Crime Scene – an essay by Kresha Richman Warnock

Crime Scene

My husband, Jim, and I turn into the parking lot of the small Episcopal church. Full retirement wasn’t my husband’s chosen gig, so a couple of years ago, he became vicar of this church in the city where we retired. Here we are, about to lead the Wednesday morning Bible Study, bickering about something in the drive over as old married couples tend to do. He walks across the street to pick up the mail from the grey, rectangular-domed mailbox, unintentionally making me wait outside to enter the blue-green parish hall. I don’t have a key.

Larry, a member of the congregation who does, pulls his white mini-van into the parking space in an uncharacteristically reckless, speedy fashion. He ignores me and charges across the parking lot, as fast as a fit, 80-year old can, to talk to the man in the van marked “Joe’s Electrical Service.” I pretend to be mellow, as I stand in the sunshine under the blossoming cherry that is long past its spring bloom and wait for someone to open the door. Jim got there eventually.

We walk into a crime scene. I love mystery novels, but I’ll alert you: there is no body, no smeared blood, no mysterious gunshot residue. There is a tall ladder set up at the entrance. We turn the corner, and it takes a minute for our eyes to register what has happened.

Clumps of black dirt are scattered all over the slightly yellowed, linoleum floor. Looking up, I realize that it came from the holes in the popcorn ceiling, made by the heels of clumsy boots walking on the bare flooring of the semi-attic. Bits of shingles, broken lathe have fallen through from the space where the thieves used that first ladder to climb up and steal all the copper wiring from the attic. There is now no power in the little building – no heat, no refrigeration, no point in plugging in the thirty-cup coffee urn that one faithful congregant fires up every Sunday so we can socialize at the round, folding tables after the service. 

Even in its heyday, our little church was the runt of the litter of Episcopal churches in the Pacific Northwest. Instead of a brick-and-mortar social hall attached to the sanctuary, we got a reused, prefabricated, World War II-era mess hall which had outlived its purpose at nearby Ft. Lewis. 

No one living can describe how it got here in 1951, a 100-foot by 600-foot building on the bed of a truck, trundling up the ten miles from the Fort. There was no interstate in those days, so the truck must have waded its way through city streets, cleared of all parked cars, up Pacific Highway South, barely making the corner at Ninety-Sixth Street. What machinery moved the structure off the truck onto the prepared foundation and settled it there on the property where it sits until this day?

Back in the sixties and seventies, there were children and families that worshipped in the church’s sanctuary, across the parking lot from this little building, and ran around on its linoleum floors after church. The kids grew up, found different faiths or no faith and have grandchildren of their own who run around somewhere else now. We are a skeleton church, silently moving forward as one by one our members become less mobile, less alert, die. There are ghosts in the parish hall.

My husband took over in the midst of Covid. When we were able to unZoom our services, we started building friendships, getting to know the worshippers, complete with their foibles, histories, traumas, and relationships. Aging can be an inward-looking process, but with Jim’s encouragement, we added a deacon whose special ministry is to the homeless. The city opened a secure homeless encampment for veterans a mile from the church, everyone got involved, and we started delivering home-cooked meals. 

Positive movement, but when we walked in on Wednesday, the place was trashed. 

All the cupboards were torn open, napkins, plastic plates, miscellany tossed on the floor. The thieves took the carton of Swiss Miss Cocoa but left the big tub of Folgers Coffee. They took all the big garbage bags and the dish towels.

They also tore up Vivian’s artful décor. She had covered each of the tables in the main room with bright yellow fall plastic tablecloths. Fabric leaves, in yellow and green and reds fluttered down the middle as a centerpiece on each, and golden potted chrysanthemums adorned the serving table. She had gussied the place up for Gregg’s funeral. A week before, in a reception for that event, his family and friends sat together in this hall for a late lunch of little egg salad or cream cheese and turkey finger sandwiches that the church ladies had made.

I never met Gregg because he had suffered from advanced dementia since we moved here. His tiny wife, Rhonda, had been caring for him alone since before Covid. The reception was organized by Vivian and the ladies. There was a service in the church, but Rhonda had chosen to say goodbye to her husband at graveside, where the clods fell, by herself. I hoped the dirt and shingles that fell on the décor of his funeral would be cleaned up before she came in the door of the parish hall again.

At least they didn’t get Vivian’s silver. Only the week before, the ladies had been cleaning out the pantry. On the very top shelf, ten feet up, someone discovered a box of silver-plate cups and a tea service, blackened with tarnish. “That’s from my Janie’s first wedding,” Vivian said. “I’d wondered what happened to them.” Janie is now sixty-five. Myself, I’ve researched selling the silver plate I inherited, and it’s not worth anything, but I’m glad the thieves didn’t get Vivian’s.

