Hard Truth- Pigeon 13 by Nevada Barr Page A

suddenly.ware of the silence: no people talking, no televisions murmuring behind closed doors, no phones ringing or lawn mowers buzzing, no traffic. The underlying pulse of life that is a constant where people gather together to live was missing. New Canaan felt comatose, all life locked deep within an inert body of which Mr. Sheppard was apparently the brain. Anna guessed if he wasn't the de facto bishop, he was one of the elders.

"Bet you could get a house here cheap," Lorraine.said with a wry smile.

"My soul as collateral for the mortgage?"

Lorraine shook her head. "I don't understand this kind of fanaticism, Trading today for an eternity elsewhere. Plain old life is the best fun I've ever had."

A door opened on the opposite end of the house from where the origi-nal activity had occurred. Mrs. Dwayne stepped out onto the packed dirt. "Why don't you come in for a cup of coffee?" she said brightly, as if they

were neighbor ladies paying a call.

The room they were ushered into was about three times the size of a standard living room in a tract house, and even less appealing. No win-dows let in the light of day. No pictures graced the walls. The room was Dare but for two rows of backless benches and a lectern. Mrs. Dwayne referred to it as the chapel but, to Anna's mind, it was the last place an omniscient being would choose to spend time. There wasn't any coffee.

Mr. Sheppard stood just to the right of the lectern, arms folded across his chest, beard thrust out pugnaciously. Robert Proffit hunched on the front bench, elbows on knees, hands buried in his hair like a proper renitent. The chief ranger took the bench behind him so he'd be forced to turn around. Anna stood to one side, her senses in a state of hyper-awareness. She didn't like the space, the New Caananites or the feel of crucified rodents in her brain.

"Mr. Proffit," Lorraine said, her voice warm and motherly, "we've been told Candace stayed with you when the other two girls went for their walk."

That brought his head out of his hands. He twisted around to face her. The shock on his face looked genuine enough but, were he a manipula-tive psychotic, it might have been shock that one of his victims had the temerity to rat him out.

"Who told you that?" he said. Not "It's not true" or "That's absurd," but a demand for identification of his accuser.

"Who would know?" the chief countered.

In conscious or habitual drama, he reburied his head in his hands, fin-gers raking the long curling hair into a crazed thatch. "The girls wouldn't tell you that," he muttered to the floor between his feet. "They know I love them. They're like my own children-God's children-put into my care. I love them in a way those not followers of the Lord can never know."

"You're barking up the wrong tree." Mr. Sheppard added a dash of the prosaic to Proffit's rhapsodizing.

"What would be the right tree?" Lorraine asked.

Her question went unanswered. Proffit began to pray or converse with his knees, Anna wasn't sure which. Lorraine met her eye for a second. Time to go to work. Straddling the bench beside Proffit, her knee nudg-ing his, Anna leaned into him and said, "Hey, Robert, what do you think of mice?"

"Mice!" he squawked and levitated at least six inches off the bench, looking around him wildly. Had he been a cartoon elephant he would have leaped atop the lectern and balanced on his four feeties. "Where?"

"Mice in general," Anna said when he'd settled a bit.

"Don't do that," he said with an odd mixture of ferocity and plaintive-ness. Then: "I don't much care for mice. They're filthy things. Diseased, a lot of them."

"So you kill them to clean up the planet?"

Proffit had recovered from Anna's mouse assault. Vulnerability went underground. The gaze he turned on her was sharp, focused. For the first time it occurred to her that he might be smart; not just clever but very; very smart. That was one more "very" than she could lay claim to and she warned herself to be careful