"And you feel fulfilled by it?"

Z07.

"Sister, I do what I do, and I do it better than most, and I take some satisfaction in that. I am like a very dependable dog.

They throw a stick into a jungle and I can go in there and bring it back. Fulfilled has the sound of home and kiddies. The guys I work with, I can't see them in that context either."

"You like being your own person."

"Exactly."

"Is there room in your life for God?"

"Sister, I had eight little pins fastened together that dangled from here to here, celebrating perfect attendance at the Sunday School of the Salvation Baptist Church in Kingsport, Tennessee. I was the next to the youngest one of four girls, and we all wore all those pins, and they got married and I didn't. They go to church and I don't. And I go visit lots and lots of nephews and nieces and get along with them fine. I try to do unto others the way I always wish they would do unto me. All except the fawners and the fakers and the political animals. I show them no mercy. Do you believe?"

Mary Margaret looked startled.

"What do you mean? Of course I believe!"

"Really, really, really? Way down in the bottom of your heart, you know the truth?"

Mary Margaret leaned toward her.

"I believe in life everlasting, in God and Jesus Christ and the teachings in the Bible. I live according to what I believe in, and conduct myself accordingly. I have absolute confidence God is watching over me and that when I pray He is there to listen."

Carolyn looked down at her pad. There was nothing to take any notes about, not in that profession of faith. She had talked to very plausible scoundrels over the years, and to the most skilled and practiced liars. This giant woman had a total sincerity, an almost childish confidence in her faith and in an ultimate justice.

Then I can ask you something that bothers me?"

"Of course."

"Lots of money comes in here from hundreds of thousands of donors. It comes pouring in. It's a flood. Okay. I don't think I'm being a cynic when I say that it's a good bet that little dribbles of it are being diverted into the wrong pockets. Not stealing, exactly. Bad judgment mostly. But it is happening.

And according to what I read today, money is supposed to be a kind of prayer. Stealing a prayer would be the worst kind of sin, I guess. So here's the question. How do you keep on justifying your faith in the middle of a situation where there is so much money and so much power people are taking unfair advantage?"

Mary Margaret thought for a little while.

"I had to cut that question into pieces. First of all, I don't have to go around justifying my faith. I have it. It has always been there. It is as real as my hands to me. Secondly, it would be presumptuous for me to judge anybody else. Judgment is the Lord's. And I am confident that when the time comes for each individual, he or she will be judged according to his or her life. It will be judged on balance. Our Church members are mostly wonderful people leading wonderful lives of service and joy. They will deserve heaven just as I hope I will."

Carolyn Pennymark felt simultaneously moved and exasperated. She slapped her notebook shut and dropped the pencil into her oversized purse, and took out the Leica.

Mary Margaret flushed and said, "I take very bad pictures."

"I hope you won't mind if I try. I'll do my best to make it a good one."

"Do the people you work for expect this of you? And of me?"

"Yes, ma'am," she said, startling herself.

She moved in close as she had been taught and took three, with the light behind the woman on the third exposure, and the lens turned slightly out of focus. She thanked her. Mary Margaret phoned down to have a car brought around, and then she walked her down to the entrance. At the motel she tried to tip the driver but he refused it. She had to run three steps through the roaring rain to get into shelter. When she got up to the room she realized she was bone tired. She did not know why she should be. Usually she had a great deal of energy, and it went on and on for days without cease. Something about Mary Margaret had tired her. It was almost as if she had worn herself out holding great doors closed against some sort of invasion.

When she awoke it was past eleven and she was hungry. She hurried down to the coffee shop. As she ate her waffle she looked at the three middle-aged women at a nearby table. They sat in silence. Two of them looked enough alike to be sisters.

One of the sisters sat with tears slowly leaking out of her eyes and rolling down her expressionless face. One woman patted the weeper's hand from time to time, and the other one reached and dabbed at the tears with a paper napkin.

They must come from all over, Carolyn thought. All over hell and gone, bring their heartbreak right here to the Meadows family, knowing that the pain will be helped. Confident it will be. And what a dreadful, constant, nagging responsibility that has to be. Suffer the little people to come unto Me. Maybe the weepers are the lucky ones. I can't even locate the place where I hurt, or find out why. It only hurts when I don't laugh.

Thirteen.

At four in the morning on Wednesday, August seventeenth, the huge rains stopped so abruptly the silence awakened many people at Meadows Center from sound sleep.

Glinda Lopez awoke from a dream about her husband, so vivid she reached her arm out to touch him and rapped her fingers against the dormitory wall close to her narrow bed. In the dream he had been trying to tell her something. The words were at the back edge of her mind and slipped away into darkness as she tried to recall them. Only the cadence and timbre of his voice was left. There was a dampness on her pillow and she knew she had been crying in her sleep, but she didn't know why, or for whom. She sat up and blew her nose.

She could hear the subliminal thud of some college kid playing music at a forbidden time.

John Tinker Meadows had been wide awake when the rain stopped. He had been wondering whether he should go into the bathroom and get ten grains of Valium. He had slept heavily in the early part of the night and then awakened with the feeling that every nerve had been pulled to such a tightness it thrummed like silver wire. Was Tom Daniel Birdy trying to be cute, trying to improve the offer, or was he serious about going his own way? If he joined up, could he be eased into the number-two slot without upsetting Walter Macy? If Walter Macy got too upset, he would take it to the Council of the ministers of the affiliated churches. He had built up a power bloc which he could not use against any Meadows, but would certainly use against Birdy. And what good had it done to spend another fourteen thousand on the old man, bringing the famous British doctor over? Mary Margaret's idea. Just to tell them what they already knew.

