“RIGHT NOW!”
Although Davy Goya, God bless him, was coolly inspecting his fingernails, it seemed to Clem that every other person in the hall had taken up the chant. He’d done his share of chanting at various protests, before he met Sharon, but the sound of it now was so alienating that he felt ashamed of himself, ashamed of his weakness, for having hugged the other alumni. Not only were they safe and self-righteous, they weren’t appalled by Toby Isner. If they’d ever been Clem’s people, they definitely weren’t now.
Toby lowered his fist, which he’d been pumping to the rhythm of the chanting, and hit the opening notes to “Blowin’ in the Wind.” A shout went up from the audience, and Clem couldn’t take it anymore. He pushed through the crowd and escaped into the church’s central hallway, where the bathrooms were. He opened the ladies’-room door a crack. “Becky?”
No answer. He checked the other rooms along the hallway—also empty. He could still hear Toby Isner’s voice, could picture him simpering through his beard, when he reached the main church entrance. Sitting on the floor inside the door, smoking a cigarette, was a girl in a biker jacket. It was Laura Dobrinsky.
“Hey Laura, good to see you. I wonder—have you seen my sister?”
Laura took a sideways puff as if she hadn’t heard him. She looked like she’d been crying.
“Sorry to bother you,” he said. “I’m just looking for Becky.”
Between him and Laura was the social ease of having long ago established that they didn’t like each other. She took another sideways puff. “Last I saw her, she was stoned off her ass.”
“She was—what?”
“Stoned off her ass.”
His vision swam as if he’d been punched. Now he understood why Davy Goya was worried. Leaving Laura to her private woe, he ran up two flights of stairs to the Crossroads meeting room. In the dimness of it, from the doorway, he saw a girl supine on a sofa, beneath a skinny boy. Both of them were clothed, and thankfully the girl wasn’t Becky.
“Sorry. Have either of you seen Becky Hildebrandt?”
“No,” the girl said. “Go away.”
As he descended the stairs, he was hammered by his lack of sleep. He would have sat down for a smoke if he’d believed it would make him feel anything but worse. His eyes were fried, his head full of rottenness, his shoulders aching from carrying his luggage, his mouth sour from the cookies he’d grabbed on his way out of the parsonage, and the complication of Becky made it almost unbearable. He knew Perry smoked pot, but Becky? He needed her to be her shining, clearheaded self. He needed her on his side before he told his parents what he’d done.
The second-floor hallway was dark, but the door of Rick Ambrose’s office was ajar. Clem had always appreciated Ambrose for understand ing his ambivalent relationship with Crossroads, and he appreciated him now for wanting nothing to do with the concert. On the chance that his sister might be in the office, safe, Clem peeked inside. Ambrose was slouched in his desk chair, reading a book, and appeared to be alone.
Farther up the hallway to the sanctuary, Clem noticed a strip of light beneath the associate minister’s office door. Evidently his father, who would now be at the Haefles’ annual party, had forgotten to turn out the lights. As he walked past the door, he heard a laugh that sounded like Becky’s.
He stopped. Did she somehow have an office key? He tapped on the door. “Becky?”
“Who’s there?”
His blood pressure jumped. The voice was his father’s. Clem hadn’t expected to see him—had counted on not seeing him—before he’d talked to Becky and gotten her blessing.
“It’s me,” he said. “It’s Clem. Is Becky in there?”
There was a silence, long enough to be unnatural. Then the door was opened by his father. He was wearing his old Arizona coat, and his face was strangely pale. “Clem, hi.”
He seemed not at all happy to see his son. Behind him, in a hunting jacket and a matching cap, stood a clear-skinned boy who was, in fact, Clem realized, a short-haired woman.
“Is Becky here?”
“Becky? No. No, ah, this is one of our parishioners, Mrs. Cottrell.”
The woman gave Clem a little wave. Her face was very pretty.
“This is my son Clem,” his father said. “Mrs. Cottrell and I were just, uh—actually, maybe you can help us. Whoever shoveled the parking lot blocked her car in. We need to dig her out. Would you mind?”