"Maybe even Satan can do Your work sometimes, Lord.

This man kneeling with me as if he is praying helped bring Doreen back to You. Now she feels a terrible guilt because this agent of Satan has taught her to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh with him. He is a wicked old man. He tells me that if I expose him, I will be destroying several lives, and solving nothing. He tells me that is more important than the sin I am committing of doing nothing to save her from the sins of the flesh. This agent of Satan is an empty man. There is no soul inside of him. There are only tricks and deceits. He does not believe in You or in hell or in salvation. He does not understand how precious are Your laws, and how joyful is the chance of eternal life. I feel sorry for him. For a little while, long ago, I was as empty as he is, and as consumed by pleasure. But I found my way back to You. I think it is too late for him, but if it is in Your mercy I pray to You to open his eyes as You opened mine long ago. And I pray to You to give me a small share of Your wisdom so that I may be guided toward what I must do. And please keep me from hating him, even though I can hate what he is doing." There was a long silence. She seemed to him to be waiting for something to come to her. And then she said, "Amen," and got up slowly.

As he got up, he found that his eyes were stinging, and a single tear had spilled. He did not want her to notice that. He had the strange feeling that for a moment, through her trust and innocence, he had been privileged to look beyond a curtain that had been drawn across a secret window all of his life. It had parted, just for a moment, too quickly for him to see and comprehend what was behind it. He was conscious only of a visceral feeling of expectancy, a flicker of unearned joy.

"Thank you for letting me stay," he said.

"That's okay. If I can't make up my mind, I'll pray again, and keep praying until I know what to do."

Thanks for praying for me."

"You're the worst kind of sinner, Joe Deets. You are the kind who think there is no such a thing as sin. You think that the only sin is getting caught."

As he walked slowly down the corridor toward the stairs, he heard her put the chain back on the door. Damned old fool, he thought. You should have peeled her out of those travel clothes when you sensed there might be the tiny little chance she wouldn't fight it off. You've studied women long enough to know when to move in. It would have been the best insurance you could buy. What's all this genteel reluctance, Joe boy?

Face it. After years of trying, you have finally found your stopping place, finally found something so wonderfully rotten that even you wouldn't do it. Perhaps there is some hope for you after all.

He did not let himself think about his reaction to her prayer.

It had no place in his life. Before he got on the bicycle, he put his hand in his left hip pocket and took out the note dear darling Patsy had sent the woman. He wondered if, by now, Annalee had discovered it was missing. Not having it at hand should decrease any desire to blow the whistle. He started to tear it up, hesitated, put it back in his pocket. He wanted to see Patsy Knox's face when he showed it to her. Then he would tear it up.

He went directly back to his office, put Annalee and Doreen out of his mind and began work on the report he was writing to John Tinker with a copy to Finn Efflander about the feasibility of decentralizing the membership records. For an initial cost of $13,500 for a Vanguard 8000, with printer and ten-megabyte hard disk, they could equip the fifty largest of the affiliated churches for a total outlay of $675,000. The bigger churches were getting restive about sending the entire collection away and getting half of it back. This way each church could record its own total contribution received in the pledge envelopes, and prepare the necessary receipt for the church member to prove his tax-free gift. The proper percentage could be sent along, and by setting up modem connections between the mainframe and the decentralized computers, they would have a close check on finances and they could also verify mainframe data base records against the regional records. He wanted to work up a sample program to demonstrate how it could be done. But as he worked on the program, setting it up in Pascal, he discovered several ways his ideas could be improved and expanded to take care of other problems of administration.

Fingernails walking lightly across the back of his neck startled him and he snapped his head around and looked up at the pretty smiling face of Doreen Purves.

"Hey, guess what!" she said.

He looked at his watch. It was twenty past nine, and he realized he was very hungry for the dinner he had missed.

"I.

give up. What?"

"My mom is here! She took me to dinner at the motel across from where she's staying."

"Why did she come to see you?"

"I guess just to kind of check up on how I'm doing. Hey, how long have you been here? Did you eat or anything?"

"I guess I forgot about it."

"What are you doing there?"

"Just a program for the affiliated churches."

She moved around to face him, half sitting on the wide shelf that held the computer equipment.

"Can you quit?"

"Let me see." He printed the long list, tore it off the printer, studied it and scowled at it. Lots of clumsy steps. But a reasonable stopping place. When he was done, the revision would make it efficient and elegant. He stored it and turned off the computer and the printer.

"I'm through for now."

"Okay, whyn't you bike over and pick up some fried chicken and chocolate shakes. I'm starved again. We ate at six. I'll wait for you at your place."

