"Would it be possible for you to leave me alone?"

"Pardon me for living."

She jumped up and turned the set off and went back to her mending. After about ten minutes he got up and went out into the kitchen. She did not know why he went out there until she heard the door to the carport shut. He raced the engine of the small dark blue Buick which the Church owned and which was permanently assigned to them. When he drove out she resisted the temptation to try to catch him in the driveway and ask him where he was going. She knew it was a very bad day for Walter Macy. He was heartsick. He had at last realized, as she had earlier, that they were bringing in this backwoods preacher, Tom Birdy, to take over a lot of the preaching chores in the Tabernacle, the work that Walter loved best of all. It was a terrible blow to him after all his faithful labor. In fact, a terrible blow to both of them. Probably that hick would be moving into the Manse. As soon as Walter regained some of his spirits, she decided she would ask him to rally the affiliated ministers to his side to reconfirm him as the first assistant to John Tinker.

She was certain that between the two of them, they could get the affiliates to agree. That hick had no formal training at all as far as anyone could find out. Several times during the day she had tried to get Walter to talk about it, but he had looked at her as though she were some stranger butting into a private conversation he was having inside his head.

Walter drove the Buick down out of the Settlements in a slow and aimless fashion. He had to get out of the house, had to get away from her and her questions and her worry about him. He parked at the Motor House and went into the coffee shop. His stomach was empty and he felt hungry, but when he tried to eat a doughnut at the counter along with his cup of coffee, it turned into a kind of stale mush as he chewed it and he knew that if he swallowed it, he would be ill. He disposed of it in a couple of paper napkins and left them on his plate beside the rest of the doughnut.

One of the things that had bothered him most all day had been his inability to muffle the vividness of the memory of Erskine's eyes and his voice'... going to chase your flabby old ass up and down the woods and the fields until you fall on your sorry old knees with the tears running down your face and tell me just how you came onto her like an animal and crushed her throat to stop the screaming."

It kept coming back into his mind with such a force of prediction that he kept feeling himself being pulled in some strange way toward Erskine, toward confession. But that would be insane. There was no proof. There would never be any proof.

Two young Angels came in out of the rain, evidently with special permission to be in the commercial area this late. There was a rerun of one of the old De Mille biblical motion pictures at one of the Mall theaters. They had probably been to that.

They sat at the counter. There were two empty stools between him and the nearest one. They whispered and giggled together.

The nearest one wore beige shorts and a yellow blouse and carried a furled umbrella. They both ordered chocolate sundaes. They were at his right. The long curve of the top of the girl's thigh was exquisite. He shaded his eyes to conceal the direction and intensity of his inspection of her. She hitched forward on the stool, her knees a foot apart, and he saw where the two lines of her thighs converged softly and gently to stop at a point just far enough apart to provide a sweet space, pouched in beige fabric, for the little curly chestnut thatch, moist pink lips, perky little clitoral button, her magic kingdom awaiting assault. And of course the cheap little teasing slut would know what she was doing flaunting it around, and parading the rubbery cheeks of her taut little ass, and the swollen pink-brown of her nipples. She strutted about, defying God and man in her wickedness, challenging the thunderbolt, practically demanding that somebody take her up on her lascivious flaunting and teach her that the reward for evil was pain and fear and death.

He shuddered and realized that he must have made some odd sound, because they were all looking at him with a kind of bland and meaningless curiosity.

"Sorry," he said, 'sorry." He left his coffee and went to the cashier and paid the tab and went out into the misted rain, wondering if he had really had those same thoughts back there during that night in May, or if he now merely imagined that he had thought things like that. Because if he had, then it was probably not an accident. But it had to be.

He drove west and took the on ramp and headed north on the Interstate. The phased windshield wipers swept and paused, swept and paused. There was little traffic. The tires made a hissing sound on the pavement. He noticed the speedometer and was shocked to see that it read in the low eighties.

He slowed down at once and turned off at the next exit, forgetting that there was no southbound on ramp at that first exit north of Lakemore. When he realized his mistake, he pulled off the road and got a local road map out of the glove compartment. He saw that he could head east on a county road that would intersect a state road. He could go south on the state road and come out a few miles east of Meadows Center.

While he was studying the map he thought of the young girl's thighs again, and found that he was swollen large inside his trousers. There seemed to be an unwanted and unfocused sexual excitement in his body that made his face hot and his breath short and rapid. He willed it to go away but it remained.

And he could not pry his thoughts away from the girl. The country road was narrow, but it had been recently resurfaced.

