The Boy in the Church Parking Lot

Deputy Hank Moser did not put a hand on his belt.

That is the first thing I noticed from the office window, with the phone still warm in my hand. He got out of the county car, settled his hat, and walked across our parking lot the way a man walks out to check a mailbox. He went straight to the old tan sedan in the back corner by the hedge apple trees, laid one hand flat on the roof, and knocked on the glass with two knuckles.

I had the window cracked. I had cracked it on purpose, so I could hear.

“Morning, Eli,” he said.

I want to tell this the way it happened, and that means telling what I did first.

My name is Sandy. I was sixty-one years old that October, and I had been the secretary at our Methodist church on the east edge of McPherson, Kansas, for nineteen years. I typed the bulletin. I kept the prayer list. I knew which of our widows wanted a call and which wanted to be left alone, and I knew where every key in that building hung.

The church sits a quarter mile past the city limits sign, with a milo field on two sides. Most mornings I pulled in around half past eight. That week I was coming in before seven. We had a funeral on Thursday for a man who had been a member for sixty years, Pastor Ray was back and forth to Wichita with the family, and there were two hundred bulletins to fold and a dinner to line up.

Monday morning at twenty till seven there was a car in the back corner of the lot.

It was a Buick, tan, older than some of our youth group, with a cracked taillight and a rust line along the rocker panel. It sat nosed up to the hedge row as far from the road as a car could get. The windows were fogged gray from the inside.

I sat in my own car with the engine running and looked at it.

Then somebody moved in the front seat. A shape sat up. A hand wiped a circle in the fog, and I saw a face. Young. A boy’s face, or a young man’s. I could not tell which from sixty yards.

I went in the side door and locked it behind me. By the time I had the lights on and the coffee started, the car was gone.

Tuesday it was there again. Same corner. Same fog on the glass.

That morning I did one halfway decent thing, and I did not finish it. I filled the office thermos with coffee to carry out to him. I got as far as the kitchen door with my hand on the push bar. Then I pictured myself alone at that car window with nobody in shouting distance, and I turned around, and I locked the door, and I poured the coffee down the sink.

I told my husband about it that night over supper. Glenn worked thirty-four years at the refinery before he retired, and he is not a man who scares easy or talks much.

“How old?” he said.

“I couldn’t tell. Young.”

“By himself?”

“I think so.”

He set his fork down. “Don’t you go out there by yourself, Sandy. You’re alone in that building till Ray gets in. If he’s there again, call somebody.”

Glenn was not being hard. Two summers before, somebody had cut the copper lines off both of our air conditioning units in the night. Every one of us on staff had been told the same thing by the trustees. See something, call it in.