"I look like too many other overweight middle-aged men."

"Walter, you are a very distinguished-looking man, and we are all proud of you and the job you're doing. And if Tom Birdy agrees to join us, we will count on you to take him under your wing. Okay?"

"Of course, Mary M. There's nothing you could ask me that I wouldn't try to do as well as I possibly can. When will I know?"

"I hope by the time you get back here Sunday. Get in touch with me." She turned in the doorway and looked back at him.

"If you heard it, you know that John Tinker preached beautifully on Sunday."

"I heard it. It was very good. Very. It's too bad we don't often hear him do as well."

She looked at him for a long moment, wondering if he should be brought to task for a minor impertinence, and then decided against it. Walter had always slipped his little knife into Johnny whenever he had a chance. She shrugged, smiled, waved her small pink hand and left.

On that Friday he walked home with every intention of telling Alberta about this new development. But as he walked and thought, the closer he got to his house, the more unpleasant the idea became. She would take it the wrong way. And so he told her the morning had been uneventful.

It had been a mistake mentioning to her his intention to talk to the magazine woman, but at least he'd had those second thoughts about mentioning the tapes and photographs Erskine had gotten for him, documenting John Tinker's wickedness with Molly Wintergarten. He shivered as he thought of how many times he had come close to telling her about the materials and how he had planned to use them. He had even thought at times of showing her one or two of the most explicit photographs just to see her stunned by the shock of it. They had always been open with each other. When you were writing a sermon and you suddenly thought of some interesting departure, you could go back to the first part of it and take out what did not conform to the new idea. But life was written day by day and hour by hour, with no way to go back and change any part of it. The moving finger writes. He decided that it would be a tactical error to try to tell the new woman from that magazine about the diversions enjoyed by John Tinker Meadows. There are times when you want to leave the moving finger with nothing at all to write.

He looked across at his wife as she ate her lunch, reading from a book as she ate. He had never liked watching her chew.

She moved her under jaw a little bit from side to side as well as up and down. A strand of mouse-gray hair hung down on her forehead. Without looking up from her book, she stuck her underlip out and blew the hair away. The sharp exhalation ejected a tiny green piece of chewed lettuce. He watched it throughout its arc and fall. It landed next to the salt, which she would use and he could not. He got up abruptly and told her he was going for a little walk around the area before heading for the office. She nodded absently and turned back to her book.

Two blocks from his house a pair of Angels passed him, arms locked, giggling. Blue skirts, white blouses, sensible shoes, bright hair bobbing at the napes of their necks. He lengthened his stride to keep them in view longer, to watch the flex of their smooth calves, the pretty swing of their young hips. He thought of Joe Deets with hatred and a despairing envy. The beast was always there, just below the surface. That lust in the heart, which Jimmy Carter had admitted. The mind made its foul and secret images, leafing through them at such bewildering speed, it was as though it would be unbearable to dwell upon such grotesque perversions too clearly or at too great length.

The mind could not be restrained from working its foul inventions involving a thousand mouths, a great wetness, the aching spasms. But in time, little by little, he could bring himself back from the edge of the pit. The Angels were out of sight, around a distant corner and beyond the tall hedge. The last of the fragrances of their bodies and hair had drifted away on the slow movement of the heated air, and he forced himself to think of gray stones, bones breaking, iron fists of images as far from the soft warmth of young flesh as possible reining himself in with a hard and steady pressure.

With familiar resignation he promised the Lord a full hour of prayer to pay for the few minutes of erotic admiration of the bodies of the young girls. It was always disciplined prayer, kneeling motionless on a hard surface, keeping the mind focused on the task at hand, that of not only asking forgiveness for weakness, but vowing next time to meet the sweet perfumed tauntings of the devil with greater strength. And at the end of the hour of prayer he would remember to thank the Lord for having given him this great weakness of the flesh so that he was better able to comprehend, with humility, the weaknesses of his parishioners who told him of acts so scruffy and so horrid it made him dizzy to listen to them.

As he walked slowly along he tried to compose the structure of the long prayer he would make in atonement for the sins of the mind. But he could not find a beginning, or think of a suitable biblical reference. Far back in his mind, like a worm living inside what had once been a healthy structure, he held the suspicion that there would be no prayer this time.

He walked into the small park at the far end of Zedekiah Lane and sat on a concrete-and-cypress bench in the shade, out of the glare of the early-afternoon sunlight. With the nail of the little finger of his left hand he carefully picked a loose scrap of skin from his forehead. He wondered if reflected sunshine would be good for his psoriasis. In a few minutes he counted his pulse. It was eighty-two. He wondered what his pressure might be.

He knew he was using the trivial concerns of the body to distract him from the mortal sickness of his soul. He thought of the casual sinning committed with apparent unconcern by John Tinker Meadows and Joseph Deets, and he tried to convince himself that their sins, because there was no repentance or atonement, were greater than his own. But he knew the argument was forlorn. He found himself wishing he had not destroyed the photographs and tapes of John Meadows and Mrs. Wintergarten. He could no longer lock himself away and look at the pictures while listening to the tapes. It had been one way of diverting his attention from his own problem, that problem so great that he was afraid that if he ever thought it through, step by step, the pressure would blow his heart apart.

He wondered idly if he might be able to buy without risk of course materials as stimulating as the ones he had destroyed, and he wondered if they would help blur the sharp agony of his spirit.

