Something of the wilderness must have shown in her face, because Aberforth leaned forward awkwardly against his Eames-spindled knees and said, “I haven’t said anything to the bishop yet, but you’re going to need to come to a decision soon, Ms. Fergusson. Not for him or for me or for the people in your parish. For the sake of your own soul.”
She nodded mechanically. “I know, Father. And I’ve…” Her voice faded off. How could she describe the past few weeks? Days? These last terrible hours? “I’ve taken steps.”
She picked up her mug of tea, watching with a clinical interest as her hand shook. “Unless something extraordinary happens, I do not expect to see Russ Van Alstyne again.”
TWO
Meg Tracey wasn’t the sort of woman who had to keep tabs on her friends. She enjoyed her own privacy too much to intrude on others, and she frequently quoted the phrase “An it harm no one, do what you will,” which she had picked up in a book on Wicca she bought at the Crandall Library’s annual sale for a buck.
She liked to think of herself as a neo-pagan and threw an annual winter solstice party with lots of torches and greenery and drinking of grog, but she wasn’t interested enough to dig much deeper into the philosophical underpinnings. It was enough for her that it annoyed the hell out of her intensely Catholic family (she had been born Mary Margaret Cathwright) and that it distinguished her from the vast majority of her neighbors in Millers Kill, a town she frequently described as “three stop signs east of Nowhere.”