Over the kitchen picnic, Doreen said, "You know, when I saw her coming toward me after practice, I was really, really scared. I thought: Oh my God, she knows about me and Joe. It would really kill her. You know that? She couldn't handle it.

And there's no way I could make her see that you're the best thing ever happened in my life."

"But it was just a visit."

"I guess so. Well, hell, I was a basket case when they brought me up here. I wanted to be dead, and I would have killed myself if I'd had the energy. Why am I telling you all this? You know how I was, better than anybody. Anyway, she acted funny. She looked at me funny. There's something on her mind, but I know it isn't us. We had a wonderful visit, Joe. It looks like my brother will be marrying the DeAngelis girl. Barbara. She's very pretty and nice. But they don't want to risk trying to get their own place in times like these, so they want to move in with Mom and Daddy, which is fine with them. Even though Barbara works, it will still mean more help and more company for Mom. I hope Barbara helps with the chickens. Mom hates those chickens. She can't stand them. My dad is okay too. They fired three guys from where he works, but they kept him on."

"When is she going back?"

"Her bus leaves at three tomorrow and she'll be home by about eight o'clock. She's going to come to choir practice. I showed her my room. I thought she'd ask me why I didn't have a roommate like they told her I would have. I'd hate to have to tell her all the tricks I had to pull to get a room alone."

"There's some chocolate on your chin, love."

Thanks," she said.

"Sorry." She dabbed it away, frowned and said, "About three or four times I looked over at her and caught her looking at me funny, as if she was trying to figure something out. I don't know what. She asked me a lot of times if I was happy. I told her I was happier than I had ever been, and it just about killed me not being able to tell her why. When I said good night to her about fifteen minutes ago in front of her place, she took me by the wrist and held on so hard it hurt. And she said like, "Remember, Doreen, all your father and I want for you is for you to be happy and lead a good Christian life." I guess I'm leading a good Christian life with one little excention, huh?" F "Just one exception."

"Gee, I wish you could meet her, or at least get a look at her She s a real pretty woman. She's worked hard all her life but it doesn t show, you know what I mean?" ' "I think so."

"You could look in on choir practice maybe. She's about my size but a little heavier here and there, and she's a blonde too but she s getting quite a lot of gray in with it. I told her she ought to use a rinse, and she said maybe she would. She says my old dog misses me something terrible. Old Brownie He sleeps on my bed and looks out the window for me at school bus time. I wish I could have him here. The only person he ever bit was Mike and Mike kicked him so hard he went howling down the road. And I hit Mike and Mike hit me, and I went home howling too. Some great scene, huh?"

He looked across the table at her and said in a low tone "I have a different kind of scene in mind for you, young lady " You do, huh? Like for instance what?"

He didn't answer her. He just smiled into her eyes and watched the changes. He watched her mouth swell and soften her head tilt of its own weight, her eyes grow heavy-lidded her breathing deepen and slow. ' "Like what?" she whispered.

"Come see," he said.

Twelve.

On Monday, August fifteenth, a large tropical storm, big enough to fill most of the Gulf of Mexico, recovered from two days of indecision. The weather people had named it Harold.

The velocity of the winds at the center increased almost to hurricane force, and the entire storm system abruptly headed north-northeast at increasing speed, making landfall along the entire north coast of the Gulf, from eastern Texas to Pensacola.

It carried an enormous amount of water, and by Tuesday afternoon heavy rains were falling on Lakemore and Meadows Center. The sky was so dark the Boulevard lights went on automatically. Dozens of counties in six states experienced severe flooding during a twelve-hour period with rains of anywhere from five to twelve inches.

The giant storm brought tornadoes, high winds, electrical storms which mangled trailer parks, sucked roofs off frame houses and barns, toppled power lines and blew recreational vehicles off the highways.

In midafternoon when the rain was as heavy as any he had ever heard, Roy Owen sat at the small desk in unit sixteen of the County Line Motel going over the eight pounds of computer printout and corporate financial statements Dave had sent down from Hartford by Federal Express. He had arranged for their computers to be programmed to give him the ratios he thought significant the market volume in each issue expressed as a percentage of the shares available, and related to the daily increases or decreases in the daily quote. And he paid close attention to the internal ratios of the corporations whose stock they held in the three funds. Ratios of sales to gross to net and to debt structure. He was a specialist in the different ways bad news could be weasel-worded in the footnotes to the financial statements. And he depended a great deal on the Value Line rating system.

Peggy Moon knocked and he let her in. Her dark hair was curly damp. She had clean sheets over her arm, wrapped in plastic to keep the rain off.