2 - Secrets: Ike Schwartz Mystery 2 by Frederick Ramsay Page B

for the last twenty years. As you know, the Bishop decided to close us down a while back. Only the good graces of Saint Anne’s and the friendship between Dr. Taliaferro and Philip Bournet kept it open. I have been told Saint Anne’s will close us if we fail to grow in the next two years. So it is no idle threat on my part to suggest the church might not be here someday. If you are among those ‘who go to church,’ you can always go somewhere else. But if you are among those ‘who are the Church,’ you may soon face a great tragedy.
    “I am calling on all of you, now, today, to decide. Shall we stay open, or shall we fold up and go away? ‘Never flag in zeal, be aglow in the Spirit, and serve the Lord.’ Amen.”
    Blake turned, but first took one last look at his congregation. As he hoped, the doughnut stayed with him and, he happily noted, a small part of the hole. But the center remained frozen and now, it appeared, angry.
    The remainder of the service went smoothly enough. Mary played expertly. The choir picked up on her cues quickly and sang, without rehearsal, better than they ever had for poor Waldo. Blake followed the choir into the narthex and turned to greet his people. Out of the corner of his eye he noted some moving forward, away from him, to the door with its flickering exit sign in the front of the church. They were either leaving or going to the basement without speaking to him. He couldn’t be sure, but their number seemed to be larger than usual.
    The good news: instead of the usual perfunctory “G’morning, nice to see ya,” or “Interesting, Reverend,” people actually stopped to talk. Coffee hour promised to be something more than the painful passage it had been in the past.
    “Look at the doughnut, not at the hole. Look at the doughnut, not at the hole,” he repeated to himself.

Chapter Eleven
    Ike stretched his full six feet two inches and yawned. Sunday morning and he’d slept in. He’d worked a double shift until two in the morning both Friday and Saturday. He did go off duty at Ruth’s house Friday night for a while, and that certainly broke the tedium. What started out as a quick snack and some conversation turned into something more involved than eating, His watch had read eight-thirty when, sated in mind and body, he left her, fast asleep. He felt a little guilty about that. Not a lot, but a little.
    Saturday had more than its share of problems. Callend College, now back in session, meant that the traffic from the University of Virginia and Washington and Lee, beer fueled and foolish, would keep him and his deputies hopping until the early hours of the morning. He got up slowly, showered, and shaved and headed to town.
    He ate his usual breakfast at the Crossroads Diner. He didn’t have to order. Flora just waved him to a stool and put coffee and the rest down without asking. Ike always ordered the same thing. He pushed his food around with his fork and recited his litany of whys—why me, why here, why did he stay, and, most important, why the Crossroads Diner every day? It served terrible food. He sighed and, as usual, left his eggs, bacon, and grits half eaten. Flora did make a decent cup of coffee, he’d give her that. The rest qualified as Southern fried dreck . He flipped open his cell phone and called his father.
    “Hello,” Abe Schwartz boomed into the phone, “Abe Schwartz here. That you, Ike? I got this here new caller ID gadget and it tells me who’s on the line so I don’t always have to answer.”
    “Pop, you’d talk to the devil himself if he called. You need a caller ID like Swiss cheese needs holes.”
    “Well, now Ike,” he said, “you might be right, but it is handy sometimes, like when that two-faced Lieutenant Governor calls.”
    Abe, even in retirement, still wheeled and dealed in the political arena, and the Lieutenant Governor had backed out of an endorsement he’d promised one of Abe’s people. Abe said he wasn’t done with the son of a