The Rectory Burglary

The rectory sat on the corner of Second and Vine, a white house with a porch and a lilac that Ruth Gibbs had planted the year they came and that had never once bloomed properly, and Ruth had stopped referring to it as the lilac and had begun, in the last few years, to refer to it as the bush.

Ruth Gibbs was a woman with a system, and the system was this: the building fund did not go to the bank. The bank in Millvale charged a fee for a commercial account and wanted two signatures and a stamp, and Ruth had fought with them about the stamp in 2019 and had won, and what she had won was the right to keep eleven thousand four hundred dollars in a brown manila envelope in the bottom drawer of the study, under the parish registers, in new twenties, because new bills were easier to count and because she had asked the teller for new bills and had been given new bills and had felt, all the way home with it in her bag, the specific pleasure of a woman who has extracted a small concession from an institution.

She had told people. That was the thing Ruth Gibbs could not stop coming back to in the weeks afterward, and it was the reason she did not go to church for a while, and the reason she and Ellery did not speak of it for six months. Not carelessly — that was the point, she had not been careless, she had been proud. She had said it at the altar guild in January, and to Wes Corliss over the counter at the store, and at the church supper in the parish room while she was doing the dishes, with the water running, to two women who had both since been questioned by the deputy, and what she had said was: "It's in the house, and I've been keeping it in the house since the bank lost Mr. Ferry's deposit slip, and I'll tell you, I don't sleep as well as I used to."

She woke up at one forty on the Thursday night because the house was cold, and then because the house was cold for a reason, and the reason was that the back door of the rectory was standing open onto the yard, and the yard had snow in it, and the snow was coming in.

What she did then was what she would do again; she had thought about it a great deal and she would do the same thing. She lay still. She listened. Ellery was asleep beside her with his mouth open, which in fifteen years of marriage had never once stopped being the sound that meant the house was all right, and it was still making that sound. And down the hall, in the study, in the dark, on the floor, something was moving paper very carefully. Not rummaging. Moving paper. The slow deliberate sound of a person reading.

Ruth Gibbs got up and went down the hall in her nightgown and did not put the light on, and stood in the door of the study, and the study had one window and the streetlight on Second Street came through it and lay across the floor in the shape of the window, and in that patch of light, on the floor, in the middle of the room, the bottom drawer of her desk was out.

That was all there was.

There was the drawer out of the desk. There was the manila envelope gone from it, and the parish registers scattered, and, an inch above the floorboards, in the air, in the light — she saw all this in what she swore was one second and what Ellery swore afterwards must have been longer — in the air above the boards there hung, quite still, a sheet of her good writing paper, the heavy kind with the cross on it, and it was hanging in the air at the height of a man's face, and while she watched, it turned over.

Ruth Gibbs said, "Ellery."

She had not planned to say it. It came out of her in a whisper the exact size of the room, and the moment she said it the sheet of paper dropped, and whatever had been holding it was not standing where the paper had been, because the third stair of the staircase behind her creaked, and the third stair creaks only at the front edge, which is where you step if you are a person in a hurry going up.

Ellery came out of the bedroom at the top of the stairs holding the lamp and looking like a man who has been dropped out of an airplane. Ruth heard him shout. She heard, from below and from the wrong place, from the kitchen, from the door that was standing open onto the yard, a man's voice say, "Quiet," and it was not shouted, it was said conversationally, at her husband's own volume, in the flat even tone of somebody who had come a long way to be inconvenienced.

Ellery went down the stairs. He was sixty-one years old and he went down the stairs four at a time in his undershirt, and he was a man who had been a lineman for a power company in his twenties, and he went out the back door into the snow, and there was nobody in the yard.

Roy Nunn was at the rectory by two fifteen, because the rectory was four blocks from the substation and because he had been unable to sleep since October, the town being what it was, and had been sitting at the substation desk reading the county budget with the radio on, when the call came.