Made for an interesting theological paradox. Where was the old man's soul these days? It certainly wasn't in his body. If it was, it had died. It was gone, thus disproving everything the old man had so earnestly believed. Maybe, if it had no self-awareness, the soul could still be there in his body. But if souls had no awareness of self whatsoever, what was the point in going to heaven? Where was the everlasting life? There had to be some kind of special limbo, jam-packed full of all the old people's souls. Their souls had fled, but their bodies were still tied to earth, just like all those people on machines all over the world in the hospitals, brain dead. Miracles of modern medicine. Maybe, he thought, that is exactly the kind of afterlife I want, one without any self-awareness at all. So where is my reward? And my punishment? What if all of it, every smidgin, is right here? Heaven and hell on earth. And, thinking of punishment, how much does Rolf know? Or suspect? Rolf's own damn fault for thinking he could marry all that rubbery vitality and keep it satisfied. Now we do it like enemies punishing each other. Take that! And that! So why not end it now? Tomorrow. She won't make a fuss. She's tired of it too. It shows. Whining when I can't wait long enough for her.

Indifferent to my needs. Total self-absorption in the midst of passion, using me as she would use a vibrator for masturbation. Maybe the final sin is that of indifference. Subject for a sermon. Tell Spencer McKay to work it up.

He got up and took the Valium, and then went naked to the sliding doors and opened them and stepped from coolness out onto the shallow balcony. From that fourth-floor level he could see the perimeter lights, a dark silhouette outside a guard station, lifting the glow of a cigarette to his lips. The night air was warm and humid, and the bats were out, darting and dipping. He told himself it was time for a lasting vow of celibacy. Otherwise, the risks were too great and becoming greater. There was too much curiosity about him, too many people focusing on him in compulsive obsession. And in weary resignation he remembered he had vowed the same vow too many times before to have any belief he could keep it this time.

Perhaps one of these days he would take a look at what's-her name Tracy something. What had Mag called her? The oldest Angel I've got. A Guardian Angel to keep me out of trouble.

This last affair was not like the others. There wasn't any compelling desire to begin with. Went after Mrs. Wintergarten just to see if an affair this close to home could be managed.

Found it could be. So? Tracy Bellwright! He could see the long blonde hair and the tall slender figure, but the face was blurred.

Healthy and adoring. Extricate myself from this one and take a long rest and then see if I feel I can marry again. Mosquitoes began to whine around his ears, and he went back inside. As the Valium began to work, he yawned himself down into sleep.

The abrupt cessation of the heavy rain awoke Roy Owen.

His sleep had been so profound he had no idea where he was.

But soon in the faint seep of light around the drawn draperies he recognized the room, and remembered all of it, and realized that for the very first time he could recall, he could not find any plausible justification for his behavior. There was no good reason to stay on here. The rhythms of this life were so much less demanding he felt uneasy staying on. Things were gradually shifting out of focus up in Hartford. Too many changes in the portfolios where he had not followed the reasoning carefully, because he had not had the research materials at hand.

An increasing chance of an ugly surprise. He had almost been caught in the Braniff thing, but his analysis of the cash flow indicated they couldn't make it, not for very much longer, not with that enormous expansion in a declining economic condition. So he had dumped it over three market days, taking a minor bruise, and had dictated the usual memo to himself indicating what his analysis had shown, and what his reasoning had been. They are always suspicious of a dump, suspecting insider information. A stupid rule, because it is a violation of the free market principle.

Time to head home. They'll never find Lindy. That's what the Sheriff was telling me.

When the end of the storm had awakened Peggy Moon she had discovered she was hungry. She put a robe on and went to the kitchen between the office and the owner's unit, and, squinting in the glare of fluorescence, she cut a wedge of sharp cheddar, poured herself a glass of skim milk and leaned back against the edge of the sink as she ate. As usual, she found herself thinking about Roy Owen, wondering about him. Such a nice quiet steady little guy. She couldn't imagine him being married to that burnished little woman, all glitter and polish and self-possession. Before the rain came, Roy had started taking long walks in the cool of the early morning, from first light until well past sunup. She wanted to walk with him, and wanted to ask him if she could. But she could not imagine why she was so reluctant. She could be back by check-out time. And there were never that many people to be checked out. And Fred would be up anyway to take care, if she wasn't back. Maybe he would be walking again this morning. She wondered what he thought about as he walked. The missing woman? Or maybe securities he wanted to buy and sell. Or maybe he thought about his little daughter, and the years of married life.

Down in Georgia, at the Purves farm, the rain had tapered off and stopped before midnight. Before they went to bed, Hub had put on his raincoat and boots and gone out with a flashlight to look at how high the water in the creek was getting. It had already covered half of her kitchen garden, and the three of them had picked everything pick able and ripe enough before the water reached it."

He came back in with his thinning hair soaked flat against his head and told them it was still coming up, but very slowly, and he didn't think it would do damage to anything else.