He began to drive fast, thinking that if he could make himself nervous about the speed of the car, the erection would subside.

But the sensation of speed and the vibration of the car, the sway of it as he rounded the gentle curves, seemed to enhance his tumid state.

He slowed down, and finally took his foot off the gas pedal entirely. The constriction of underwear and trousers was so uncomfortable as to be almost painful. He unzipped himself and prodded himself free. In the faint glow of the dash lights he saw that rigid pallid thing, under the bottom edge of the steering wheel. The car was almost at a stop. An old farm truck rattled by at high speed, startling him with the roar of engine, blare of horn.

Quite suddenly, and almost with a feeling of relief, he realized that the thing down there, that hard, yearning, grist led object, was the devil. It was Satan which had affixed himself to the body of the servant of the Lord, and thus held that servant in his power. Once long ago he had become drunk for the only time in his life. A fellow ecclesia st had sworn the tall refreshing drinks had little or no potency. And in his drunken state he had felt like this, he recalled. A kind of intense revelation, an awareness of great mysteries around him. A necessity for some kind of act, but he could not guess what it would be.

He moved the car slowly ahead, looking out through the sweep of the wipers, and he saw a small iron bridge. At first he thought he would pull off the road at the right, but it looked too overgrown to get completely off the pavement. He swung over to the left where there was a bare shoulder, pulled on to it, turned off the car lights and the engine. The wipers were stilled. The clear spaces became dotted with fine rain, visible against distant muted starlight.

The Reverend Doctor F. Walter Macy grasped himself with his right hand and opened the car door with his left. He stepped out into the night, feeling the prickle of mist on his face. He could hear a rushing and whispering of water. He thought he might best step into the thicker brush for what he was about to have to do.

When he took the second step, his heel slid on wet clay and he fell heavily onto his left shoulder and hip. He was on a forty-five-degree slope. He turned onto his hands and knees and pushed himself erect so he could walk up the slope. A wet branch slashed back across his throat and, in dodging it, he fell backward, realizing as he fell that it would have been preferable to have crawled up the slope on his hands and knees. He fell to the foot of the short slope and struck the back of his head on a shale ledge. It so stunned him that when he lurched to his feet, suddenly and desperately alarmed, he staggered to his right, put one foot deep into the rushing creek water and, with a cry of anger and despair, he fell into the creek, into floodwater boiling with energy and country topsoil. It rolled him over and over and he caught at an edge of the bridge support.

He held on there for a time, and then the water yanked him free. He knew he would have to swim to shore, and shore could not be far away. He knew he would have to swim in the direction of the current. He swam into the smaller branches of a great tree which, undermined, had fallen halfway across the creek. He made swimming motions, ever more slowly until his lungs filled and he rested there, entrapped, deceased, his head and shoulders upstream, his legs swinging slowly back and forth in the changing pull of the muddy currents.

Ten minutes later a deputy sheriff, returning to the rural station in West Carrolton, came upon the car parked over on the shoulder on the wrong side of the road, just before the Knoll Creek bridge. As he pulled in to park nose to nose with it, he could see the driver's door was open, the dome light on. He got out with his big flashlight in his left hand, and unsnapped his holster before he moved toward the dark Buick. He walked slowly and cautiously all the way around it, shining his light in the windows. Keys in the ignition. Unfolded map in the seat beside the driver. Local tags. No luggage. A Meadows Center parking sticker on the rear bumper and another one on the front side of the rearview mirror.

If the car had run out of gas, it would have been on the proper side of the road, and locked. Same if some mechanical problem had occurred. The deputy's name was Walker Hendry and he had been six years in the department, long enough to feel uneasy when he came upon something in the night that did not make sense. The misty rain had stopped. He moved back around to the open door and shone his bright beam down the abrupt brushy slope, and saw a fresh scar in the clay, as might be made by the heel of a leather shoe. He saw two branches freshly broken. With care, he eased his way down the slick incline and, at the bottom, on the bank of the creek, he came upon a pair of eyeglasses with heavy black frames. The frames were twisted and the left lens was cracked. Had they been in that exact spot during the time of the heavier rains earlier in the evening, they would have been spattered with mud.

It was beginning to take shape in his mind, a process of cause and effect. Somebody, alone, in a big hurry to stop and get out, and that was why the car was on the wrong side. Too much growth too close to the hardpan on the other side. A drunk sick to his stomach, or a case of diarrhea, or an emergency bladder problem. So he slipped and pitched down the slope, landed hard and rolled into the creek. In the focused light the creek looked like sudsy chocolate milk.

