The voice on the thumb drive was Kelsey, low and impatient, in the office of the church that I knew by heart. “If she goes to the board, Jordan, you know what we have to do about her medicine. Another dose, higher. It was working. She was already shaky at rehearsal. Nobody will question a seizure.” Then Jordan, calm as a man ordering lunch: “I will handle it tonight. The tea. She always drinks the tea.” Brother Lewis took off his glasses and set them down very slowly on my kitchen table. His wife began to pray in a whisper. Grace did not move.
I made myself listen to the end. There was more. Jordan talked about the building fund, which stood at one hundred and forty thousand dollars for the new fellowship hall, and which by August had been reduced to nine thousand. He talked about a condominium in Gulf Shores. He talked about Kelsey and a trip to Cancun. And he talked, in a quiet and contented voice, about what would happen to the children, as though Grace and Noah were a pair of boxes to be shipped. I heard a sound in the room and realized it was coming from my own throat.
The letters in the choir folder were in the neat handwriting of my daughter. She had written four of them, and they were dated across the autumn. The first was a plain note to Brother Lewis, which she never delivered, laying out the missing money. The second, to me, described her fear. The third listed the names of the medications that had been added to her tea, as she had learned from a nurse in the choir. The fourth, shorter, was addressed to Grace and Noah, and I could not read it aloud. I handed it to Grace. She read it silently and folded it twice.
The courage of a quiet person is measured in the pages she hides and the people she trusts to find them.
Brother Lewis stood up. He was seventy years old, a gentle and stooped man, and he did not look like himself. He said, “Joyce, I will call the sheriff. Tonight.” His voice trembled. “I told her to pray about it. God forgive me. I sat in my office, and a woman came and told me that her husband was robbing us and poisoning her, and I patted her hand. I will carry that until I die.” His wife took his arm. I told him I believed that Melissa did not blame him. I told him that she had trusted him enough to ask. He bent his head.
The sheriff of Montgomery County sent a lieutenant and two deputies to my house at midnight. The lieutenant was a calm woman named Rodgers who listened to the drive from beginning to end, and then to the end again. At two in the morning she called the district attorney at home. At five, she called the coroner. By the time the sun rose I had signed a statement and given her the folder. She stood on my porch in the first gray light and said, “Mrs. Parrish, you have been very brave. Now we have to be quick. Pastor Jordan has a flight to Panama on Monday.”
They arrested him on Sunday morning, in the pulpit of the church, in front of a congregation of four hundred. He had stood up to preach on forgiveness. The deputy walked quietly down the center aisle, with Lieutenant Rodgers behind him, and spoke a few words in his ear. Jordan turned the color of paper. Brother Lewis came forward from the front pew and took the Bible from his hands. The congregation rose, not in anger, but in a kind of stunned and holy hush, and I heard someone start to sing.
The song was How Great Thou Art. It began among the lower voices, in the choir loft, where a single chair stood empty with a white rose on it. A woman in the back row was singing it, then another, and then the whole choir, and at last the entire sanctuary, four hundred voices, rising and rising. Grace stood in the front pew in her robe, her mouth open, and I thought of how often she had sung beside her mother in that same loft. Then, shaking, she raised her voice and found the harmony line and held it, steady and true.
Kelsey was arrested that afternoon at her parents house in Prattville. She took the stand against Jordan in exchange for a reduced charge, and in the end it was her testimony, along with the recording and the toxicology report, that closed the case. The examiner found in the tissue of my daughter a combination of medications that no doctor had prescribed. Jordan was convicted of murder and embezzlement, and received life. Kelsey received twenty years. When they led her out, she looked at me, and I looked back, and I felt nothing but a vast, cold sorrow.
The building fund was recovered in part, from the sale of the condominium. The congregation voted to build the fellowship hall anyway, and to name it for Melissa. A plaque went up by the door of the choir room. It reads, In memory of Melissa Parrish, who sang the truth. Brother Lewis presided at the dedication, and he wept through the whole benediction. Afterward he found me in the hallway and asked if I would forgive an old man. I put my arms around him. I told him that it was my mother, long ago, who taught me that forgiveness is a choice.
Grace sings the harmony in the choir now, in the seat of her mother. Noah, who is nine, sits in the front row and holds the hymnal upside down and sings loudest of all. They live with me in the little house on Court Street, and on Saturday nights we turn on the radio and dance in the living room. The choir folder lives on a shelf above the piano, the silver letters on its spine a little worn. When Grace opens it, she touches the page of It Is Well, and for just a moment, I can hear her mother humming the harmony.
