Out Of The Deep I Cry

Chapter 6

While they decamped to the meeting room, and people helped themselves to Lois’s bad coffee and they settled around the massive black oak table, she congratulated herself on decisively taking the field. The glow lasted right up until Terry McKellan told her there weren’t going to be any loans to actually get the work done.

“What?” she said, looking at the copy of their financial statement he had sent sailing across the table. “We have to get loans. That’s the way you do it, right?” She stopped. She sounded more like a high school girl running a student council meeting than a Leader of Men. And women. She tried for a more decisive tone. “That is, my experience has been”-watching her mother run a capital campaign for their home parish near Norfolk and a single workshop on fund-raising at Virginia Episcopal Seminary, but they didn’t have to know all the details, did they?-“that necessary improvements on the physical plant are started by loans from the diocese or the bank, and the capital campaign is designed to supplement them and pay them off.”

“That’s a good way to do it,” McKellan agreed.

“So what’s the catch?”

McKellan’s luxurious brown mustache quirked up at each end. “You have looked at the financial statements over the past year, haven’t you?”

“Of course I have.”

“Did you notice the outstanding loan from the diocese? We took it out three years ago to pay for the organ restoration and the parking lot repairs.”

“Sure. But we’ve been making regular payments on it.”

His eyes flicked toward the others seated around the table. “And you noticed the monthly mortgage payment we’re making?”

“Sure. The parish hall burned down nearly to the ground in ’93 and the vestry took out a mortgage to cover the cost of repairs. I’ve looked over the records. We’ve never had a late payment, not once.” She looked around the table. “St. Alban’s must have good credit.”

McKellan’s mustache broadened. He was looking at her in a distinctly paternal way. She didn’t like it. “Clare,” he said, “have you ever taken out a loan?”

“I had a student loan. In college. I paid it off.”

“I mean, a loan requiring collateral. Income flow. A debt-to-asset ratio. A mortgage. A car loan. A business loan.”

“Um.” She had gone from her parents’ house to school and then straight into the army, which for ten years had told her where to go and given her a place to live when she got there. Then it was a group house at seminary, located for her by the housing office, and now the St. Alban’s rectory. Clare realized that not only had she never purchased a house, she had never even chosen her own place to live.

The vestry members, most of whom were old enough to have paid off their mortgages when she was in diapers, were looking at her. “I, um, I’ve always paid cash for my cars,” she said.

McKellan nodded. “We have too much debt in proportion to our income.”

“Which has been falling over the past ten years,” Sterling Sumner pointed out.

“You work for AllBanc,” she said. “Couldn’t you…?”

“AllBanc holds the current mortgage.” McKellan opened his hands. “If we were still doing business the old way, it wouldn’t be a problem. Every officer at the bank knows this church and knows we’re good for the money. But we’re part of a conglomerate now. We can’t make loans based on a handshake and a reputation anymore.”

Clare pulled her shoulder-length hair back and twisted it. From the corner of the room, the Civil War-era grandfather clock ticked away the time. She wondered, for a moment, how much they could get for it at auction.

“Okay,” she said. “We’re going to need a sizable chunk of change to get repairs started while we’re getting a capital campaign off the ground.” She thought about the annual budget they had hashed out last month. She couldn’t imagine squeezing anything else out of that stone. “Suggestions?”

“Get rid of the outreach programs,” Sterling said. “If it’s really important, people will take up the gap by donating their time and money.”

“No!”

Clare erupted from her chair, setting it rocking unsteadily on the Persian carpet.

Sterling tugged on his scarf. “It’s not as if the soup kitchen will fold without us. And I’m sure the unwed teenage mothers will continue to have babies whether we’re here to ‘mentor’ them or not.”

“Sterling,” Mrs. Marshall said warningly.

“Well, they’re not providing much benefit to the members of the congregation,” he pointed out.

Clare braced her hands flat on the table. “Ministering to the poor, the sick, and the friendless is pretty much the whole point behind the Christianity thing, Sterling.” She caught the wicked gleam in his eye and knew she had risen to his bait. “And you are being deliberately provocative.” She sat down. “Next suggestion.”

People looked up, down, across the room, as if thousands of dollars might materialize from the air.

“What about investments?” Geoff Burns said. “Are there any underperformers in the church’s portfolio we could sell?”

McKellan shook his head. “Not without gutting our already-modest endowment.”

“Ah.” Burns sank back into his seat. Clare considered the leather-and-oak chair, one of twelve in the room. Maybe they wouldn’t have to send anything out to auction. They could do it all on eBay. Mrs. DeWitt, St. Alban’s seventy-something volunteer webmaster, had her own e-store.

“There is the possibility…” Mrs. Marshall’s voice faded away. Clare sat up straighter. The elderly woman tended to be one of the quieter members at their meetings, but when she spoke up, she always did so strongly. Clare had never heard her sound uncertain before.

