Relentless by Ed Gorman

door to call her unfit and insist that she resign. Or be fired.
        But then she thought about the children. She owed them an explanation and perhaps an apology. She loved them and she knew that most of them loved her. In a very real sense, she saw them as reflections of herself, what she’d taught them these past years.
        A group of eight mothers met her at the door. There were no children present. As usual with mobs of any size-and eight is plenty for a mob-there were two outspoken ones. The rest lost a lot of their ire when they saw her. They suddenly felt sorry for her or realized that they, too, had done foolish things in their own past.
        Callie tried to get into the schoolhouse to write a note on the blackboard for the students, but the two women wouldn’t let her. Nor would they let her get her things out of her desk. Hiram Weaver, one of the two town councilmen who liked Callie and me, showed up and told everybody to calm down. He noted that Callie, whatever her past had been, was a fine teacher and that Skylar was lucky to have her. Callie was heartened by this, thinking that Hiram would at least let her write out her note of apology on the blackboard. But he ultimately sided with the two women and said that it would probably be better if she just went on home for a few days until this thing was all straightened out.
        By this time, half the women present were taking Callie’s side and arguing with their self-appointed leaders. Callie said that the arguments had gotten not only testy but pretty personal. The only way she could stop the women from having at each other was to slip away. Hiram walked with her to her horse. He was long on apology but short on advice. All he could come up with was: “Maybe you and Lane better stick pretty close to home until things settle down. Grice and Toomey are raising holy hell. Paul’s pretty quiet now. He got his way. He somehow managed to get the judge to come up with a sudden case of gout so that Trent couldn’t be tried.”
        She stopped by church and said some prayers. The old monsignor came out. He wore an eyepatch these days because of a detached retina. He emerged from the shadows of the sanctuary, looking pretty damned sinister for a cleric. She’d been almost afraid to speak to him, which was a good measure of how upset she was. He was one of the first people to befriend her when we’d moved here. And now she was afraid of him?
        But her misgivings were soon dispelled. He knew that her secret was out. She’d long ago told him in confession of her background, so he was well aware of what she was going through.
        “They think I killed him, Monsignor.”
        “Nobody who knows you thinks that for a minute, child.”
        “One of the women said that Lane resigned this morning. I’ve ruined his life along with mine.”
        “You have to have faith that this will be all right when it’s finished.”
        “But things aren’t always all right, Monsignor.”
        “That’s a difficult thing to know sometimes. Even when they go wrong, you see God’s terrible wisdom years later. You find out what He really had in mind for you. You see why He made you suffer.”
        “ But Lane ’s suffering, too.” Callie frowned. “ ‘Terrible wisdom.’ That’s a strange way to say it, Monsignor.”
        “Sometimes His wisdom does seem terrible. At least until we come to understand it.” He took her slender white hand into his own huge, age-mottled one. “All you can do for now is pray and know that someday, in some way you don’t expect, you and Lane will be vindicated.”
        As she had told Lane many times, the younger priests always had bright little homilies to offer you in times of trouble. It was their way of keeping you and your problems at arm’s length-because they didn’t have any answers, either practical or theological. They were just human beings.
        This was why