He climbed back up to the car and walked out onto the bridge, thinking that the poor son of a bitch would be a couple of miles downstream by now. The rains had turned every trickle into some kind of Niagara. He stood at the iron railing and shone his light downstream. There was a big tree that had fallen at an angle, blocking half the creek. The body was in dark clothing and he could not determine its position until the light picked up half an ear out of water and the white temple.

Walker Hendry sighed and spat, and wished he had taken the other road in. This was going to hold him up for an hour anyway, to say nothing of the damn forms and reports. It would be nice, he thought, if it turned out to be somebody unimportant. It would take less time. As he reached to try the key to see if the Buick would start, he hesitated and pulled back. There was always the chance the whole thing had been staged, and the man caught in all those little twigs and branches of the great tree had been thumped on the head and dumped in. He went back to the county vehicle and his radio and called in, saying to the dispatcher, "Guess what I got, doll."

Twenty-One.

On Saturday morning at eleven o'clock the Reverend Doctor John Tinker Meadows met with the press and the television and radio people in the fourth-floor conference room at the Manse and read the statement prepared for him by Jenny Albritton, Spencer McKay and Walker McGaw, assisted by Alberta Macy. They had begun work at midnight on Friday, and at six on Saturday morning, after Alberta had gone home, they rehearsed John Tinker, correcting the script wherever the lines did not sound quite right.

"Ladies and gentlemen of the media, I want to thank you personally for appearing here on such short notice. There will be no need for any of you to take notes. Mrs. Albritton has seen to it that enough extra copies of this statement have been prepared to give one to each of you.

"As all of you doubtless know by now, my trusted and valued First Assistant Pastor of the Eternal Church of the Believer, the Reverend Doctor Walter Macy, drowned in an unfortunate and terrible mishap last night while on an errand of mercy. His grieving wife, Alberta Macy, has told us that Walter was quite distressed all day yesterday, worrying about a family of members of the Church who live in West Carrolton.

They have had bad fortune recently, and they have written me several times, asking if the Church might be able to help them. I had asked Walter to look into it when he had a chance.

"Those of you well acquainted with the area know that West Carrolton is on County Road 88-Z, a dozen miles west of the next exit north on the Interstate. Mrs. Macy has told us that Walter said to her that he was going to go visit with that family and find out how the Church might help. It was quite dark last night, with a persistent drizzle and ground mist. What we are assuming is that Walter got his direction confused when he came down off the Interstate and headed east rather than west, as was his intention. After ten miles or so, he apparently began to realize that he was not passing any familiar landmarks, and so he pulled well off the narrow road it was County Road 88-Z-by a small bridge that crosses Knoll Creek and one must assume that he studied his road map. It was open on the seat beside the driver's seat when the alert deputy came upon the empty vehicle with its lights out, engine off, and the driver's door open.

"There is little point in speculating on why Doctor Macy got out of the car. It is sufficient to say that careful expert examination of the scene shows that he slipped on the clay bank, fell to the bottom, struck his head on a shelf of shale rock and rolled into Knoll Creek, where the water has been high and fast for many days. The cause of death has been established as accidental drowning.

"This is another sad blow to all of us. Last week we lost Molly, the wife of one of our valued executives, Mr. Rolf Wintergarten, in an automobile accident. And just recently, though there was no connection to Meadows Center and our work here, the body of one of the members of the press was discovered, long dead, in the bottom of a well within twelve miles of here. It has indeed been a tragic summer thus far in the annals of the Eternal Church of the Believer.

The Reverend Doctor Walter Macy will be buried up on the hillside behind the Manse next Wednesday at high noon.

There will be a small service at the chapel on the hill and at the grave site, and the whole community will be present at the candlelight memorial service at dusk that same day.

"We are sorry to lose these people out of a life of piety and service and self-sacrifice. But we know they have, in the midst of life, been harvested by the Lord and taken to His kingdom for life everlasting.

"I am prepared to answer any questions."

"What's the name of the family he was going to see?"

"I'm sure you all understand why I must keep that information confidential."

"Don't you think that sounds as if you're covering up something?"

"I am. I am covering up their identity to save them from harassment and embarrassment."

"Do you know if there are any clues in the case of Linda Owen?"

"I haven't heard of any new developments. My personal guess is that it will never be solved. The trail was, as they say, too cold."

"How much money will the Eternal Church take in this year?"

"Next question?"