Her voice trembled.

"It is something I am never going to talk about to a living soul the rest of my life."

"But it was something a little bit like her running around with the motorcycle people?"

"Maybe. I don't know. Let me alone. Could be it was all Hub's fault, the trouble with Doreen."

"In what way?"

"I guess I don't want to talk about it."

"I thought we were here to work out what's best for Doreen."

She sighed and shrugged, spreading her hands in a gesture of helplessness.

"It's probably nothing. When she was seven, eight, nine. Around that age, Hub used to tease her to come give him a movie kiss. And she'd hug him tight around the neck and kiss him on the mouth for a long, long time. It was innocent fun with Hub. It was a game they played. She was his daughter. But it worried me that she began to get big up here when she was so young. And she became a woman when she was a month past her twelfth birthday. I couldn't blame that on Hub because I was that way too. And that's part of the reason I got into... never mind."

She stopped talking and stared at him with an exasperated expression and a little snort of frustration.

"I didn't come here to the Center to have you talk and talk and talk and not say nothing at all. You probably think I'm some kind of dumb farmer-woman. Maybe I am but I'm not that dumb. You're not going to talk me out of anything. Are you sleeping with my daughter or aren't you?"

He knew then that she was a more formidable opponent than he had anticipated. There was a good toughness there, a directness that was going to require every bit of persuasion he could muster. And he had the feeling that it was not going to work, that nothing he said to her was going to change anything.

"I'm waiting," she said.

"Annalee, I'm a foolish man and I'm a weak man. Please believe me when I say that I am going to give you all the answers, but I want you to let me go at it in my own way, because it may be the only way I will ever get you to understand."

"You will never make me understand a man like you sleeping with my daughter."

"Do you know what a hypothetical question is?"

"I don't think so."

"Lawyers ask hypothetical questions when they crossexamine somebody in court, some criminal.

"What if," they say.

"What if the prosecution can prove you were at the scene of the crime that night?" ' "You want me to change my question so it's hyp... hyp..."

"Hypothetical. No. I want to change the question around and ask you what will happen if what's in that letter is true?"

"You will burn in hell forever!"

"Aside from that."

"Don't you care about that?"

"When I am finally judged, Annalee, I hope that I will be judged on the basis of my entire life experience."

"You are confusing me."

"If that letter is true, nobody here at Meadows Center knows about it. If that letter is true, and if it were made public, they would have to send Doreen home. And if that letter were true and they sent Doreen home, she would probably kill herself.

She tells me that she would, and I don't think she's bluffing.

First she would sink back into depression, and then she would kill herself."

She leaned toward him and she hit her thigh with her clenched fist, a thud of bone against muscle.

"You are telling me it's true, aren't you? Damn you! Why? She's just a kid.

She's so innocent. You're older than me. Older than Hub.

You're not handsome and you're not tall. You're kind of an ugly wrinkly bowlegged man, like some kind of farmhand.

Those little pale eyes and that scratchy voice. What in the name of Jesus Christ could a sweet pretty girl see in you? How in God's name did it ever happen the first time?"

"If it happened."

"Play your dumb game. It doesn't work anymore. Just tell me why it happened."

"This is not a game. Don't think of it as a game. This is the real world, and foolish acts in the real world can make horrid things happen. What will happen if you, out of anger and pain and righteousness, take your daughter Doreen home with you, after telling Mary Margaret why you are doing it? What will happen if you tell Hub and her brother what happened to her up here?"

She looked startled and awed.

"It would really kill Hub. It really would. He would have to come up here and kill you.

Like he tried to kill her boyfriend the week before he died, after he found out Doreen was pregnant."

"Can't you talk quietly to your husband? Can't you explain things to him?"

She thought for a moment.

"I think we used to talk a lot, when we were going together and after we were married, before the kids came along. The way I remember it, we used to talk about... well, things that are important, like time and God and love. But I can't remember what either of us said. I just remember sitting in the hammock and talking. Now we don't talk like that. We haven't for a long time. I wouldn't know how to begin with him. And I don't think he wants to talk about anything anymore. He is on edge. There's too many men been fired where he works and still not enough work, and in the night he'll get up and walk around the house and sit in the dark. It's like he's getting ready for some kind of explosion.

I don't know. I'm not explaining it right. All I know is that if I tried to tell him about Doreen, I would get it half said and he would be gone. He wouldn't hear another word and he wouldn't talk about it. He would just drive up here ninety miles an hour and do what he would think he had to do. Please tell me what happened. I can't understand how it could happen."

"We haven't looked at all the probable results yet, Annalee."

"I guess not, and they would throw you right out of the Church and I guess that's what's bothering you, isn't it ? I don't know what you're trying to talk me into, but that's what's so important to you."

He hoped his laugh was convincing. At least it startled her.

"Mrs. Purves, I am a computer expert. As such, I am very well paid. I am a programmer of the very first order. They don't want to lose me because I am as near to being essential as any person in Administration can get. They ordained me as a device to make me less likely to leave. It puts me under a very generous retirement and pension program. It adds to the plausibility of the Church, I guess, to have the top people called the Reverend this and the Reverend that. But if you blow this whole situation wide open, they will have to ask me to leave, regardless of how badly they need my services. In a certain sense, I will be sorry to leave. It's a pleasant environment, an interesting challenge. But the major problems are solved. It may very well be time for me to move along. I would say that, on the average, I get three good offers a year from industry. I would have no trouble. I would have some regrets. But I would be doing interesting and important work within a month."

She stared at him.

"Don't you believe in the Church?"