His father had died at fifty-three. Walter was now fifty-four.

For many years he had thought that were he to suddenly begin to die, if that great crushing pain they spoke of began to squeeze his chest and cripple his left arm, he could not know whether he would go gratefully to Jesus, or whether his last thoughts might be instead of an intense regret that through all his life he had averted his eyes from the young bosoms and lips and behinds and prayed to God to help him resist temptation.

In the act of dying he might try to tell himself that he had lived his life the way it was supposed to be lived, as a man of God.

The proper way. The decent way. God's way.

For all the years of his life he had averted his eyes, used prayer to cleanse his mind. He had not rolled and snorted in strange beds as had so many others he could name. He had not defiled his own marriage. The devil had approached him in female form many times. He had coveted. That was a sin, of course. But he had resisted, and that was strength.

But now was it all to be wiped out because of one incident which happened more by accident than design? Was all the rest of his life to be discarded just because of that?

He realized he was arguing with the Lord, and he was being angry with the Lord. But it was no good, of course. It was far too late to try to set up scales and balances.

The sin he had committed gave him the terrible assurance that when this sun became a nova and the earth a cinder, F. Walter Macy would still be turning slowly, slowly on the iron spit, his indestructible flesh basted each moment in lava, his eyes bulging forever as he howled his torment and his remorse and his agony.

He could contemplate the inevitable punishment for the act, yet he could not let any slightest specific memory of that time enter his mind. If it did, he felt that he would scream and become mad.

It struck him as most odd that he could divert his attention from his secret pain by making such vivid pictures in his head of things he had never seen that he became aroused. He knew he could probably never pray again, not the way he used to.

And with prayer denied him as diversion, he escaped into erotic fantasy. Jenny MacBeth and Jenny Albritton, rolling and stretching and stroking in their languid sensual ease. Joe Deets, bucking away at the sweet flesh of the blonde Angel, defiling her with his vileness.

He used to think that because he could so vividly imagine the doing of evil, he was thus stronger than other men in being able to resist performing it. He now knew that had been but vanity, and it had been his way of rationalizing a certain sickness in his mind. He wondered if it was that very sickness which had propelled him into the Church in an attempt to escape the consequences of the diseased imaginings. But now he knew that any sense of escape had been illusion. He had been entrapped. Everything was changed. There was nowhere to run. And if there was a refuge, he could never run fast enough.

The patient and eternal fires of hell were awaiting Walter Macy.

Sheriff Wil Dockerty found Roy Owen waiting to see him when he came back from the Kiwanis meeting on Friday afternoon. He looked at the messages Myrna had left for him and then told her to send Mr. Owen in. Ever since he had found out the man was staying at the Moons' motel, he had been expecting Owen to come see him.

He was a little surprised at the size of him. These little bitty blonde women usually turned up married to big men.

Dockerty had learned that you go slow and easy with small men. They are quick to take offense, easy to rile. But this one had a steady gaze. He looked calm and smart. The mustache was a statement, apparently.

"Like some coffee, Mr. Owen?"

When he said yes, the Sheriff shouted out to Myrna, and she came in moments later with two big white steaming mugs.

"Drink myself too much of this stuff all my life," Dockerty said, pushing the sugar across the desk to where Roy Owen could reach it. It was a green metal desk in a small room with gray walls, a metal table piled high with file folders, a single window looking out onto a segment of parking lot and a long angular slice of one of Lakemore's downtown streets. Sheriff Dockerty was a big flabby old man with large white hands covered with brown spots, and a head totally bald, and equally spotted. His breathing was shallow and audible.

"Come down to find out if we know what we're doing down here, did you?"

"Not really."

"Satisfied with Hanrahan's report, were you? Don't look surprised. He's a pro. He checked in with me just as he's supposed to. And if he'd come up with anything he would have come back to us with it."

"Whose jurisdiction is it?"

"Mine, by default. The city limits go right to the county line over to the west, and the county line is about a hundred yards past the Moons' motel. But we work together on just about everything. Couple of years back the city council and the county commissioners got together and combined a lot of our functions, to save money. The city is kind of drying up lately, and the county has got a lot of structure out there at Meadows Center they don't get any ad valorem on."

"Do you think my wife is alive?"

"I'll put it this way. I do if you do."

"I don't," Owen said without hesitation.

"I would say the only possibilities would be total amnesia, and that is a very rare thing, I understand, or somebody holding her as a captive.

That doesn't make sense either. So I think she's dead. It's hard to get used to saying that word. I don't like the thought of never knowing what happened. What do you think happened to her?"

"From the pictures that were sent down, and from talking to Peggy Moon and her brother, she was a pretty little woman with blonde hair and a good figure. I keep wondering if she didn't have somebody with her when she left to drive on down to the airport, or if she picked up somebody along the way."

"I would rule that out, Sheriff. She wasn't a damn fool. She never picked up hitchhikers. If she picked anybody up, or took anybody along with her, it was somebody she knew. I keep thinking about one little thing that seems uncharacteristic.

Lindy is... was a very tidy person. I mean she followed the rules. All the little rules. I am staying in that room. There is a sign on the inside of the door above the dead bolt that says "Please Leave Key in the Office When You Check Out." You can't miss it. She would have left the key in the office."