off to sleep, he thought he saw her. She was looking at him, and there was something wrong with her. Her neck looked funny—stretched out and tilted at an odd angle.
When the little boy screamed, a nun hurried into the room and put her arms around him. The nun held him until he went back to sleep.
On the third day they took him to church and the little boy realized that his parents weren’t going to come and get him. He realized that they were in the boxes at the front of tibe church, and that after the boxes were taken away, he wouldn’t see them again.
He asked if it would be all right if he looked at his parents before they were taken away, but he was told that he couldn’t He wondered why.
During the funeral service the little boy kept looking curiously around the church, and shortly before tibe service ended, he tugged at the black folds of the habit the woman next to him was wearing. He knew she was a nun, and that she would take care of him. He tugged again at her habit and she leaned down to put her ear close to his lips.
“Where’s Elaine?” he asked. “Isn’t she going to be here?”
The nun stared at the little boy for a moment, then shook her head.
“She can’t be here,” the nun said finally. “You mustn’t think about her anymore, or talk about her.”
“Why not?” the little boy asked.
“Never mind,” the nun admonished him. “Your sister was an evil child, and she has sinned. You mustn’t think about her.”
The funeral mass ended, and his parents were taken from the church. He watched them go, and wondered what had happened to them.
And what had happened to his sister.
And why he was by himself.
But, of course, he wasn’t by himself. He was in the convent, but no one would tell him why. He heard someone—one of the sisters—say: “Hell get over it. He’ll forget. It will be better that way.”
The little boy did not forget. Not while he was small, and not while he grew up. Always, he was aware that something had happened. Something had happened to his parents, and to his sister. And his sister had caused it to happen.
His sister was evil.
She had sinned.
He knew that God forgave sinners.
But who punishes them?
By the time he was ten, he had stopped asking. Nobody had ever told him the answer.
BOOK ONE
The Saints of Neilsville
1
Peter Balsam trudged to the top of Cathedral Hill and stared up at the forbidding stone façade of the Church of St. Francis Xavier. The desert heat seemed to intensify, and Balsam could feel sweat pouring from his armpits, and forming rivulets as it coursed down his back. He sank down on the steps in front of the church, and stared at the vista below him.
The town was called Neilsville, and it lay shimmering in the heat of the Eastern Washington desert like some dying thing writhing in agony with each tortured breath, unable to end its misery.
There was an aura about Neilsville, an aura that Peter Balsam had felt the minute he had arrived but had not yet been able to define.
A word had flashed into his mind the moment he had gotten off the train two hours earlier. He had put it immediately out of his mind. It had kept coming back.
Evil.
It covered the town like the stink of death, and Peter Balsam’s first impulse had been to run—to put himself and all his possessions on the next train east, and get away from Neilsville as fast as he could.
But the next train would not be until tomorrow, and so, reluctantly, he had gone to the apartment that had been rented for him. He had not unpacked his suitcases, not put his name on the mailbox, not tried to order a phone, not done any of the other things that one normally does to settle into a new home.
Instead, he had tried to tell himself that the pervading sense of foreboding, of something desperately wrong in the town, was only in his imagination, and had set out to explore the place.
After two hours he had climbed Cathedral Hill, and now he was about to present himself to the man who had brought him to Neilsville.
He slipped into the gloom of the church, dipped his fingers into the holy water, made the sign of the cross as he genuflected, and slid into a pew. Peter Balsam began to pray.