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would begin in half an hour, but at the moment the narthex and the nave were deserted.

At the back of the sanctuary, to the right of the altar, a door opened into the sacristy, where Father Tom daily prepared for Mass. The outside door of the sacristy brought me again to the serviceway where I had left our luggage in the rain.

I transferred the bags to a supply closet off the sacristy. There was a time, maybe prior to 1965, when they say you could leave unattended belongings almost anywhere and find them untouched when you returned. These days, a church is your only half-safe bet.

Vandals visit churches with increasing frequency, but thieves seldom do. Maybe the average thief worries that someone whose opinion he values might see him entering a house of worship and get the wrong idea, suspecting him of having gone over to the light side.

Earlier, in the car, I printed and signed a note to place on the luggage: DEAR FR. TOM, I’LL BE BACK FOR THIS STUFF SHORTLY. EXPLAIN LATER.

I hoped to retrieve the bags before anyone found them, making an explanation unnecessary. I didn’t know the extent to which Waxx might expand his to-kill list to include people I told about him, so I half feared that involving Father Tom would make him a target.

Among other things, the closet contained a few rolls of paper towels. I took one, closed the door, and backed across the sacristy, blotting up the water that had dripped from my coat onto the floor, so no one else would open the closet to get towels to attend to the task. Outside, I dropped the towels, used and unused, in a trash can.

As twilight drowned and night swam down through the rain, I walked to the northwest corner of the church property, where two streets met.

After I waited about a minute, scanning the oncoming traffic, I spotted the Explorer approaching. In the gloom and the downpour, I could not clearly see the driver.

Blinking into the glare of the headlights, I suddenly knew that the vehicle would slow but not stop. And as it glided past the driver would be the Maserati monster.

When the Explorer pulled to the curb and I saw Penny behind the wheel, I shuddered with relief.

Some parts of the night were darker than others.

In the current economic mess, which politicians caused and which they insisted they could fix by imposing on us more suffering and unreason, many small businesses were destroyed. Previously thriving commercial centers, where entrepreneurs had stood in line to rent space, now had empty units not leasable at any price.

Beddlington Promenade had been a busy open-air shopping center. When the real-estate bubble burst, the property value dropped forty percent. The Promenade was losing tenants, hemorrhaging cash, and the highly leveraged owners let it go back to the bank.

Because the location remained superb, a retail specialist proposed to rescue the center. The bank wanted to finance this new owner in an arrangement that would have made it a partner.

Having seminationalized the bank, as it did many others, the government insisted on a say in its future operations. The Promenade deal would have been golden for the bank, but the federal regulators had a list of investments more appealing to the political class.

Beddlington Promenade closed. Vandals broke the windows at many of the empty stores, and sheets of plywood took the place of glass. Now Day-Glo graffiti covered the walls and seemed to throb in the dark, reminding me of cave paintings and of the crude symbols of barbaric languages.

The vast parking lot had once been graced with a geometric bosk of sizable trees, eighty to a hundred podocarpuses. With the failure of the Promenade, no effort was made to excavate these fine specimens and sell them. Over one summer, when the irrigation system was left off, the trees died.

Turning from the street, we entered this darker part of the night, and Penny parked under a bleakness of leafless and beseeching limbs.

We abandoned the Explorer and, with Lassie on a leash, walked two blocks to a bus stop.

Milo envied our black raincoats and profoundly disliked his bright yellow gear. “I look like a baby chicken.”

I told him earlier that the store offered children’s sizes only in yellow. Now I said, “Actually, you look more like a duckling.”

“That makes me feel so much better.”

“I’ll bet if I squeeze your nose, it’ll honk.”

“Geese honk. Ducks quack.”

“Let’s see,” I said.

Putting a protective hand over his nose, Milo said,