"Have you got a few minutes?"

"Of course. Look, about my phoning you..."

"I want to tell you I'm glad you did. I feel so helpless about Janie that I try to tell myself the problem will take care of itself.

And I learned from you that it won't. I tend to get...

emotionally lazy about responsibilities like that. But I wanted to ask you about something else. I know how much Lindy depended on research. You can bet that by the time she came down here she knew everything that had ever been published about the Meadows family and the Eternal Church. Moses told me that the family tried to hush up the trouble they had with the younger son, Paul. I just wondered if she could have been looking into that."

"We wouldn't know anything special, Fred and me. We never really got into that Eternal Church. We were interested in it, of course. I mean, if somebody had started a ten-million dollar zoo in the county, everybody would have been interested. But practically anybody would know as much about Paul as we do. How much did you find out from Moses? I heard he was in the place where they sent Paul, up in Ohio, I think."

"I know he was the youngest son and I know he died of pneumonia after he fasted for a long time. They put him in there because he went crazy and cut off his left hand. And I know he was kind to Moses and had a lot of influence on him."

"Okay, I can fill in a little. Let me see. John Tinker must be forty-two by now, and Mary Margaret about thirty-eight, so if Paul had lived, he'd be thirty-five, thirty-six, around in there.

I'm thirty-one right now. I'm trying to work out when it happened. When the Church came in and bought all that land out there around the Meadows Center, there were a couple of old houses on it, and the family moved into one, and the people that were closest to the family moved into the other. The first thing they did was put up one of those great big aluminum buildings that look like half of a long huge pipe. They put in big fans to keep the air moving through it from end to end, and they bought hundreds of folding chairs and an electric organ.

Our parents took both of us there one Sunday because the young boy was going to preach. That was Paul, and I guess if I was seven or eight, he was about twelve years old. I never heard anything like it anywhere before or since. It made me all-over goose bumps, listening to him. And he made me cry and he made lots of people cry. They said he had the gift, and he got it from his father, old Matthew Meadows. Fred and I, we wanted to go back there, but our dad wouldn't let us. He said it wasn't any kind of religion he wanted any of his kin to have anything to do with. He said it was hysterics. He said it turned everybody into crazy people."

She turned and looked at Fred, who had just come in.

"We're talking about Paul Meadows and how he preached that Sunday." She looked over her shoulder at Roy.

"Fred might be able to remember things I've forgotten. If you want to hear them."

"Of course I do. I'm wondering if my wife found out anything about Paul that could... endanger her life."

Fred frowned and hopped up to sit on the counter, and said, "I wouldn't think so. It's been over and done with a long time ago, and that Meadows Church is too big to be hurt by any kind of gossip. That kid preached up a storm. We heard him once in person and then they had him on the radio and Peggy and I listened a couple of times when we weren't supposed to listen at all. But then they stopped using him. We heard he was sick."

"Don't you remember?" Peggy said.

"We heard he got sort of strange and they couldn't let him preach because once he started they didn't have any way to stop him. He just wouldn't stop. Everybody could walk out of the church and he would keep right on, they said. Then he got a big kitchen cleaver and chopped his left hand right off at the wrist and nearly bled to death. So they had to send him up to an institution that specialized in whatever it was was wrong with him, and then after he was gone maybe four or five years, he died. If I had to guess, I'd say he was sent up there when he was eighteen."

"Closer to twenty," Fred said.

"Then that would make him twenty-four or -five when he died. And I can remember that they had that huge funeral service for him on the very day of my twenty-first birthday. So you're right, Fred. Closer to twenty."

"Was it pretty much common knowledge that they sent him to a mental institution?"

They looked at each other. Fred frowned and said, "There was always talk about Paul Meadows. His father ordained him when he was about thirteen, and people said that was a mistake. Sometimes when he preached he would stick needles through his arm to show the power of prayer and faith. But I never saw him do that. Old Matthew never seemed to notice how weird the kid was becoming."

"Did the family try to keep the whole thing quiet?"

"Maybe they tried," Fred said.

"I guess they did. But it was a small town then and it's still a small town. We all heard he died of pneumonia and complications."

Moses verified that when Roy talked to him," Peggy said.

"And Moses told me he's going to start preaching the Gospel according to Paul Meadows."

Fred shrugged.

"He'll never get to do it in the Tabernacle, and I don't think any kind of street-corner preaching is going to bother John Tinker and Mary Margaret."

"It must have been a sensation around here when he chopped his hand off. Were there any rumors about why?"

Fred gave his sister a wink that screwed up half his face and said, Take a walk, lady."

"Oh sure," she said.

"The menfolk want to talk dirty."

"Maybe this is just barroom talk with everybody bee red up, and maybe it isn't. But my old man, he used to say that it was a real good idea to keep your woman away from the traveling tent shows. He said it was common knowledge those hellfire preachers could get their glands all stirred up enough so they could be took off into the bushes all ready to sing Praise the Lord. The talk around this area was that there was some woman they had teaching the Bible at the Meadows Center, before they'd started the college. She was about thirty-five then, a big hearty good-looking woman, and she got purely turned on by Paul and his preaching and his strange ways. So they say she got to him, and she got past all that sanctity but they didn't do any actual screwing. I guess that was to come later. But she got him to doing a few things to her and for her, and that's how come his left hand offended him and so he cut it the hell off."

"What was her name? What happened to her?"

"Hilda something. German name. I can't recall it. But she was gone like at first light the next day, so I guess Paul told his daddy why he did what he did. They say she went to California. I don't know for sure. Hell, that was long ago. She'd be coming up on sixty years old by now. There'd be nothing there worth digging into for any magazine. Poor old Paul just couldn't handle the pleasures of the flesh. I think it's true because it sounds true. You know what I mean?"

"I know. Thanks. I appreciate it. Moses told me that a police officer named Dockerty had checked him out. I want to be very certain that there's no chance Moses could have... hurt Lindy. Do you think he'd talk to me?"

Peggy came back in saying, "It's too hot anywhere but here, men, so knock off the man talk. I heard what you asked, Roy.

You better hurry, though. Wil Dockerty retires the end of this month." She went over and stood in front of the full blast of the noisy little air conditioner.

"No, don't touch that thing! I want to turn blue. Did you two decide Paul's history has anything to do with your wife disappearing?"

"I would say absolutely nothing at all," Roy said.

"I don't even know what I am supposed to be looking for. Strange things, I guess. Things that might hurt the Meadows family."

The history of Paul Meadows is strange enough," Fred said, 'but trying to hurt the Eternal Church with that old story would be like throwing puffed rice at an elephant. Or like me, Peggy, the time I tried to beat up that meathead you were married to for about twenty minutes. And ended up with a concussion."

"Oh shut up, Freddy," she said wearily.

"Well, I want to thank you for your help," Roy said.

"I better be heading back to my room."

"I'll walk you over. Fred, no comment. Please."

The night seemed especially warm after the success of the little air conditioner. They walked across the coarse grass in the middle of the compound. Something went scuttling away, rattling the grass, making her jump.

"One of those little black lizards that came in from Cuba," she said.

"They've chased out the kind we used to have." A truck droned by. They stopped and looked at the sky, but there were only a few stars visible beyond the mist.

Lots of worlds, he thought. The rabbit and the Moons and I and the black Cuban lizard are in one world. That flat toad is in another. Moses is in still another, an older place somehow.