Mrs. Marshall looked down at the financial statement in front of her. “I suppose I could liquidate the Ketchem Trust.”

Norm Madsen shook his head. “No, no, no no no. Out of the question.”

Such clear-cut decisiveness was out of character for Mr. Madsen, the vestry’s Great Equivocator. “What’s the Ketchem Trust?” Clare asked. “I don’t recall seeing that name in our financial statement.”

“That’s because it doesn’t belong to St. Alban’s,” Mr. Madsen replied.

“But it could,” Mrs. Marshall said.

“Isn’t this the money-,” Sterling Sumner began.

Mr. Madsen cut him off. “There’s been no qualifying event to disburse the trust.”

“I’m the one who decides what qualifies.” Mrs. Marshall was sounding more like herself now, but Clare had never seen the elderly lawyer so worked up. She glanced around the table. Terry McKellan and Robert Corlew were following the exchange with baffled expressions. Geoff Burns jotted notes in his Palm Pilot, evidently keeping busy until someone filled him in. So it wasn’t one of those pieces of information that everyone on the vestry knew and had forgotten to tell her.

Sterling was advising Mrs. Marshall to think of herself, and Mr. Madsen was saying something incomprehensible about “devolving” and “beneficiaries.” Robert Corlew had leaned over and was whispering to Terry McKellan.

“Excuse me,” Clare said. “Folks?” She might as well have been talking to herself. Geoff Burns rolled his eyes in her direction. She leaned forward. “Excuse. Me,” she said, in a voice pitched to carry across the noise of helicopter rotors.

The room fell silent. “Thank you. Mrs. Marshall, some of us here need an explanation. What’s the Ketchem Trust?”

Norm Madsen opened his mouth, but Mrs. Marshall said, “Let me tell it, Norm.” She turned toward Clare. “It’s a trust left by my mother at her death. I’m the sole trustee, and I have the power to decide if the trust ought to be ended and the principal handed over to the beneficiary.”

“Who is…?” Clare had a feeling where this was going.

“If-when-the trust is broken, the money goes to me, to be used entirely at my discretion. I must say, I never thought the trust would last forever, but it feels very strange now, contemplating ending it. I always thought I would leave it to St. Alban’s in my will. Under the circumstances, I believe I’d better push my timetable forward.” She wore coral lipstick that matched the coral scarf around her throat, and when she smiled, she looked like a banner flying in the face of defeat. “After all, I’ve already invested in the window. I may as well pay for the roof and the wall.”

“The window? You donated that?”

“As a memorial to my mother.” She frowned. “Oh, heavens. I do hope the work they did back then isn’t a factor in our present problem.”

Sterling shook his head. “The artisans only replaced the existing color-block window. There wasn’t any structural work done.”

“Kind of a grim verse there,” Burns said from his chair at the far end of the table. “I thought people usually went for more uplifting resurrection theology in memorials.”

“Do they?” Mrs. Marshall’s polite tone implied Geoff Burns’s idea of a suitable memorial would contain big-eyed children and puppy dogs frolicking about a blond-haired Jesus. “I thought Lamentations most suitable.”

“Getting back on point,” Clare said, “I’d like to understand more about the Ketchem Trust. What is it used for? Why haven’t you broken it up to now?”

“How much money are we talking about?” Robert Corlew leaned forward on the table.

“It varies with the state of the stock market, of course,” Mrs. Marshall replied, just as Norm Madsen said, “You don’t have to answer that, Lacey,” and Sterling Sumner chimed in, “Oh, sure, with somebody else’s money you’re interested.”

There was a pause.

“Between one hundred and thirty and one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.” Mrs. Marshall gave her defenders a quelling glance. “Roughly.”

Geoff Burns whistled. “In that case, I like it rough.”

Clare coughed, and McKellan and Corlew snorted, but evidently that particular phrase didn’t mean anything to Mrs. Marshall. “Has it all been accumulating in there, like a savings account?” Clare asked. “Or is there money being paid out currently?” A thought struck her, and her cheeks pinked. “It’s not-do you need-is it helping you out?”

“No, dear. The trust does generate a modest income, and since 1973, it’s been used to help defray the expenses of the free clinic.”

Clare should have been surprised, but after living over a year in a town of eight thousand, she was beginning to realize that sooner or later, everything and everybody was connected. In one way or another.

“When we were foster parents, Karen and I went to the free clinic a few times,” Geoff Burns said. “Two of the moms we dealt with got treated there. Dr. Rouse does good work.”

Clare noticed that when Geoff spoke of foster parenting, the veins in his neck didn’t bulge out like they used to. Becoming a father-finally-had mellowed him. Of course, he was branching his practice out into criminal defense, so she supposed he hadn’t softened up all that much.

“My mother founded the clinic. That is, she donated the building and money to support it. She was a deeply Christian woman. The most charitable I’ve ever known.”

