Sam supposed he wouldn’t care for that.

  Then, since he was tired of keeping secrets, he told Charley about Hank, Wilson, and Wayne cutting down the two trees full of bats.

  “Knew about that, too,” Charley said. “I sharpened Hank’s chainsaw the Saturday before and he told me then what he was going to do.”

  “You know, you might tell me these things in advance,” Sam suggested. “That way I can intervene and keep them from happening.”

  “Can’t,” Charley said. “It would be a violation of a—”

  “I know, I know. A violation of a confidence.”

  “You got it,” Charley Riggle said. “I will tell you one thing, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Your father has a floor sander reserved for all next week. He said you’ve agreed to sand all his floors. Just thought you’d want to know.”

  Sam sighed.

  “I actually made no such promise.”

  “Well, don’t tell him I told you,” Charley said.

  “So if I invited you to church, would you come?” Sam asked, remembering the professed reason for attending the pocketknife convention with Charley.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Charley said. “You Quakers seem a little too wacky for me. I like my church to be calm.”

  “Not everyone’s wacky,” Sam said. “A bunch of us spent the morning helping at a food pantry.”

  “Yep, knew that, too. Kelly mentioned it to me yesterday when she came in and bought a new heating element for a water heater,” Charley said. “She really knows her way around a hardware store.”

  “You know she’s a lesbian, don’t you?”

  “No, but what’s that got to do with it?” Charley asked.

  “Oh, you know, lesbians are good at those kinds of things,” Sam said.

  It sounded ignorant even as he said it, like saying Polish people were better polka dancers. He wished he hadn’t said it.

  “I’m not sure about that,” Charley said. “I’ve known lots of women good at home maintenance who weren’t lesbians. But I tell you what I think is interesting.”

  “What’s that?” Sam asked.

  “I think it’s interesting that the one lady in your church with the most enthusiasm for Christian service is a lesbian who is new to the congregation, and the people killing bats and squabbling over money are the longtime members.”

  That was interesting, and more than a little depressing, implying as it did that long-term exposure to Christian community had a negative effect.

  “Then again, maybe I’m just sympathetic toward lesbians. I kind of know what it feels like to be one,” Charley said.

  “Oh?”

  “Yep, I’ve always been attracted to women, too.”

  Sam chuckled.

  “They can be pretty nifty,” he agreed.

  66

  The Friends of Hope met at Bruno’s the next morning for worship, being too afraid to ask the DNR lady if they could have their meetinghouse back. Sam didn’t think it was his job to ask anyway. The trustees had got them in this mess, let them ask.

  The Finks were there, trying their best to fade into the background. They stayed in the nursery, or the closest thing Bruno had to one, a far corner of the restaurant where they’d rolled out a rug and scattered a few rubber toys for the babies to chew on.

  They bumped Norma from the electronic keyboard, downloaded piano music to Sam’s smartphone, and struggled through the first hymn, followed by joys and concerns, Sam’s favorite part of worship, unless someone went on and on about their ailments, which Wilson Roberts tended to do, droning on about various aches and pains, all of which could have been avoided if he had dropped fifty or sixty pounds. But he was subdued this morning, chastened by his crimes.

  Kelly thanked everyone who had helped at the food pantry the day before, then Stacey Maxwell stood and announced that her dog bite was healing nicely. Ruby Hopper reported that the bat killer had been caught, didn’t give a name, but asked the meeting to pray for him, that he would draw closer to the Lord and become a contributing member of society.

  “So if there’s a fine, is Leonard going to pay it, or will the meeting pay it?” Wayne Newby asked. “Because technically he was working for the church when he killed them, but we didn’t tell him to kill them. I could see it going either way.”

  “We’ll discuss that at our next business meeting,” Ruby said diplomatically.

  “As for those trees,” Wayne continued, “that was Hank’s doing. Wilson and I didn’t set foot on the meeting’s property. It was all Hank’s idea.”

  “Let’s not discuss this during worship,” Ruby suggested.

  There were several visitors that morning, all of them watching on, fascinated.

  “When do we get our meetinghouse back?” Hank Withers asked.

  “Please, friends, let’s hold off this conversation until our next business meeting,” Ruby said.

  “You’re welcome to worship here as long as you want,” Bruno called out from behind the counter. The Sunday before had been one of his most profitable Sundays ever. “Don’t forget the ten percent discount for anyone who stays for Sunday dinner.”

  Sam was desperate to get worship back on track, so stood, thanked people for sharing, and launched into a prayer, asking God to do first one thing and then another, as if God were not wise enough to discern these needs without Sam’s help.

  Then he delivered his sermon, continuing the series on church history, but skipping nearly 1,400 years, jumping from the Council of Jerusalem to the founding of Quakerism, sparing the congregation scores of sermons on topics of little interest to them. At this rate, he’d be done with the series in another month, two at the most, and could move on to more interesting matters.

  After the sermon, they settled into silence, sang a closing song, then Bruno brought out dessert. People lingered to visit. Sam sought out the visitors, welcoming them to the meeting and inviting them to return. They had questions about the bats, which Sam answered, avoiding the more gruesome details.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Stacey Maxwell gathering Leonard, Hank, Wayne, and Wilson at a table in the back corner. She caught his eyes and gestured for him to join them.

