‘Surely the gunmen wouldn’t be wedding guests,’ Dylan said.
‘No… I think… no….’
She took a few steps toward the back of the unoccupied pews in the last row, her interest rising from the assembled guests to the sanctuary beyond the distant chancel railing.
An arc of columns separated the nave from the sanctuary and also supported a series of transverse arches. Beyond the columns lay the choir enclosure and the high altar, with pyx and tabernacle, behind which towered a monumental downlighted crucifix.
Moving to Jilly’s side, Dylan said, ‘Maybe they’ll come in after the wedding begins, come in shooting.’
‘No,’ she disagreed. ‘They’re here already.’
Her words were ice to the back of his neck.
She turned slowly, searching, searching.
At the pipe organ in the sanctuary, the organist struck the first notes of the welcoming hymn.
Evidently, workmen involved in the restoration of the painted plaster frieze had left windows or doors open, thereby admitting some temporary tenants to high apartments. Frightened from roosts in the ribs of the vaults and from carved-marble perches on the ornate capitals of the columns, doves swooped down into the nave, not the multitudes that Jilly had foreseen, but eight or ten, a dozen at most, arising from different points overhead but joining at once into a flock this side of the chancel railing.
The wedding guests exclaimed at this white-winged spectacle, as though it must be a planned performance preceding the nuptials, and from several delighted children arose a singular silvery laughter.
‘It’s starting,’ Jilly declared, and a sculpting terror wrought her blood-streaked face.
In gyres the flock flew through the church, from bride’s family to groom’s to bride’s again, progressing toward the back of the nave even as they explored both sides of it.
A quick-witted usher raced down the aisle to the back of the nave, under the scaffolding, through the open doors into the narthex, no doubt intending to prop open a pair of entry doors to provide the winged intruders with an unobstructed exit.
As though synchronized to the hymn, the birds soared, dived, and swooped in their blessing circles from the chancel to the rear of the nave. Drawn toward the draft caused by the open door, charmed toward a glimpse of sunlight not filtered through stained glass, they went where the usher had induced them, out and away, leaving only a few luminous white feathers adrift in the air.
At first transfixed by a feather rising on a thermal current, Jilly’s gaze abruptly flew to the scaffolding in the aisle on the west side of the nave, then to the scaffolding in the east aisle. ‘Up there.’
The apex of each arched window lay about twenty feet above the church floor. The top of the scaffolding thrust two feet higher, to service the three-foot-tall band of carved and painted plaster that began at approximately the twenty-four-foot mark.
That work platform, where on weekdays craftsmen and artisans conducted restoration, was perhaps five feet wide, nearly as wide as the aisle below it, constructed of sheets of plywood secured to the horizontal ribs of pipe that formed the scaffold cap. The height, combined with the gloom that prevailed in the vaulted upper reaches of the church, where the work lights were not aglow, prevented them from seeing who lurked in those cloistered elevations.
The back wall of the nave lacked windows; however, the frieze continued there, as did the scaffolding. Ten feet away, just to the right of Shepherd, a ladder was built into the scaffold: rungs of pipe coated with fine-grooved rubber.
Dylan went to the ladder, touched a rung above his head, and felt at once, like a scorpion sting, the psychic spoor of evil men.
Having hurried with him to the ladder, Jilly must have seen a dire shift in his expression, in his eyes, for she said, ‘Oh, God, what?’
‘Three men,’ he told her, taking his hand off the ladder rung, repeatedly flexing and clenching it to work out the dark energy that had leeched into him. ‘Bigots. Haters. They want to kill the entire wedding party, the priest, as many of the guests as they can get.’
Jilly turned toward the front of the church. ‘Dylan!’