said. “But . . . yes, a bunch of us church people in town have thought about them. We had a Catholic priest here for a few years, Danny McCoy—he’s up at the archdiocese now, doing something important. We used to play poker with a couple of other guys. He was no good at it, he couldn’t bluff worth a darn. He won’t tell you anything, because I think it came in a confession, but he apparently heard from somebody that there was no good going on there. He was conflicted. He mentioned it to me privately; I’m sure he wouldn’t talk to you. I don’t know if it went any further than me, or if he took it up with his superiors—he took the bonds of confession seriously. He was never explicit, but I got the feeling, though, that there was something sexual going on.”

“Have you ever felt that?”

Baumhauer took a deep breath, looked away for a moment, then said, “Yes. I can’t say where or how, because I can’t remember—it’s just rumors and implications and comments over the years, about marrying them off young over there, and things like that.”

“Mmm. You never mentioned it to anyone?”

“Well, I suspect you’d find a lot of older people around here, especially churchgoers, who have heard something. But it’s all vague,” Baumhauer said. “The other thing is, when I was a kid, I was working in an area in Indiana with a lot of Amish. I got to know some of them, and they’re good folks. Solid. They have some of the same characteristics as the World of Spirit—they keep themselves separate, they homeschool, they intermarry. And they’re good people. So you get the feeling, you can’t pick on a whole church. If you even hint at it, people are going to go off in all directions. That’s just not right, either. Tainting a whole church, with no real knowledge at all.”

Virgil sighed and said, “Yeah.”

“But, that said, they’re not the Amish,” Baumhauer said. “The Amish are separate, but not secretive. They’re not paranoid. And you can see why they believe what they do—they’re staying away from the modern world, and it carries right through from the way they dress, to the vehicles they drive, to the way they furnish their houses. No TV and so on. The World of Spirit, you don’t see that—they’ve got TV and nice cars and big tractors, and back during Vietnam, their boys would get drafted and go off to fight. The only thing they’re different about is what happens with their church, what it’s all about, and they’re secret about that. Paranoid.”

“As you say, you don’t have anything specific.”

“No, no, I don’t. But . . . did you ever hear of Birdy Olms?”

“I have. She supposedly ran away from them.”

“I’ve heard that, too. Quite a few years back. The story in the church circles here was that the local Jehovah’s Witnesses took to witnessing on her porch when her husband wasn’t around, and she began to doubt the church and got into some kind of trouble with the church and ran away. If you can find her, she’d be worth talking to, I think.”

VIRGIL WAS RUNNING behind when he left the church, and was five minutes late to Coakley’s house. Coakley, along with Schickel and Dennis Brown, was waiting in her living room. Brown was a tall, fat man, with a round, red face and white hair. He did not look jolly, and would have been a rotten Santa Claus; he carried a sad, deep-eye brooding look, and perpetually pursed lips. When he and Virgil shook hands, Virgil was surprised to find his hand hard, dried, and callused, like a sailor’s.

Coakley said, “Okay, Virgil. You called the meeting.”

Virgil dragged an easy chair around so he could face Brown and Coakley on the couch, and Schickel on another easy chair. Schickel had a laptop and a legal pad, used the laptop as a lap desk as he doodled on the yellow pad.

Virgil asked, “Everybody know about Spooner, and her story?”

They all did, and Schickel said, “I think she killed him. I’ve known Jim Crocker for a long time, no goddamn way he ate his own gun. He would have wiggled and squirmed and cried and hired lawyers and done everything he could to get out of it. If he was going to commit suicide, he would have taken pills.”

“I’ll second that,” Brown drawled.

Virgil nodded. “My boss is going to call me anytime now and tell me