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Deadly Murmurs: A Novel
Deadly Murmurs: A Novel
Deadly Murmurs: A Novel
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Deadly Murmurs: A Novel

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Lena Johansson listens well. In her role as Director of Outreach at View Ridge Church in Seattle, Lena hears things and makes connections. After the killing of an abortion nurse, Lena’s ability to listen puts her right in the middle of the murder investigation.

Set amidst the beautiful scenery of Seattle and Puget Sound, Deadly Murmurs draws the reader into the life of a congregation in the mid 1990s with the undercurrents and history that all congregations have, but in this case with deadly impact. Lena is tested mentally and physically as the truth about the murder becomes clear to her.

Deadly Murmurs is a sequel to Dead Sea: A Novel. One reviewer wrote about Dead Sea: “The masterful part of the book is the way in which Baab weaves in human emotion and reaction to a host of situations including conflict, confidentiality, love, and jealously.” Another reviewer said, “The characters were compelling, the mystery was a page-turner,” and another wrote, “The author’s descriptions of Israel throughout the story put vivid pictures in my mind as I read.” Lynne Baab brings these same skills to a Seattle location in Deadly Murmurs.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherLynne Baab
Release dateFeb 14, 2014
ISBN9781310192135
Deadly Murmurs: A Novel

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    Book preview

    Deadly Murmurs - Lynne Baab

    Deadly Murmurs: A Novel

    by Lynne Baab

    Smashwords Edition

    Copyright 2014 Lynne Baab

    Smashwords Edition, License Notes

    This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author

    Http://www.lynnebaab.com.

    Cover design: Copyright 2012 Jonathan Baab

    This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

    TABLE OF CONTENTS

    Deadly Murmurs

    Epilogue

    Letter from the author

    Questions for discussion, pondering or journaling

    Books by Lynne Baab

    Deadly Murmurs

    CHAPTER 1

    Seattle, 1995

    People tell me things. That’s why I decided to work in a church.

    When I told my two older brothers my career choice, they laughed hysterically. Mick and Adam remember all too vividly my childhood behavior in church, a constant series of attempts to alleviate boredom. With my older brothers as eager witnesses and sometimes cohorts-in-crime, and with my younger brother, Ian, as a full partner, I pilfered dimes from the collection plate and slithered under pews looking for bubble gum other kids had parked there. I chewed the promising blobs and then returned them to the underside of the pews. Most Sundays I got a lecture from someone, my father, a Sunday school teacher, sometimes even the minister. I hated causing trouble and I hated being in trouble, but I simply couldn’t sit still.

    I feigned sickness far more frequently on Sundays than any other day. When I became a teenager, I begged and pleaded to be allowed to skip church.

    Yet, beginning with my pre-school days, I always had a deep, passionate, and extremely helpful faith in God, while deploring what I called church-ianity. The prissy hats and ridiculous gloves worn by some older women. The organ music and choir in stupid robes. The artificially nice voices. The unbelievably tedious sermons and Sunday school classes, two settings where I was expected to sit still. Torture.

    I figured God is most real in my everyday life. So I prayed on my bicycle and during sailboat races. I worshipped God when I body-surfed on frigid waves at Washington State beaches. My heart was filled with thanks when I swam in remote lakes nestled at the base of towering mountains. And I did my best to love the people around me.

    *****

    On that blustery April afternoon, Carla Slater was telling me things. Not the things I expected to hear. That morning I realized I’d left my Bible and some papers in the sanctuary – the worship space in the church building – so I ran across to get them. They weren’t on the side pew where I expected to find them. By the time I ran them to earth on a table in the back, the cold of the unheated building had begun to seep into my bones. When I opened the door to return to my office, the wind tore into my hair, and I could hear the rattle of the palm leaves. Spring was late this year. Pulling my sweater closer around me, I cursed the California-obsessed architect who had designed the church in three unconnected wings around a central courtyard.

    At the base of the small palm trees that circled the courtyard, daffodils bobbed in the blasts of wind. Palms and daffodils look like a tasteless marriage of the tropics and Holland. Do daffodils and palm trees grow together in California? I have no idea, but I think they look ridiculous in Seattle.

    I saw Carla getting out of her silver Subaru station wagon in the parking lot. She waved at me, then motioned for me to join her.

    She was sensibly dressed in jeans and fur lined boots that I envied at that moment. Carla has the kind of coloring that reminds me of summer days in the country: golden hair like fields of ripe wheat and the rosy, rounded face of a farm child who’s been running all day. As I approached her, I noticed pale cheeks and new lines around her mouth and eyes. Her light blue coat, exactly the color of her eyes, should have been flattering but instead made her look washed-out. Maybe she’s sensitive to cold, I thought.

