"Do you have a replacement for Reverend Macy?"

"I am appointing a search committee from among the pastors who head the affiliated churches. Perhaps one of the men on the committee itself will be found suitable. In the meantime my sister and I will shoulder the entire burden."

"Can your father take over any part of it?"

"Regrettably, no. He is not up to it. He is willing, of course, but his voice is too far gone for that kind of strain."

"Is it true that you fired your administrative officer?"

"Mr. Efflander? Not at all. He was told by his doctors that he had been under too much strain for too long. So we agreed to his taking a leave of absence. We all hope he will decide to return when he is feeling better. He developed a strong staff during the time he was here and so things are running smoothly."

"There is a rumor about a hospital here and a medical school and school of nursing. Is that in your plans?"

"All I will say is that if it is indeed in our plans, it is too far in the future to be discussed at this time. I believe that we do not have time for any more questions. I would like to close by telling you that I have been in consultation with Alberta Macy and it is her desire and mine that the Church, in conjunction with the University, set up a special faculty chair in Biblical History. Mrs. Macy will take an active role in helping establish this memorial fund and I need not add that she will remain on as a valued member of the Meadows Center family. Thank you all."

The bright lights were turned off and John Tinker slipped through the door that led to his own suite. He closed it and locked it and leaned against it for a moment with his eyes closed. It seemed to him that it had gone well. Better than he had any right to hope, the way Alberta Macy had reacted at first. It had taken a long time to convince her that it was beneficial to the Church to have a story everyone would accept. And as Tom Daniel Birdy had refused to come aboard, the scenario of Walter Macy storming out of the house, enraged and sick at heart at being displaced, would just not play. Every effort would be made to make life pleasant for the bereaved.

And Spencer McKay, with the backing of Jenny Albritton, had been right in saying that there was no point in stating, as had the accident report, that the condition of Macy's clothing indicated that he had gotten out of the car to relieve himself.

Spencer had composed the sentence that said there was no point in speculation. It made the whole thing more dignified.

In the heavy heat and silence of Saturday afternoon, Eliot Erskine and Rick Liddy parked where the abandoned Buick had been found, and got out of the cool security car and walked out onto the bridge. Three little kids, scrawny and sun-browned, were standing by the rail looking down toward the tree where the body had been.

The tallest one looked at them and said, They pulled a drownded man out of there, stuck in that tree. He was pissing in the river and fell in."

"You got it about right, kid," Rick said, 'but you should learn better language."

The smallest one said, "There was a horse drownded in there a long time ago. A big horse."

"You kids stay out of fast water," Erskine said.

"It's tricky.

It'll get you."

They walked back and got into the car and turned the air on high and drove slowly away, Liddy at the wheel.

"Cold beer?" Liddy asked.

"Fine by me. Now what?"

"What do you mean by this "now what"?"

"Isn't there still a chance they'll try to make Moses for the Owen thing? What's to keep the new guy from moving on him when Dockerty takes off the end of the month?"

"I think it's all over."

"It isn't over until it's over. Yogi Bear."

"We're going to be around, aren't we?"

"Far as I know, Rick."

"The best chance is the new sheriff will clean up his area to save future trouble, and Moses will get the usual roust and become somebody else's problem five hundred miles from here. But if it doesn't happen that way, we keep an eye on it.

And if they ever try anything that dumb, we can tilt the machinery a little."

"Mind telling me how?"

"What are you? Some kind of total straight-arrow warrior?

It would take one of those notes made with letters cut out of _ the newspaper.

"Oh, sir, it has been on my conscience so bad, waking up in that busted-down barn and seeing that big preacher that drowned carrying a body to that well and dumping it in and covering it over with boards from the barn." "Won't that open up the whole mess?"

"Doubt it. Charley Winchester would be in on it, and that note would go into the back of a safe in his office. Nice and quiet. And you can't try a dead man. And if Walter Macy and the rest of the preachers are right about what's waiting in the next world, old Walter is up to his glottis in boiling lava, bellowing his lungs out. That place ahead look okay for a quick beer?"

"I did it to him, Rick. I shook him loose from his life. I turned myself into Crazy Lew Yolen and pushed him into the creek and out of this world into the next one. Makes me feel weird."

"I asked you if the place ahead looks okay for a cold one."

