Part 3 — The Organ Console
Kendra pointed to the front of the sanctuary, past the choir rail, to the old pipe organ that nobody had played since 2011.
“He hid it all inside the console, Ernestine. Behind the lower stop panel. I saw him carrying a gym bag in there on Wednesday nights.”
Three deacons walked up the aisle with a flashlight and a screwdriver. Brother Tobias, ninety years old, led them. He rapped on the dark wood with his knuckles and said, “Hollow, same as always.”
The panel came off in his hands. Behind it, on the dusty ledge where the pedal mechanism once ran, sat a blue gym bag with a broken zipper.
Kendra counted the contents on the front pew, in plain sight of the whole congregation. Bundles of twenties and fifties, rubber-banded. Every one of them was there.
Fifty thousand, two hundred sixty-five dollars. The roof money, the food-pantry envelope, and the choir robe fund, to the penny.
Lyle stood in the aisle, shaking. He said that his brother had been threatening to foreclose on his house, and he had taken the money to keep from losing it, and then could not bring himself to spend it.
“Every night I sat in my car outside this church,” he said, “and I could not make myself take it out of the building.”
I had mopped that floor for forty-one years, and the Lord had kept the money safe in the one place a thief could never quite carry it away from.
The deputy who arrived was a young man named Bergeron, and he took Lyles statement kindly. He told the congregation that the case would go to the district attorney, and that restitution, cooperation and an honest account would weigh heavily on what happened next.
Lyle resigned that same hour. He handed over the checkbook, the keys to the office and the gold tie clip. The church voted to appoint Kendra as treasurer, with two members of the congregation to sign alongside her.
The funds went into a new account that same week. A roofer from our own membership, Brother Marcus, gave the church his cost on the materials. Eleven men and women from the choir volunteered on three Saturdays to climb up and lay shingles.
Alma got a new Sunday hat. The robes arrived in plastic bags, and the pantry shelves were full by Thanksgiving.
On the first dry Sunday of spring, I carried the three coffee cans out to the dumpster in the back lot. I stood there a moment, looking up at the new roof, and hummed Blessed Assurance on my way back in.