    Lena, could I talk to you? Do you have time? she asked as I got closer. I was planning to do some work on the wedding decorations, but I’d rather talk with you first.

    Sure. I was going to spend the next hour making some phone calls, but they can wait.

    She took a couple of steps towards me, then stopped. Her body seemed stiff and awkward. She said, You know Robin Jaysen is getting married this Saturday. Did you know that Elaine and I have spent a lot of time helping our mother with the decorations? Robin’s family has been friends with our family ever since Robin, Eileen and I were babies. The decorations have been a big hassle. The florist went bankrupt last week, after ordering ribbons in two different colors of green. Can you imagine? Teal green and forest green. They look horrible together. We had already paid the deposit for the flowers, too.

    She was talking in a flat voice, as if she were delivering a speech she’d rehearsed in order to sound normal. But there was nothing normal about the blankness in her face and her dead tone.

    I said gently, Your mother told me a little about it. Let’s go inside, out of the cold. Can I get you some coffee?

    She didn’t answer. I opened the door to the office wing and felt the warm air engulf me. Lovely.

    You wait here. I’ll get us both coffee. OK? I looked at her, and she nodded.

    Felicia Pope, our efficient secretary, nodded to me while she continued a phone conversation. I filled two mugs with the Starbucks coffee Felicia loved and kept brewed for us. Does Carla take sugar or cream, I wondered. I didn’t want to bother her in her preoccupation, so I grabbed the mugs and joined her in the hall.

    When View Ridge Church interviewed me three years earlier, the personnel committee gave me a tour of the building and showed me where my office would be. When I walked into my prospective office, I knew instantly that I would work at View Ridge. Later I wondered whether that assurance came from God, giving me the confidence I so badly needed, or whether it came from my own desire to work in an office with a beautiful view. That flash of certainty helped me get through the intimidating interview process.

    My office is in back of the wing, a long way from the coffee pot, mail slots, computer printer, and photocopy machine that live in the front office. But only the back side of the wing has an unobstructed view of Lake Washington, with the endlessly-changing Cascade Mountains and Mount Rainier in the background. The architect I so often curse did me one huge favor: an entire wall of my office is glass.

    That view has soothed my spirit many times. I watch the snow coming and going on the Cascade Mountains with the passing of the seasons. I watch the play of light on Mount Rainier, back lit in the winter sunrise and rosy pink in the summer sunset. And so many faces of nature are reflected in the surface of the lake: dark and brooding, choppy and stormy, sparkling with sun and wind, or calm and peaceful. The variety of moods God creates in the physical world make me more able to accept my own varied emotions, which often seem too intense.

    In addition, the tumultuous weather I can see from my window helps me welcome the amazing diversity of emotions people bring into my office. As we walked toward the back of the office wing, I tried to prepare myself to be a good listener to Carla and to be receptive to whatever storms she was experiencing.

    I gave Carla the armchair with the best view of the lake, its surface a leaden gray today. The wind had whipped the water into whitecaps. Kirkland, on the other side of Lake Washington, looked dismal under the heavy gray skies. The foothills of the Cascades, still powdered with snow, were barely visible under the rapidly shifting cloud cover. Not the best day to enjoy the view from my office, but it didn’t seem to matter to Carla. She was clearly in no mood for scenery.

    After I hung her coat on a hook in the small closet, I sat beside her in the other armchair, waiting for her to speak. She stared blankly at my bookshelves, her face still pale. After a minute or two had passed, I asked her what was on her mind.

    I knew her. She spoke so softly I couldn’t be sure I’d heard.

    What did you say, Carla?

    She spoke a fraction louder. I knew her.

    Who?

    The abortion nurse who was killed at the pro-life rally. Kris Potter. I knew her.

    The warmth of the office was making no impact on her pale, drawn face. Now I knew why. A tremor — maybe even a full-fledged earthquake — had shaken the foundations of her life.

    She went on, talking slowly, her voice dull. I knew her in college. Up at Western in Bellingham. We weren’t close friends, but we lived in the same dorm for two years, maybe three. She was always so full of life, laughing, joking, energetic. She wasn’t super good-looking, but she gave the effect of being pretty, if you know what I mean. She had a lot of dates, and I can remember her laughing in the lobby of the dorm, saying good night to one guy or another. I can’t believe she’s dead.

    Her voice became stronger. She didn’t deserve to die.

    I nodded. Tears began to roll down her cheeks, and I handed her the box of pale blue tissues from my desk.

