another moment’s hesitation she got out of the car and started for the chapel entrance, the magazines in her arm.
As she had suspected, the gift shop teemed with people in sunglasses, carrying cameras, buying everything in sight. Two elderly monks waited on people, but the one who haunted her nights was nowhere in sight.
Her heart dropped to her toes. She waited in the corner until most of the room had emptied before approaching the one closest to her.
“I’m Fran Mallory from Beehive Magazine. I told the monk who granted me the interview on Abbot Ambrose that I would bring by some copies for all of you.”
He gave a slight bow. “You’re very kind.” Then he reached for the magazines. This wasn’t going the way she had planned it. Now she had little choice but to hand them over.
“Would it be possible to speak to the monk I interviewed?”
“He’s no longer with us.”
Fran blinked in astonishment. “You mean he’s been sent to another monastery?” she cried before she could stop herself.
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
Her skin prickled unpleasantly. “Of course not. I only meant that I’m disappointed that I couldn’t thank him in person for all his help.”
“I’ll pass the message along.”
“Th-Thank you. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”
Shaken by the news, Fran hurried out to the car but didn’t immediately start the motor.
The sense of loss was too staggering.
By the time she left for Los Angeles two days later, she was furious with herself for having allowed his memory to interfere with her work. As she boarded one of the two specially chartered 747s to carry the Choir and staff, she made up her mind to leave all thoughts of him behind and concentrate on her work.
This trip was not only going to be a great adventure, it was vitally important to her career. She wasn’t about to jeopardize her work because of a monk she had no business thinking about.
With her mind made up, she found the excitement contagious as she, along with the Choir, arrived at Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles by bus for their concert given to a sellout crowd.
Being a fan of the hundred-and-fifty-year-old Choir, Fran had attended dozens of their home concerts. For years she had listened to their international Sunday broadcasts, and was familiar with much of their repertoire. Certain songs thrilled her, others moved her to tears.
But there was one song in particular that always left her and the audience weeping. Afterwards, there would be this electric silence before the crowd rose to its feet in thunderous applause. To Fran, that awe-filled silence proved the greatest ovation of all.
Tonight she was ready with her camera to capture the enchanted expression of some attendee’s face. The right picture always told the tale.
She wanted to find that one photograph which exuded the magic of the night. Barney was counting on her. If she were successful, it would go on the front cover of Beehive Magazine, a coup she hadn’t yet accomplished, but maybe this time.
The song she’d been waiting for came soon after the intermission. She’d obtained permission to set things up near the orchestra where she would be out of the way, yet obtain frontal shots with her telephoto lens.
The choir leader stepped to the podium and raised his baton. When everything grew quiet, the sopranos began singing their moving entreaty. The heartrending music pierced a part of Fran’s soul not reached in any other way. It happened every time, not just to her, but to everyone in the listening crowd.
Slowly she panned the audience, snapping one picture after another. By the time the full swell of male voices began, she happened on a face glowing with pure joy. There wasn’t another word to describe it.
A woman in her midsixties maybe, gray hair, a sweet expression on what looked like her Eastern European features.
The tears rolled down her rosy cheeks. Her eyes seemed transfixed by the music.
Fran swallowed hard and took a dozen pictures in succession. There was no need to look anywhere else. Something told her that this woman was the one she’d been hoping to find in the audience, the one who reflected the feelings of everyone around.
Maybe Fran could find a subject this perfect in Australia, but she doubted it. The moment was an illuminating one. She felt the hairs stand on the back of her neck.
Driven by a compulsion she didn’t understand, she was anxious for the concert to be over so she could approach the woman. There had to be a story behind that face. Fran wanted to get it, not only for the article, but out of a burning curiosity.
After the Choir sang their last number, the audience must have clapped for a solid five minutes. No one wanted the concert to be over.
With purposeful steps, Fran insinuated herself into the crowd and waited at the end of the row for the woman to exit. While everyone around was expounding on the remarkable performance they had just heard, Fran approached her.
“It was a beautiful concert, wasn’t it?”
The woman whose face glistened with fresh tears threw her head back. “It was as wonderful as I remembered it back in Germany.”
“You heard the Choir there?”
“Oh, yes. Many years ago. When I was a little girl growing up in East Berlin, my mother told me that if I ever got the chance, I should get away to a place where I could be free to worship God. I didn’t know what she meant.
“Then many years later came détente. I fled with my family to Frankfurt. It was there I heard this beautiful music for the first time. Later, when we moved to Zurich, in Switzerland, I heard the Choir again. That’s when I found God.” She shook her head. “You can’t imagine.”
But Fran could. She’d even captured the woman’s ecstasy on film. “Thank you for sharing that with me,” she whispered. “I work for a magazine in Utah and have been taking pictures tonight. I took some of you. Do I have your permission to use them and your story?”
The woman smiled. “I don’t mind.”
“Thank you,” Fran murmured as she watched the woman rejoin her family slowly making its way out of the row into the crowded aisle.
With her own eyes tear-drenched, Fran turned to go the other way and found herself face-to-face with a man who could have been the monk’s twin, except that his hair was longer and he wore a suit and tie.
Hadn’t she read somewhere that everyone on earth had a double?
There seemed to be an air of unreality about the entire evening. Her heart was really being given a workout. First the woman, now this haunting face from the past, a face she’d tried in vain to forget.
Angry with herself for staring at him, she averted her eyes and attempted to step past him.
“Ms. Mallory?”
