The Name on the Broadcast novel · Chapter 18 of 24

Chapter 18: Sunday

"When?" I said. "What time?"

"After the service. They bring them in the camper, to the church house, while everybody's still at coffee." Rachel's whisper shook. "She'll be in the back of it right now. Somewhere on a highway."

"Rachel, listen to me. Don't do anything. Just be in church tomorrow."

"I'm always in church," she said, and hung up.

I told the detective.

He went pale under the buzzing light, and then he went to the radio.

By midnight there were troopers parked on every road that led up the hill, in the dark, with their lights off.

"Nobody gets up," the detective said. "And nothing comes down that I haven't looked inside."

He looked at me.

"The book," he said. "You get it in your hands, you text me. We're up that hill in four minutes."

"Four minutes is a long time in that church."

"I know it is."

At ten to ten on Sunday morning, Annie's brother drove me to the bottom of the church lane.

Frances sat beside him with her hands folded so tight her rings dug in.

Ben was in the back seat.

He leaned forward between the front seats.

"I could come in with you," he said.

"They'd stop you at the door. You're not kin and you're not bought."

"I could be kin."

Frances turned around and looked at him over her glasses.

"Was that a proposal? In my son's truck?"

"No, ma'am. It was a bad joke."

"Well, make a better one when she gets back."

I laughed. It came out shaky.

Then I got out of the truck.

I walked up the lane alone.

The church bell was going.

It sounded exactly the way it had every Sunday of my life.

The white doors were propped open. Organ music came out of them, the slow hymn they always opened with.

I walked in.

Every pew was full.

Every family in town, in the same seats they'd sat in for forty years. Men in pressed shirts. Children with wet-combed hair.

The deacon who'd held the shovel was gone. His wife sat alone, staring straight ahead.

Grandma Verna was in the front pew, on the aisle, in her good gray suit and her pearl clip earrings.

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