Fallen Angels by Alice Duncan

stick to
poodles and never get married and have children.
    “I’m so sorry, honey.” Harvey meant it.
He and Chloe were the perfect couple. I mean that sincerely. They
absolutely belonged together, which made me happy since . . . well,
since they were together, if
you know what I mean.
    Chloe tried to put on a brighter expression.
“Mercy’s getting us a toy poodle for Christmas, Harvey. What color
do you want?”
    Harvey, continuing to massage Chloe’s
shoulders, looked from me to Buttercup and back again, his eyebrows
lifting, whether in delight or surprise I couldn’t tell. “That’s
nice of you, Mercy, but . . . They come in different colors?”
    “Tell him, Mercy.” Chloe allowed her head to
fall forward as she enjoyed Harvey’s massaging fingers.
    “Black, reddish-brown, white, and golden like
Buttercup.”
    “I like Buttercup a lot,” said the
ever-diplomatic Harvey, “but I’d kind of like a black one.
Maybe.”
    “Black is a very sophisticated color,” I told
him. Chloe had enlightened me on that important reality of life;
otherwise I wouldn’t have known. “In fact, the very first toy
poodle I ever met was black, and she was the reason I decided to
get Buttercup.”
    “Black it is, then,” said Chloe.
    By that time, Buttercup and I had finished
breakfast, so I led her out to the backyard where she did her duty
as a dog, and then I left the house for the Angelica Gospel Hall.
I’d called ahead for a taxicab, and when I told him my destination,
he said he didn’t need me to tell him the address.
    “Everybody’s going there these days,” he
said, trying, I’m sure, to make friendly conversation on our
journey.
    “That’s what I hear. I figured I’d go and see
what all the fuss is about.”
    I could tell he was grinning even though I
sat in the back seat. “Hellfire and brimstone, I imagine.”
    “Maybe. Actually, I’ve read that Mrs.
Emmanuel preaches more about joy and happiness than hellfire and
brimstone.”
    “Yeah? Well, that’d be a new approach,
huh?”
    “Indeed it would.”
    In actual fact, once I got there and Mrs.
Emmanuel began preaching, I discovered both the cabbie and I had
been right to one degree or another. I’d never seen a minister
preach in so . . . boisterous a manner. Boisterousness isn’t a word
one associates with Episcopalians, and that’s what my family is.
Was. Oh, bother. You know what I mean.
    I’d never been in a church where the members
of the congregation felt free to vent their feelings with loud
calls of “Amen!” and the waving of hands in the air, either. Sister
Emmanuel seemed to eat up the enthusiasm, and I could almost
understand the attraction of a happy and loving faith in one’s god,
although my stubborn Bostonian breeding kept me glued to my pew,
and I only opened my mouth in order to sing the hymns, most of
which were new to me. The entire experience was most enlightening
as far as understanding the appeal to so many of the Angelica
Gospel Hall and its leader, but I didn’t know how attending this
service was going to help me solve the murder of Mrs. Chalmers.
There I was, stuck in a pew, and there wasn’t an appealing suspect
in sight. Even if there had been, I was in no position to
interrogate him or her.
    The worst part was yet to come. After the
final amen sounded from His people again, as the old hymn puts it,
people stood up, turned in their pews, and began cheerfully
embracing and blessing one another. Never, in my entire life, had I
imagined that such activities could take place in a church.
    The lady beside me said, “God bless you,
sister!”
    I gulped and said, “God bless you . . .
sister.”
    Then she grabbed me in a big, fat hug. After
a second or two spent being appalled and stiff, I unbent and hugged
her back. What the heck. I was there, and this was clearly the
conduct expected of anyone who was there. My mother was going to
freeze into a block of ice when she heard about this latest
instance of what she would