There was an expression on Norm Madsen’s face that made Clare think that he, perhaps, had a different view of Mrs. Marshall’s mother. “Mr. Madsen,” she said, “how do you fit into all this?”

“I was the late Mrs. Ketchem’s attorney. I handled the property transfers that established the clinic. I also drew up the trust documents.”

“Mother wanted to make sure the clinic would be able to keep running, but she also wanted to leave a legacy to me. We discussed it before she died. Up till now, there was never any need more compelling than the clinic’s. But”-she tossed up her hands-“that leak! We have to get the roof fixed and we have to do it now, before the entire north aisle becomes unusable and the rot spreads into the main roof.”

“Hear, hear,” Sterling Sumner said. “But I’m confident we could do the repairs with half the sum you named, Lacey. You keep the other for yourself.”

She shook her head. “No. I couldn’t. Besides, if I gave the whole amount, we might be able to avoid a capital campaign altogether.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Robert Corlew said.

“There are other reasons for running a capital campaign,” Geoff Burns said. “In addition to making repairs and building the endowment, it gives donors an investment in St. Alban’s. They have a stake in its future, a vested interest. It’s the difference between renting an apartment and buying your own house.”

“I happen to agree with Geoff,” Clare said, “but it’s a moot point. I don’t think, in good conscience, we can use the Ketchem Trust money when the clinic is struggling financially.”

“Says who?” Corlew tapped his nose. “They get a fat check from the town every year. Courtesy of us, the taxpayers. Plus, they do that annual fund-raiser. Believe me, you won’t be seeing sick people staggering around in the street.”

Fortunately, Terry McKellan spoke up before Clare had a chance to say something unpriestly. “Besides. Even if the trust is invested in high-yield dividends, it can’t be throwing off more than a few thousand a year.”

Mrs. Marshall nodded. “It’s usually about ten thousand.”

“So eight hundred a month. It must be a welcome addition to the other funding. But it’s not a make-or-break amount.” He turned to Clare. “I know you’d prefer to keep that money going to the clinic. I would, too. But let’s face it, we’re up against the wall. Even if we started the capital campaign tomorrow and every pledging unit at St. Alban’s gave, it would still be months before we actually saw any income. That roof could be down in the aisle by then.”

“There must be some other way.” She pushed back her chair and walked around the perimeter of the meeting room, past Gothic Revival bookcases, past diamond-paned windows, past small, thickly painted oils of biblical landscapes. “Look at all this. Look at what we have. There must be some way to raise fast cash besides taking away medical treatment from the working poor.”

Mrs. Marshall surprised her by rising, too. “But then we’d be robbing Peter to pay Paul, dear. You agreed, as did I, that preserving St. Alban’s unique history and beauty was worth the cost. I believe you described it as ‘big, honkingly expensive.’ ”

Despite herself, Clare’s lips twitched.

“Are you going to back out now that the price turns out to be more than you wanted to pay?”

Clare looked down at the intricate carpet. She thought she would have learned by thirty-five that saying yes to one thing meant saying no to something else.

“Before we all agree to this, I want to state my objections in the strongest terms.” Clare and Mrs. Marshall both turned to Norm Madsen. “It was Mrs. Ketchem’s intention that the money from the trust be used to support the clinic. Only when the trustee judges that the clinic no longer needs the funding is the principal to be disbursed. And you cannot convince me, Lacey, that you honestly think they no longer need that ten thousand a year.” He shook slightly from the force of his tone. “Your mother would not have wanted this.”

She sat down again. “Maybe not. But she left me to decide, Norm.”

Clare never would have imagined that news of her parish getting a $150,000 gift would depress her. She sat in a funk while Corlew, who had a 1:30 appointment, wrapped the meeting up and everyone shucked on coats, hats, gloves, and mufflers. She had enough presence of mind to make her good-byes, but she was still in a blue devil, as her grandmother would have called it, when she gathered up the papers to return to her office.

She was surprised to find Mr. Madsen lingering outside the meeting-room door.

“Thanks for giving it a try,” he said, sounding much more his usual even-handed self. “Not that it helped, but I appreciate the effort.”

“I feel like I did when I was a kid and found out we were moving near my grandparents. I was all excited, until I realized I was going to be leaving behind my friends. I guess this defines a mixed blessing.” She looked up at him. “I was surprised at how, um, passionately you felt on the question. You must be a big supporter of the clinic.”

“Not particularly, no.”

“Then why were you so vehement in defending its funding?”

“Jane Mairs Ketchem, that’s why. She’s rolling over in her grave right now, and it wouldn’t surprise me if she kicked her way out of the coffin and marched down here to defend her precious clinic.” He ran his hand over his thick white brush cut. “I’ll tell you something. She was the only woman who could ever scare me. And the fact that she’s dead doesn’t make me any less scared.”