Theresa walked with a determined stride and the church came into view just past the Fidalgo Island Theater Ensemble’s headquarters. FITE’s theater was a reclaimed industrial building, a two-story thing in the front with square structures placed upon rectangles, almost three stories in the rear where the stage had been constructed fifty years in the past. The marquee was bare and unlit, and the building had no windows, as if purposefully blinded. If Theresa thought about it more, she’d say the façade didn’t welcome patrons, even though the front was fancied up with a roofline trim, and more town murals of famous residents of the past, a girl skipping, pigtails flying up, a crab boat with fishermen hauling in the catch of the day. This one made Theresa stop a moment before crossing the sidewalk. The mural showed two men lifting something heavy, unseen, beneath the waters of Puget Sound, and Theresa imagined the water spraying as an evil black shape breached the surface to drown the two men, take them straight to the bottom. Was it her imagination? Did the water surrounding the painted mural stir, the acrylic froth bubble? Theresa hurried along holding her breath until the theater was behind her. The church stood on neighboring ground, and Theresa shuddered. There was something more happening in this town. Theresa jumped to conclusions and scolded herself. She saw what she saw and she’d make the priest believe it, she’d seek his counsel, and he’d share holy wisdom.

The front door to the church was always unlocked and Theresa pushed into the foyer. It wasn’t a fancy church, but the rich wood entryway made Theresa think many a blessing was spent on creating a warm and welcoming house of worship. The smell of lemon-scented cleaner grew as she walked into the back of the large hall, pews in two and two and growing until the church filled with enough room for hundreds. Sunday service was full but nowhere close to standing room only. Theresa thought more’s the pity: if only church could be electrified, turned into a multi-colored game, automated with tablets, and far from the ancient tablets of Moses. Today’s generation expected miracles only when stricken by illness, pain, grief, inconsolable despair, and the Lord worked in mysterious ways. People wrote songs about this still. Theresa preferred the hymns of old.

The church was empty. Father Mitchum Kelly was probably invited to an upright family’s Thanksgiving table, smiling his handsome smile, being polite, funny, charismatic. Theresa liked Father Kelly. She didn’t hold his youthful vigor against him, but her husband couldn’t stomach his company. Told her Father Kelly should’ve stuck with a different kind of stage, a less lofty pulpit. Her husband thought Father Kelly was a show-boater, a narcissist (yes, he preened a bit too much up there, but that was preferable to dirge-like sermons as dry as toast), loved to hear himself speak, and there were rumors he’d gone to Hollywood after majoring in drama and theology at a college in Oregon, and that the tough life of a young starlet in the making had become too difficult—that penniless, difficult times in his L.A. past stayed at the rumor stage. More schooling. Seminary. Years. Father Kelly must be almost thirty. Handsome. Theresa became stuck on this word. Attendance at the church had grown, with the old priest set out to pasture and forgotten by most in a few short months.

Theresa moved across the atrium to the far left wall facing the front theater-level mount. The wall’s crème paint took in the flickering light of dozens of votive candles. She quickly lit a candle—to the dead, the entire town, to herself and her husband—and kneeled in prayer, her words a mumbled mess, rapid-fire pleas to God.

The church felt chilly, and the lighting in the space dim with only two golden and six silver chalices reflecting flickering candlelight. Spaced along the walls, antique bronze candlesticks, unlit, added to the gloom within this house of the Lord.

She moved to the alley splitting the pews in the center and approached the front row to sit and wait for Father Kelly. Cupboards behind the altar held communion vessels. Theresa remembered that this cupboard had an official name—the aumbry—used to keep the reserved sacrament. In her amped paranoid state, she wondered what was hiding there and actually stood up and moved to a seat four pews back from the front.

The sound of a door opening reverberated throughout the empty church.

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“Oh my blessed god, forgive me, forgive me forgive me. They are gone. I saw all of them, all but one.”

Theresa uttered this and if anyone had heard her they would’ve wondered at the strangeness, a woman walking alone on Thanksgiving evening, darkness coming in, spouting gibberish. The look in her eye, the set expression, grim, questioning, would’ve had most avoiding her path.

She did have a purpose. Someone would be there. The new priest, almost too youthful, Theresa thought, for her old-world manner. And she was from a different world, a different country. Croatia, where her roots ran deep, held its secrets. No one in her adopted country had ever travelled there and this always made her feel sad. She couldn’t say anything to anyone she met about Croatia without a hint of grim nostalgia as if it was a place she’d escaped from. Far from the truth, really, because she’d once been a pampered child with parents who wanted the best for her, gave everything for her future dreams. Now look at her. A husband so ill he couldn’t leave the bed for more than a few moments each day, the bills piling up, along with other more earthly things, laundry, garbage, the grass growing too high in summer, a neighbor kind enough to take over that chore, others from the church visiting and dropping off casseroles, cookies, food that her husband no longer had a taste for, his sense of spice deadened, all flavors squeezed to blandness. Theresa took the nanny position over a year ago, and she was good at it, didn’t impose her will on the two children (even when they needed a heavier hand, a smack even, not a hard one, simply to startle them into making well-mannered choices—that Fergus—and Theresa shuddered remembering his insolent face, his snake-like disposition—made Theresa feel lucky she only had Parker and Chelsea to make lunches for, take to Washington Park’s playground, wash clothes for) more than a sour verbal reprimand when the kids were really acting up. Parker was a bit too self-contained, studied the world like a scientist, and acted like he was already clouds and stars above Theresa’s age in intelligence. Chelsea, the sweet pea, the laughing girl, made Theresa grimace. She had grown fond of the girl and now could only conjure up the last image she saw of her eating turkey and stuffing at the kids’ table. All black as night, coals after fire, a hardening corpse, and a tear formed in her left eye.