He found the back door open and Ruth Gibbs on the porch in a coat over her nightgown with a flashlight in each hand and her husband standing in the middle of the yard, and the first thing Roy did was not ask a question, it was to look at the snow, because Roy Nunn had grown up in the valley and had been a deputy in it for nineteen years and knew the one lesson of the valley, which is that the snow will always tell you what happened and will never tell you why.

What the snow said was this.

There was a line of prints. They were holes — round, the size of a cereal bowl, about a foot apart, in a line from the back door of the rectory to the fence at the alley. No boot had made them and no animal; a bare human foot made them, walking normally, and they were there only where the snow was deep.

Where the snow was not deep, they stopped.

That was the first thing, and Roy Nunn looked at it for a long time with his hands in his pockets. The yard sloped. The snow lay deep for the first nine feet off the porch, and then the wind had scoured the middle of the yard down to the frozen grass, and then it lay deep again in the lee of the fence, and the prints existed in the deep part and did not exist in the scoured part, and there was a barefooted man's track coming out of a foot of snow that had no track going into it.

The second thing was the wall. The rectory's study window is on the north side and there is a lilac under it — the bush — and against that wall, in the snow on the walk, was the print of two feet, side by side, toes toward the house, at a spot eleven feet from the ground, and there was nothing below them. No ladder. No scuff on the siding. No drip. There was a pair of bare feet standing on the air against a white clapboard wall eleven feet up, and the snow on the walk beneath them was smooth.

The third thing was the fence and Roy Nunn almost missed it. It was a hair. A single strand of hair, nine inches long, gray at one end, snagged in the wire mesh of the alley fence at the height of a man's chest, thirty feet from the yard, on the far side, where the prints did not go. It was the one thing in the whole case that Roy Nunn would never be able to explain, because it did not belong to the man.

He put it in an evidence bag and did not know what he had, and he was standing in the alley holding the bag up to the streetlight when he heard the sound of a pickup starting somewhere on Vine Street, and he did not run after it, because he was a careful man and because he had no idea yet that the case was going to be the case.

It was Bernie Kaminski who assembled it, and he assembled it not out of detective work but out of the ordinary commerce of a bar, which was why Roy Nunn had come to dislike the Bitterroot and to spend a great deal of time in it.

By Sunday, three men had been in the Bitterroot and said the same sentence, in three different words, and the sentence was: he paid me in new twenties.

Wes Corliss, who had left a case of lab gloves and four carboys of distilled water on the Wayfarer's porch on Thursday morning and taken his money off the step. Boyd Trask, who had ordered the battery. Augie Dieter, who had finally been paid for the crates.

And on Sunday afternoon, at the counter of the store, Ruth Gibbs said to Wes Corliss, in the voice of a woman who has not slept in three nights, "I hope you never find out how it feels to have eleven thousand dollars of God's money taken out of your desk, and the worst of it — Wes, the worst of it is they were new twenties."

And Wes Corliss said, "I know they were new."

And they looked at each other across the counter, and Wes Corliss is a fifty-year-old man who sells bait and ammo and cough syrup in a town of nine hundred, and he did not run anywhere, he walked the four blocks to the substation, which was closed, and then he walked the eleven blocks to the Pell house, which was not, and he stood in Vera Pell's kitchen with his hat in his hands and said, "Vera. When did he last pay you."

Vera Pell looked at him and did not answer.

She did not answer because she already knew. She had known since Thursday, actually, in the way people know things that they will not have until later; she had known since the night she had gone up to the landing with the tray and had seen, on the dresser, beside the three notebooks under their rubber bands, a brown manila envelope with a stamp on it and no address, which was the envelope she had looked at on the first day, and which had been empty on the first day.

It was not empty on the Thursday, and it had not been empty on the Tuesday, and Vera Pell had spent the whole of Friday and Saturday not thinking about it in the specific and exhausting way that a woman can spend two days not thinking about a thing while she is cooking breakfast for a man out of the money he stole from the church.