    *****

    Only three days earlier, I’d been sitting in the same chair, handing the same box of tissues to Carla’s mother, Alma. She had followed me to my office after a Church Women’s planning meeting because she wanted to borrow a catalog of Bible study guides. While we got coffee in the front office, she told me the tale of the bankrupt florist and the mismatched ribbons.

    After we got settled in the comfortable overstuffed armchairs in my office, Alma fell silent, alternately sipping her coffee and cupping her hands around the cup as if to get warm. I watched her with fondness, noticing her silvery hair and grayish blue eyes behind glasses. The wrinkles in her face reflect her tendency to laugh often.

    Alma was my earliest ally when I started working at the church, giving hugs and encouragement after those first, nerve-wracking contemporary worship services. Her affirming, supportive comments lasted long after my desperate need for them subsided, but I appreciated the good will that lay behind them. Serene and smiling, she could usually be found at church gatherings talking to someone in pain or giving a hug to a scared child. But during the Church Women’s planning meeting we just left, I had noticed she seemed tense and irritable.

    As usual, I jumped right in. Alma, you seemed unusually upset during the meeting. These wedding decorations sound like a big hassle. But is there something else getting you down?

    Her forehead wrinkled, and she bit her lower lip. How do you always seem to know these things? . . . Yes. My girls . . . Eileen has joined one of those radical pro-choice groups and spent all last week — while we’ve been working on the wedding decorations — throwing it in Carla’s face. They were both impossible, bickering every time I turned around. . . . You remember Carla is active in the pro-life movement?

    I nodded. Carla didn’t come to church often with her parents because she and her husband and children attended a different church. But on two occasions when she visited View Ridge Church, she had told me in great detail about the rallies she participated in.

    Alma went on. Carla has never been tactful about her convictions. You know, I’m sympathetic to her viewpoint on abortion. In my day, if you got pregnant, you had to bear the consequences. I love babies, and I simply can’t imagine ending a pregnancy. But I figure people are entitled to their opinion. . . . Carla seems to think she’s got to convince everybody she’s right and they’re wrong. I can’t figure out why she’s so dogmatic. She was the cutest child, all blond hair and sweetness, always willing to help around the house. She liked to take care of wounded birds and babysit for all the neighbor kids. I thought she’d be a nurse when she grew up. I don’t know what’s gotten into her.

    I could see a parallel between love for wounded birds and a concern to end abortion, but I could also see that Carla’s crusading spirit would be tiresome in a family. Engaging in debate about abortion wearies me to the bone, and I wondered if this moment with Alma was going to precipitate me into that tiresome place. But Alma had been such a support to me. I knew I had to listen to her. I knew I needed be willing to engage with whatever she cared about. Deep inside I tried to find strength for the moment, and I pictured Eileen and Carla in my mind.

    Alma’s girls were about a decade older than I was. I couldn’t imagine two sisters more different. Eileen, a Seattle city administrator with degrees in law and business, was tall, slender and dark like her father. I knew she had turned 40 the previous year because Alma had told me about the birthday party Eileen had thrown for herself at a waterfront restaurant. In the half-dozen times I’d spoken with Eileen, I received an impression of tremendous energy and intelligence, carefully harnessed to achieve specific goals. Unmarried, she usually turned up at Christmas and Easter services with various attractive and powerful-looking men. I usually felt gauche and young around her.

    Carla, the younger of the two, had a rounded build along with her summery coloring. She must have married in her early twenties, because her three children ranged in age from about ten to sixteen. I enjoyed her husband, George, very much. For some reason, he often sought me out when he, Carla and the children visited View Ridge Church. He and I discussed current events and Seattle politics. I found his conversation thought-provoking and interesting.

    I had never really connected with Carla. Had I tried? Not very much. But since she and George attended another church, and visited View Ridge only for special occasions, it seemed natural to me that I wouldn’t know her very well.

    Alma was still talking. That pro-life group — Washington For Life, that’s the one Carla belongs to — they say they’re working behind the scenes, in peaceful ways, but I think they’ve gotten more radical in recent years. Certainly their publicity has gotten more aggressive. And the killing last Saturday! Unbelievable. Of course that may not be their fault. I haven’t talked to Carla since then, and I don’t want to. . . . Anyway, in recent months Carla has become more involved. I hear one point of view from Carla, then I follow their doings in the press.

    I followed their doings in the press, too, because I’d heard Carla mention the name. Like everyone else in Seattle, I’d been shocked to the core when a nurse who worked at an abortion clinic was killed at a rally the previous weekend. The rally

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