norm.”

Clare never would have imagined that news of her parish getting a $150,000 gift would depress her. She sat in a funk while Corlew, who had a 1:30 appointment, wrapped the meeting up and everyone shucked on coats, hats, gloves, and mufflers. She had enough presence of mind to make her good-byes, but she was still in a blue devil, as her grandmother would have called it, when she gathered up the papers to return to her office.

She was surprised to find Mr. Madsen lingering outside the meeting-room door.

“Thanks for giving it a try,” he said, sounding much more his usual even-handed self. “Not that it helped, but I appreciate the effort.”

“I feel like I did when I was a kid and found out we were moving near my grandparents. I was all excited, until I realized I was going to be leaving behind my friends. I guess this defines a mixed blessing.” She looked up at him. “I was surprised at how, um, passionately you felt on the question. You must be a big supporter of the clinic.”

“Not particularly, no.”

“Then why were you so vehement in defending its funding?”

“Jane Mairs Ketchem, that’s why. She’s rolling over in her grave right now, and it wouldn’t surprise me if she kicked her way out of the coffin and marched down here to defend her precious clinic.” He ran his hand over his thick white brush cut. “I’ll tell you something. She was the only woman who could ever scare me. And the fact that she’s dead doesn’t make me any less scared.”

Monday, March 13

Clare came with Mrs. Marshall to the clinic the next Monday. “You really don’t have to do this, dear,” Mrs. Marshall said, pulling on her black kidskin gloves and setting her hat at an angle on the silver waves of her hair.

Clare brought her attention back from her look-around at the airy foyer of the Marshall house, one of several “executive mansions” outside Millers Kill that had been built for high-level General Electric people in the sixties. It was decorated-tastefully and expensively-at the same time and had never been changed again. Clare hadn’t seen so much Danish modern and smoked glass since her last visit to an Ikea store.

“I know,” she said, fishing into her pocket for her own bulky Polarplus gloves. “You don’t have to tell the clinic director about your decision in person, either. But you are.”

Mrs. Marshall smiled. She had on fuchsia lipstick today, and the effect against her paper white skin was startling. “I suspect we were both raised to do the right thing, whether we want to or not.”

“You should have met my grandmother Fergusson.” Clare opened the front door. “Do you want to take my car or yours?”

Mrs. Marshall paused on the steps to consider the Shelby Cobra, badly in need of a trip to the car wash, parked next to her Lincoln Town Car. “Mine, I think.”

They didn’t talk much on the ride into town. Clare watched the landscape, covered with sodden, tired snow, and tried to shake off the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. She could handle disagreement, disapproval, even, she supposed, disdain, with equanimity. But she hated disappointing anyone. She dreaded it with the same nauseating plunge she had felt as a child, standing in front of her mother or grandmother and admitting, yes, she had lost her new shoes, yes, she had let the twins out of her sight, yes, she had brought home a report card full of low grades and slack effort.

Mrs. Marshall could evidently read minds. “It’s hard to deliver bad news, isn’t it?”

“It’s not that, exactly,” Clare said. “You can’t be in the army and then the ministry without learning how to say things people don’t want to hear. It’s this feeling that I’m the cause of the bad news. That’s hard to live with.”

Mrs. Marshall slowed the car to turn onto Route 51. “You might be taking a little too much responsibility for this, don’t you think? You’re a wonderful priest; a little rough around the edges, of course, but experience will help with that-” Clare sat up straighter in the crushed velvet seat and surreptitiously checked her black blouse for any traces of breakfast.

“But you aren’t St. Alban’s, dear, and you mustn’t go around confusing yourself with the institution.” The scenery was more crowded now as they neared the center of town. They passed an auto repair shop, a tire store, a barren plant nursery hunkered down for the long, cold spell between Valentine’s and Mother’s Day. “If anyone should feel responsible, I should. It’s my decision, ultimately. But even so, I came to it as part of the group, not as an individual. Neither you nor I can carry the day all by ourselves. We’re part of a democracy.”

“An oligarchy,” Clare said under her breath.

“Perhaps.” Mrs. Marshall sounded amused. “But you’ll concede me my point.”

Clare flipped her hand over. Mrs. Marshall turned onto Barkley Avenue.

“What the devil?” Mrs. Marshall said. From the opposite end of the avenue, two squad cars raced toward them. The elderly woman yanked the steering wheel, plowing them nose first into the nearest parking spot, but instead of racing past them, the black-and-whites skidded to a stop in front of the clinic. Clare popped open her door and jumped out in time to see the chief of police and the department’s youngest officer, Kevin Flynn, pounding up the steps into the building.

Clare started forward across the street, recollected herself, and turned back to see if Mrs. Marshall needed any help. The driver’s side window unrolled smoothly and Mrs. Marshall said, “I’ve got to do a better job of parking. You go ahead, I’ll be right there. Be careful, dear.”

She didn’t need any more permission than that. Clare ran toward the clinic, her boots slapping through slush. One of the wide double doors had been left hanging open, and she slipped through it into a tiny foyer papered over with leaflets on AIDS prevention, domestic violence, immunization schedules, and flu shots. The inner doors-heavy, modern fireproof slabs that had undoubtedly replaced something older and more elegant-had swung firmly shut, but Clare could hear shrieking and bellowing coming from inside.

She pushed into the clinic. She was in a wood-floored hall, with pocket doors opened wide on the right revealing a waiting room. Its orange plastic chairs were knocked over and children’s toys had been kicked everywhere. Immediately in front of her, a mahogany staircase swept up to a landing, where a redheaded woman in a medical jacket clutched a newel post and looked down an unseen hallway. The sounds, much louder now, came from whatever she was watching.