And she was just about to put her lips to the cool drink when out of the blue, suddenly something whizzed past her field of vision, and slapped that glass right out of her hands! The glass crashed to the flagged floor and broke into a thousand pieces, but what was worse: her martini was gone!
“Hey!” she said, looking around to see what was going on. Was it a plane, was it a bird, was it Superman? But before she could get her bearings, the same exact phenomenon happened again, only this time with Scarlett’s equally tasty drink!
Zoom! Slam! Crash!
“What the…” Scarlett cried, greatly dismayed as only a person craving a cooling shot of the good stuff can get when seeing their glass snatched away.
And that’s when Vesta saw it: it was Harriet, cool as dammit and licking her paw—presumably the same paw she’d used to slam those glasses out of Vesta and Scarlett’s hands!
“What do you think you’re doing!” Vesta cried. “That was my drink!”
“And mine!” Scarlett added.
“For your information, I’m your new sponsor,” said Harriet, giving them both a cold look from beneath her lowered lashes. “And this sponsor means business. From now on I’m watching you two like a hawk. And if I see you touch so much as a single drop of alcohol, I’m going to do some serious damage.” And to show them she wasn’t fooling around, she held up that fateful paw and slash! Unsheathed a series of very sharp-looking lethal claws!
Yikes! thought Vesta.
Christ! thought Scarlett.
Both ladies gulped, then meekly nodded when Harriet asked if they were going to be good from now on. Because if not… And she drew her claw across her throat in a sign of what was to come if they didn’t adhere to the rules of the club!
The moment Harriet had left—though Vesta was convinced she was keeping an eye on them from some hidden vantage point—Scarlett said, “I knew this club was bad news! I should never have joined up!”
“It’s not a club but a…” But then she sighed. Oh, what was the point?
[Êàðòèíêà: img_4]
Francis Reilly wasn’t feeling very well. The last few days were more or less a blur. He still remembered loading a couple of boxes of sacramental wine into the trunk of his car, and unloading them at that old shack in the woods a parishioner had once drawn his attention to, but from that point onward things became a little hazy. He seemed to remember standing in the shower with Tex Poole at some point, but that must have been a nightmare, for who in their right mind would want to take a shower with Tex Poole? Except for the man’s wife, maybe.
And then of course Vesta had dragged him to one of those AA meetings. The indignation of the thing was what hurt him the most. Once upon a timehe’d been the one sending people to those meetings! In fact he’d personally hosted many a meeting himself! And now there he sat, a sad drunk, having to listen to other sad drunks trying to get their lives back on track. And even though he’d tried to hide in the back, he just knew people had seen him and would whisper—and soon the story would go around Hampton Cove that Father Francis Reilly was an alcoholic!
Alcoholics Anonymous, my ass, he thought. There wasn’t anything anonymous about being an alcoholic in a town as small as this one, that was for darn sure.
And so he sat in his vestry, trying to work out his Sunday sermon, and feeling very, very thirsty all of a sudden. If only he could have a nice stiff one, he’d feel much better. The words would simply flow onto the page, not like now when it felt as if he had to drag them kicking and screaming from the depths of his immortal soul. Someone—he suspected Vesta, to be honest—had disappeared the few bottles he’d tucked away in the vestry cupboard. The first thing he’d done upon his return was look, and they were no longer there. But what Vesta didn’t know—what nobody knew—was that he kept another bottle hidden in a secret compartment underneath the altar—in case of emergencies.
So he now snuck out of his vestry and into the church proper, scanned the church pews to make sure none of his regulars were seated there, and when he had convinced himself that he was alone, quickly crossed the few steps to the altar, and lifted the cloth that covered the holy shrine. The bottle was still there, all right, exactly where he had left it.
A hot flush mantled his cheeks when he palmed it, and for some reason he discovered that he was hiding the bottle from sight. He glanced over his shoulder, and was startled to discover that Christ on the cross was staring straight at him.
“Please forgive me, Lord,” he muttered. “But I need this more than you do right now.” And before he could change his mind, he unscrewed the cap, and put the bottle to his lips, preparatory to allowing the divine nectar to flow into his mouth. And just as he was about to close his eyes, suddenly there was a sort of loud growling sound, and a whizzing motion that seemed to come out of nowhere, and before he knew what was happening, the bottle was slammed from his hands!