  When they were seated, she said, “I want to approach the DNR tomorrow to see if they might be interested in a settlement.”

  “You mean money,” Wayne said. “We’re going to give them money?”

  “It’s that or jail,” Stacey said. “Take your pick.”

  “How much are we talking?” Wayne asked.

  “The maximum fine for violating the Protected Species Act is $50,000 per episode,” Stacey explained. “But I’m going to start low and offer $5,000, along with an offer to install bat houses on the meetinghouse property to expand the bat’s habitat. Just so you understand, that’s a $2,500 offer from Leonard for killing the bats and a $2,500 offer from the other three for cutting down the trees.”

  Leonard suggested they divide the fine four ways, so that all the guilty parties paid the same amount. Better yet, he thought the meeting paying the fine would be a wonderful example of Christians bearing one another’s burdens, as instructed by the Apostle Paul in the book of Galatians, chapter six, verse two.

  Wayne and Wilson felt little need to serve as an example for anything and informed Leonard and Hank they were on their own, fine-wise.

  Stacey headed them off at the pass by changing the subject.

  “Leonard, if you and Wanda can be at my house tomorrow morning at nine, I’ll have my initial meeting with the DNR.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Hank Withers said. “I’m pretty good at negotiating. I was an architect, you know.”

  “Thank you, but no. I want to approach them by myself. Besides, if you come with me, they might deduce that you’re the one who cut down the trees. Right now, I want to keep names out of it.”

  Smooth, Sam thought. He made a mental note to hire Stacey if he ever ran afoul of the law.

  “Now, at some point they will want to know your names. But before we get to that point, I need to know if any of you have a criminal history. I want to be able to tell them you’ve never been in trouble with the law.”

  She eyed each man separately. “No prior arrests? Nothing that will come back and bite us if I tell them you’re all upstanding citizens who’ve never been in trouble.”

  Leonard Fink shifted in his chair. “Uh, how far back will they look?”

  “I assume back to when you turned eighteen,” Stacey said.

  He breathed a sigh of relief. “We’re good to go then.”

  “What did you do, Leonard?” Wayne Newby asked. “Steal something? Murder someone?”

  “Yep, someone was poking his nose in my business, so I killed him,” Leonard said.

  Stacey ordered them not to do anything stupid between now and the next day, reminded Leonard to be at her house the next morning at nine, then dismissed them. Sam hung back to speak with her.

  “So what kind of chances do you think they have?” he asked.

  “It’s hard to say. It all depends on what kind of mood the DNR is in. Their age will certainly work in their favor. Judges don’t like sending old men to jail. Especially first-time offenders.”

  “I hope they avoid jail,” Sam said, thinking how busy his life would become if four of his church members were imprisoned and he had to visit them each week, plus visit their wives, plus make sure their lawns got mowed.

  Yes, jail would be an absolute disaster.

  67

  The DNR lady woke up Monday morning depressed, feeling the same way she had after ticketing the governor’s brother. Something was amiss, she could sense it. Leonard Fink was going to walk. For several weeks she had harbored the hope that the bat killer would be sentenced to the electric chair, sending a clear message that cruelty to living things would not be tolerated.

  She had overheard the big man, the director himself, on the phone, speaking to someone in the governor’s office. The director was a political appointee who had donated five thousand dollars to the governor’s reelection campaign and in turn had been given a job that pulled in something north of a hundred thousand dollars a year.

  “You might point out to the governor that bats aren’t like puppies. If the DNR cracks down on this guy, the church people aren’t going to like it. We’ve already shut down their church. I’m not even sure we had the authority to do that. But this Fink guy has already been on one television show and he might be going on others. These people buy television time by the hour. This is going to come back and bite us, I promise you that. I’d find a way to drop this matter, and quick.”

  All that work for nothing. Finding the bats. Sorting the bats. Closing the church. Digging up the pastor’s yard. Securing the search warrants. Searching Leonard Fink’s house. Finding the bat poop. Filing charges. Arresting Leonard Fink. All for nothing.

  When she arrived at work, a note was on her blotter instructing her to see the director. She knew what was coming.

  He was livid. “You shut down the church? Who told you to do that? Those people have been meeting in that church for years without hurting those bats. If you’d have just left them alone, those bats would have been fine.” He was shouting by now. “I want you to call that pastor and apologize, and you better hope to God they don’t go to the newspapers with this, or heads will roll around here and yours will be first. Get rid of the paperwork, get rid of the evidence. Now!”

  She decided to tell Sam in person, and phoned him, asking him to meet her at Leonard’s house. She stopped by her desk, trashed her paperwork, deleted the file from her computer, went to the evidence room and retrieved the bag of bat poop she had seized from Leonard’s garage, then drove the twenty minutes out to Hope.

  Sam, Leonard, Wanda, and some woman with two babies were waiting on the Finks’ front porch.

  “It’s your lucky day,” she told Leonard. “The governor doesn’t want to have charges filed against you.”

  She turned to Sam. “You can have your church back.”