A week earlier, thieves had stolen a smaller portion of the copper wire. That wiring was in the crawl space under the building, so the destruction wasn’t visible, but that’s why the electrician was there that morning. He was a sturdy working man in his forties, dressed to be able to spend hours in the dingy crawl space and replace the initial missing wires.

“If you find these people, just let me know who they are,” he said. “I grew up around here. I remember this church from when I was a kid. I would drive by and see barbecues and families playing on the lawn. It wasn’t my church, but it was part of my community. People would never have attacked a church then. But just let me handle those guys.”

We opted, instead, to call the police, knowing their response would be supportive but futile. Police staffing is low; there is no way to trace this kind of crime; even if they’re caught, there is little likelihood that the miscreant will go to jail, and the bad guys certainly aren’t in the position to pay restitution. 

The next morning, we had to phone the police again.  At 7:30 my husband had received another call. The side door to the church building itself was wide open.  He jumped in the car and drove the twenty minutes to the parking lot. I sat at home, pretending to write, imagining the same disaster zone in this space we call “sacred,” the altar at the front covered with its floral green frontal, the stained-glass windows memorializing the lives of members who had died, the rows of pews where the Vivians and Gregs and Rhondas and Larrys had sat in responsive worship every Sunday since the high-peaked building was built in the 1960’s. But the invaders had only crow-barred the door and trashed the Vicar’s office. They’d snagged an old laptop. And emptied papers, pulled the sixty years of detritus out of the closet, which I’d been nagging Jim to clean out anyway. The sanctuary was unmarred; the power still on.

How do we respond, as members of a church, as people of faith, as caring humans? Maybe we just let the electrician deal with them. He seems like a pretty tough guy. On Sunday, Jim will tell us that the center of our faith is reconciliation; we will pray for the miscreants. “Love your neighbor.” “If a man asks for your cloak, give him your tunic also”. “Pray for those who despitefully use you.” We will do what we can to non-violently protect our property. New security cameras will be in place, more lighting, more fencing. Maybe the police will drive by once a night. 

I’m thankful I’m one of the very few that walked in on the destruction. I’ve only been here two years; the ghosts in the parish hall don’t talk to me.  I didn’t eat and drink and laugh at Janie’s first wedding, forty-five years ago. The Sunday before the parish hall was trashed, Vivian had stood next to me and told me about how, when Janie’s son, her grandson, died in a car crash, Janie sat on Vivian’s couch for almost five years sunk in a depression. Vivian had been afraid her daughter would never recover. I didn’t cry when she told me, just gently said, “I’m so sorry.” The bone-thin, ramrod straight eighty-five- year-old woman, who only hears you when her hearing aids are working, just said, “I know” and went on to show me pictures of her great grandchildren. 

The Boy Scout troop that meets in the building once a week came in Wednesday night and cleaned up the Parish Hall. Vivian and all the others, living and dead, who sat around the round tables gossiping and planning bazaars and mourning lives long gone will see only pictures of the devastation. Eventually, the wiring will be replaced, the lights turned back on, the holes in the ceiling patched.

The cops tell us this was most likely the work of junkies, looking for money for their next fix. I don’t hate the miscreants, but I would be lying if I said I have the ability to love them or even pity them right now. I don’t have the wisdom to solve the problems of meth and fentanyl that are dehumanizing our community. In my younger days, I might have been self-righteous enough to think there were easy answers to poverty and homelessness and mental illness and crime. 

We can’t give up on solving these problems, but, as I age, I am drained of anger, drained of contempt. Instead, I have a reservoir of sorrow that does extend to Vivian and Rhonda and Janie and the ghosts in the parish hall. It extends to the tired veterans who are moving from a life in the streets and spending a few months in the homeless encampment up the road.  Even if I don’t hate the criminals, the sinners, who tore up our building, the boundaries of that reservoir are not broad enough yet to let me feel any sorrow, let alone love, for them. I know I am disobeying the commandment to love your neighbor. I’m working on it.

Kresha Richman Warnock and her husband, an Episcopal priest,  retired to the Pacific Northwest right before the pandemic hit. Since then she has filled her life writing a memoir and various essays. She has been published in The Brevity Blog, Persimmon Tree, Moss Piglet, Jewish Women of Words, Fahmiddan, Instant Noodles, and the anthologies Pure Slush and American Writer’s Review 2022. For a complete list of her works, please visit her website, http://www. https://kresharwarnock.com/.