The priest would help her. He would know what to do. This was something she could help him understand. She’d never seen something like this before. The yellowing butterfly escaping and searching and landing on the young woman’s palm across the table from her. She was a witness. And the others, everyone but this young woman turned to black, obsidian eyes crossed with molten red streaks—the young woman, Peggy, in white, blinding, and burning, browning at the edges, her clothing about to be engulfed by flame. This vision was an instant click in her head. She remembered pushing away from the table and little else.

She’d told her employer, a nice lady, to send her a check and even this was done with little thought, still trying to be kind. When she watched Ivy’s mouth open to speak, her black teeth now stumps, she had to look away, and she escaped into the clearing day, a frosty chill, an open blue sky turning to dusk.

In the silence of evening on Fidalgo Island no one else roamed the streets, the rural roads splitting the island into quadrants, Mt. Erie poking up to the sky and taking over the southern part of the natural wilderness and farmland area. She glanced up at the mount and shuddered.

Was someone watching her? From way up high?

Theresa felt something, someone, an intuitive bump at the back of her subconscious making itself known, akin to the instant vision of doom around the Belloon table. She heard herself say once more, “You’re all dead.”

With delicate skill, Roger Compish pulled the wishbone out of the wreck of the turkey and set it on the windowsill to dry out. He’d wanted to use his theatrical knife to cut this superstitious bone out, but resisted. The knife was his gift. The temptation to share it with Sally and Morton remained. Sally would’ve laughed if he’d said something silly and acted like he was attacking the fine bird she’d brought to her table. Her two kids would’ve been afraid though and that’s what kept him from his worst instinct to always play the jester. This was the old Roger.

One of Roger’s first questions of the holiday: “Did you both finish reading the play?”

“It’s a marvel,” Morton said.

“I can’t believe the subtext, what’s going on behind the scenes is every bit as important as what’s playing out front and center. Why was this play ever forgotten?”

“I’ll never understand that,” said Roger, “but at least our company has the chance to resurrect it.”

“There are several parts I want to audition for. I imagine whoever is hired to direct the play—sorry Roger. You deserve a shot—will be captivated by Denisov and Leonora and won’t even consider thinking outside the box for the queen’s role.”

“You’d make a complex queen,” Morton said.

Roger, ever since sitting down with Morton, Sally, and her two kids, Miles and Carter, saying a short grace and then demolishing the feast on the table, including Roger’s sausage stuffing, had observed something odd between his two friends. They were up to something. Morton deferred his harsher opinions about today’s politics, the proposed property tax hike that would hit him hard. Roger thought: Shouldn’t have bought then, sucker. (I’m happy to be a renter with a kind landlord who takes off some of my rent because of killer handyman skills. Next up? Cleaning out a chimney in another rental home and sealing a roof where some shingles had blown off in the last wind storm.)

Carter and Miles treated Morton with childlike obliviousness though, which made Roger second-guess his intuition. If his good buddy Morton was seeing Sally for more than simple play rehearsals, Roger would know it, and they’d tell him. Complete blankness prevailed, and he continued to observe.

*

Carole had thought about the seating arrangement for more time than she would ever admit. She began with Gabby. Out of all the dinner guests, she could do without the chatty Cathy’s baby-girl gibberish (the drunker Gabby became the higher-pitched and more childlike her blather). She can have the place of honor to the right of her husband, who could stare at Gabby’s pulchritudinous chest all evening and forgive her inane conversational skills. Yes, Carole was jealous of Gabby’s beauty, her youthful vigor and figure, and this secret she would take to her grave, among many other secrets—she loathed jealousy in all forms. In the theater, it was easy to spot, a want, a need, a jealousy forcing the less skilled to act in unforeseen ways.

Since she believed in splitting up couples for a more harmonious table, she placed Mack on her husband’s left. He could stare at Gabby too, and this would make him lick his lips with increasing frequency, this already one of his physical tics. Peggy next to Mack, someone who could handle Mack’s loutish sense of humor, and Ivy next to Peggy and on Carole’s right. To her left Gabby’s almost-monkishly-silent husband, Cary could compliment her cooking fifteen times and hush his children at the nearby kids’ table with a little more charm, less bluster. Carole’s side of the table would be calmer, less energized, a place where she could discuss art, the theater--The Queen’s Idle Fancy—yes, that would definitely be on the night’s topic list, and she vowed to divert attention from it as much as possible; talk of the play would lead to other concerns if she thought about it too much. It had already changed so much within her own household. Lastly, between Cary and Gabby, would be the nanny, Theresa, someone who had immediately given her the shivers just thinking about past Sunday-School mornings with sadistic unforgiving Sister Beatrice. Theresa’s downturned face, frown lines striking, would give Carole a fright in future dreams just for the resemblance.