  She stared at Stacey Maxwell. “Who are you?”

  “A friend of the family,” Stacey said.

  “I’m not going to jail?” Leonard asked, sensing a glimmer of hope in what had been a dark and threatening day. “It’s all over?”

  “It’s over as far as you’re concerned,” the DNR lady said.

  “What about the trees being cut down?” Stacey asked.

  “What about them? They’re your trees.”

  “I’m sorry for killing the bats,” Leonard said. “I’ll never do it again.”

  That helped. The DNR lady softened.

  “Do you want your bat poop back?” she asked.

  “I don’t ever want to see anything having to do with bats for the rest of my life,” Leonard said.

  “Just one favor,” the DNR lady said. “The governor would appreciate it if you didn’t say anything to the TV and newspaper folks. He wants to keep this quiet.”

  “Not a word,” Leonard promised. “Not one single word.”

  The parking garage for the DNR was next to the state office building. The DNR lady had driven in and out of it a thousand times over her ten-year career, so knew the exact place the DNR director parked. What a fathead. He drove a convertible with a Ducks Unlimited license plate, number one. What kind of moron went around blasting ducks out of the air on the weekends and headed up the Department of Natural Resources on the weekdays? Politicians. She couldn’t stand them.

  It was a gorgeous late spring day. The sky was blue, the top was down on the director’s convertible, and the poop was solid, tumbling out of the bag and over the convertible seats, filling the nooks and crannies. He’d be vacuuming it out for years.

  68

  Hank Withers wanted to sue the state for delaying their building project.

  “It’s gonna cost us about two hundred thousand more than we have, if we do it right. Let’s threaten to sue them for a million dollars and see if they’ll settle for two hundred thousand,” he told Sam.

  “We’ll do no such thing,” Sam said.

  Wayne Newby was beside himself with joy. No fine, no going to prison and having unspeakable things done to him.

  Wilson Roberts was so pleased he promised to pay for bat houses just the same. A dozen of them, along the edge of the woods, bat condominiums. Plus, he vowed to personally donate, in the name of Hope Friends Meeting, ten thousand dollars to Save the Bats!

  Sam phoned his parents to report the happy news. They invited him and Barbara over for dinner that evening to celebrate. His father wanted to ask him a question. Nothing big. Just a small favor, a little something. Would six o’clock work?

  Sam and Barbara walked the three blocks to his parents’ house. He hoped they were having fried chicken. Barbara had stopped frying their food several years before, and Sam was craving lard. Stepping through the front door, the smell of chicken filled the air. Ambrosia. It was as if the Triune God had woken that morning determined to bless Sam Gardner. Not only had his flock avoided prison, his mother had prepared fried chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans, and wait for it, she said, close your eyes, think of your favorite thing in the whole wide world.

  He thought of his wife and his sons and pocketknives. He thought of Hope Meeting and all his friends and their screen room in the summer and their fireplace in the winter.

  “Too many favorite things,” he said to his mother. “I can’t think of just one.”

  “Did you think of homemade ice cream?” she asked. “With strawberries?”

  Ecstasy.

  “Your father made it,” Gloria Gardner said. “He’s going to ask you to sand the floors this week. Just thought I’d warn you.”

  The fried chicken was just as he remembered. Crispy on the outside, juicy on the inside.

  “Well, that’s great news about the DNR not pressing charges,” Charles Gardner said, pushing back from the supper table. “I guess that means you’re not going to be quite as busy as you thought you were.”

  “Oh, I’ve still got plenty to do,” Sam said.

  “I was hoping maybe you could give me a few hours this week. I’ve rented a floor sander from Riggle’s Hardware and might need a hand sanding the floors.”

  “I don’t know, Dad. I’m pretty busy this week.”

  “You know, one day I’ll be dead and you’ll give anything to spend time with me sanding floors,” Charles Gardner said.

  “Ah, the old one-day-I’ll-be-dead argument,” Sam said.

  It was a favorite ploy of his father’s, begun when Sam was a teenager whenever his father wanted something from him.

  You know, one day I’ll be dead and you’ll give anything to mow the lawn one more time for me.

  You know, one day I’ll be dead and you’ll give anything to be able to clean the gutters one more time.

  You know, one day I’ll be dead and you’ll give anything to let me have that last chicken leg.

  The one-day-I’ll-be-dead argument made little sense, but it was highly effective.

  “Let me look at my schedule,” Sam said. “No promises. But I’ll see what I can do.”

  “That’s great. And just because I knew you would, I went ahead and made your favorite dessert, homemade ice cream with strawberries. My way of thanking you.”

  He hurried into the kitchen to retrieve the ice cream, then carried it into the dining room.

  “Hey, there’s my Tupperware bowl,” Barbara said. “I wondered where it went.”

  “You brought a salad here in it, honey,” Gloria Gardner said. “Remember?”

  “No, but that’s okay. I’m just glad to have it back.”

  “You know, Dad, I’m kind of full,” Sam said. “I think I’ll pass on the ice cream.”

  “Nonsense. Just have a little,” he said, spooning out two large scoops of ice cream from the Tupperware bowl onto Sam’s plate.

 

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