"Okay, okay. All right already!"

"What's to yell at me about, Elly? The hotter it gets, the better cold beer tastes."

The Reverend Doctor John Tinker Meadows stood silent and motionless at the pulpit of the great Tabernacle of the Eternal Church of the Believer, staring at the stained-glass window at the far end of the building, and listening to the murmur and rustle of the enormous congregation as the sounds slowly diminished.

Once again the vast space was filled for an early-morning service, even in the heat of the sun belt in August. The three broad aisles which sloped down toward the altar rail at a slight angle cut the congregation into four equal portions, fifteen worshippers wide, sixty rows deep. Another thousand were over in the University theater, watching him on the big screen in closed-circuit color, and he knew that up in the control booth to the left of the stained glass, high above the entrance doors, the production manager and the director were watching the monitor sets, cueing the camera stations. The sound was being mixed with due regard for whichever camera was being used.

He felt a trickle of sweat on his ribs, under the cassock and surplice, and reacted with familiar exasperation toward the so-called experts who had designed the subterranean air conditioning. It had proven ample for the giant space even in midsummer, but had a built-in low-frequency rumble which made it impossible to use it at full throttle when taping. Finn Efflander had put someone to work on a filter that might keep the rumble off the recording. But even were it working properly, he knew that by the end of the sermon his clothing would be sodden. He perspired heavily whenever and wherever he preached. His face would be wet and shiny in the close ups partially defeating the efforts of makeup to give him the look of a younger Charlton Heston.

He was aware of a slight change of the light off to his left and realized that someone in the control booth had pressed one of the buttons which controlled the movement of the huge translucent, fire-resistant draperies, to move one of them slightly to cut off an edge of morning sun, making the interior light whiter and more luminous.

He heard some whispering from forty feet behind him and a dozen feet above him, and he well knew the stare his sister would direct at the offenders. The choir of fifty young women, the Meadows Angels, was a chronic disciplinary problem. Had they been selected more for voice quality and less for beauty, he guessed the problem would be lessened a bit. When he thought of beauty he remembered his sister's recommendation regarding her oldest Angel, Tracy Bellwright.

John Tinker Meadows turned just enough to see the far right end of the loft, where he knew she would be. He looked directly at her and she saw him and began to smile and changed her mind, and then blushed bright pink. A lovely young woman indeed.

But he knew it was impossible, and did not know why. He saw her as though through glass, as though she lived in another world, or another time and place. It was like seeing in the oncoming traffic, stopped for a red light, an attractive woman driving a car. You saw her through the windshield. There was a mild pleasure in looking at her and a mild curiosity about her life, her problems, her joys. And then the light changed and you never saw her again anywhere, ever.

John Tinker Meadows knew that many in the congregation each Sunday were seeing the service in person for the first time, after years of faithful membership, generous tithing, much television viewing. To them the thrill of being in the same space, breathing the same air, as the famous John Tinker Meadows and his sister, Mary Margaret Meadows, was only slightly dimmed by their being such tiny figures so far away, unlike the living-room screen at home. And as the service proceeded, they would begin to realize that it ran longer than the fifty-minute version edited for cable.

It was time. When a child coughed, the cumulative silence made the small sound carry. He looked at them, feeling their tension and their excitement. He was a tall slender man with gray-blonde hair worn long at the sides, brushed back. He tried to fuel his own energies from their expectancy, from their belief.

It was time. He looked down at his opening lines, and at the marginal messages which would coordinate his talk with the marked scripts in the control booth. One more Sunday, he thought. I will get through this one somehow, and there will be another. And another and another. Somebody accepted an award once and spoke of prevailing rather than merely enduring. God, if You are there and if You will ever listen to me again, I no longer want to prevail. It will be enough merely to endure.

nonetheless stoop to blackmail or worse to insure his position as John Tinker's successor... Roy Owen, a stranger in Meadows Center, whose lonely search for his missing journalist wife is thwarted at every turn...

Unfolding through these lives is a tale of extortion and intrigue, of sexual exploitation and moral ambiguity, of murder and redemption, of the tainted reality that exists behind the facade of moral rectitude and holiness that the leaders of the Eternal Church present to the world. An enthralling work of fiction from one of America's most gifted and successful novelists.