her Bible, toward the very end.

“What is it this time?” she asked.

“I wanted to talk to you,” Virgil said, taking a chair without asking. “I’ve been trying to settle the whole Kelly Baker murder in my mind. I’m pretty sure I know what happened. I believe your husband and Jim Crocker were involved in a sexual relationship with her, and were present when she died, and that the Tripp boy found out about it. That set him off, and his arrest set off Crocker, and Crocker was killed to keep him quiet.”

“Impossible to prove all that,” she said. “Everybody’s dead.”

“But proving it, if we could do it, would still be interesting, because there might have been a third man involved, or even more,” Virgil said. “Which brings up the whole question of the World of Spirit. All of these people were members, including Kelly and her parents. So the question comes up, was this a church thing? I mean, a regular church thing, allowed and supervised by the church? How many people were involved?”

“It’s not the church,” she said. “It can’t be the church.” But she was stressed, and, Virgil thought, maybe lying.

“It would be hard to believe,” Virgil said. He nodded at her Bible. “Anyone who takes the Bible seriously, who believes that we’ll go on to another world, couldn’t be involved in this kind of thing. Child abuse, murder. But we know about the problems that the Catholic Church has had. . . . There will be, Mrs. Flood, hell to pay. Literally. You read in your Good Book where John the Revelator says, when he talks about the City that has no need of the Sun, because it has the Light of the Lord. He says, ‘There shall in no wise enter into it anything unclean, or he that maketh an abomination and a lie: but only they that are written in the Lamb’s book of life.’ Will the people in the church enter that City?”

She sat as if stricken, didn’t say a word, but fixed him with an eye like a dead bird’s, not even blinking.

One of the girls said, “Mom? Are you okay?”

“‘They repented not of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts,’” Virgil said, leaning forward, pounding it in. “And then there’s the part that says, ‘And I saw, and behold, a pale horse: and he that sat upon him, his name was Death, and Hades followed with him.’”

No response. One of the girls said, “I think you should go now.”

Virgil stood and said to Alma Flood, “I’ve got a source who knows about the church. I spoke to her yesterday, and it’s possible that the sins of the church will come back to haunt all of you. Save yourself and your daughters, Mrs. Flood. Help me out, if you can.”

Finally, she moved, to shake her head. “You go on now,” she said. “Go on out of here.”

Virgil turned away, and she said, “Maybe.”

“What?”

“Maybe something will happen. Maybe the pale horse is already here.” She held up her hand and looked at it in the light of her reading lamp, and said, “You go on. But I will talk to you one more time. Not now.”

THE TWO GIRLS came as far as the side door.

Edna said, “Rooney wouldn’t like to see you here. He says you have a bad effect on our minds.”

Virgil said, “I’d like to hear you speak your minds, what you two really think. What you talk about at night, between the two of you. You’re old enough to have your own thoughts. Then we could decide whether I’m bad for you, or Rooney is.”

Neither one said anything, and Virgil walked away, turning once to see them standing on the porch, watching him. Helen’s lips were moving; she was speaking to Edna without looking at her, tracking Virgil instead; or maybe it was a prayer. Virgil was thoroughly creeped out, not only by Alma Flood and the two girls, but by himself.

There was, he thought, something fundamentally crooked about using the Bible to crack a Bible-believer, and that feeling of being stained by his own actions, if that’s what he felt, reached so far back into his childhood that he’d never escape it.

He looked back at the house, snarled, “Fuck it,” over his shoulder, and headed down the drive.

SOMETHING LIKE two hours over to Hayfield, but he made it in a bit more than an hour and a half, by driving way too fast.