Free Weeping Angel by Stef Ann Holm

Mays?” Pap asked Frank as they walked the boardwalk on Divine Street carrying their tackle, poles, revolvers, and a gunnysack of empty food cans and beer bottles.
    â€œI brought them.”
    â€œI wonder who thought to name trout flies Ethel May.”
    Frank hiked his left shoulder to more firmly secure the strap of his creel basket. “I suppose somebody who thought Ethel May looked like a trout fly.”
    â€œYeah . . . I reckon.”
    They turned right at Dodge Street and went past the church just as the morning service let out. Frank never saw more suits in one place than Sundays at eleven o’clock. With their souls saved from sinful annihilation for another six days, the congregation milled underneath the shade of maple and cottonwood trees shaking hands as if they’d never met before. They talked in voices loud enough for Frank to hear bits of their conversations as they discussed the Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog items, recipes, and making plans for Sunday suppers. But as soon as he and Pap were upon them, octaves lowered to whispers.
    Frank was fairly certain he became a more pressing topic than the price of dress goods or the Farmer’s Almanac. He wouldn’t have minded so much if the men didn’t act differently when they weren’t under the preacher’s thumb. They had no problem bellying up to the bar with a congenial how-do-you-do during the week; and it seemed to Frank more than a little hypocritical that they would view him in a less favorable light on the seventh day.
    Thorpe must have spread the covenant of darkness on them real thick this morning.
    Striding by sporting an expression of what he hoped to be measurable affability, and with an obligatory nod now and then, Frank caught a glimpse of duck wings through a sea of millinery trimmings. He kept his gaze directed on the feathered ornamentation, and as soon as the wearer separated from the churchgoers, he caught sight of Amelia beneath the notable hat. She’d efficiently pinned her shiny brown hair in a sortof springlike twist at the nape of her slender neck. Had he not seen the strands of hair tease her brow the day she’d played the piano in his saloon, he would have assumed her coiffure never rumpled; had he not listened to her feminine and breezy laughter after she finished her musical piece, he would have assumed she kept her voice in a bland tone befitting a school-marm.
    But he had seen and heard otherwise, and viewing her this way—all coiled and subdued—suddenly didn’t seem natural anymore.
    Amelia paired up with Narcissa Dodge and smiled at something the mayor’s wife told her. There was something appealing about the way Amelia smiled, and Frank figured Pap must have seen Miss Marshall smile once before he made up his mind to give her the chase.
    Looking up, Amelia’s eyes met Frank’s and the animation left her face. The softened curves of her mouth were suddenly replaced by a wary line. She kept her expression under stern restraint when gazing at him, and it bothered him that she felt the need to bottle up her smile when he was around.
    Frank let his glance travel from her to Pap. He barely had time to wonder if his friend had seen Miss Marshall, too, when Reverend Thorpe made a special point to single Frank out.
    Dressed in a black vicuña suit more appropriate for coffin wear than a summer day, the preacher greeted, “Mr. Brody,” in a tone too Bible friendly to keep Frank at ease.
    He nodded tightly, his eyes shaded from the sun’s brilliance by the brim of his panama hat. “Rev.”
    â€œAre you going fishing?”
    Frank gazed at the fishing pole in his hand, then back at the reverend. “Looks that way.”
    â€œA blessed, beautiful day for it, too.”
    Sunlight caught on the gilt-stamped cross gracingthe cover of Thorpe’s Bible. He held the round-cornered book in his large hands, front forward, and pressed to his