Liddle shook his head. “She’s not going off her rocker. She’s just old and tired. Even her sorrows are older than most of the folks around her these days. Sometimes, the weight of all that living just presses down on a person and sort of squashes them flat.”

Russ thought that if that’s what old age brought, he’d rather go out young in a blaze of glory. His feeling must have shown on his face, because the chief smiled at him again. “Not that it’s anything you have to worry about.” He shook his hand again. “Go on with your friend there. It looks like he’s done with his phone call. And keep your head down when you’re over there. We want you to come home safe.”

And that ended his day’s adventure. At least until that night, when he woke up his mother, yelling, from the first nightmare he could remember since he was ten. And in later years, even after he had walked, awake, through nightmares of men blown to a pulp and helicopters falling out of the sky, he still sometimes remembered the sensation of sinking into the cool, dark water. The pale, withered face. The black, black eyes. And he would shiver.

Chapter 2

NOW

Ash Wednesday, March 8, a Day of Penance

The rector of St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, town of Millers Kill, diocese of Albany, spread her arms in an old gesture of welcome. Her chasuble, dark purple embroidered with gold, opened like penitential wings. “I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent,” she said, “by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy word.” Her voice echoed off the stone walls of the church and was swallowed up in corners left dark by the antiquated lighting system and the heavy, gray day outside. “And, to make a right beginning of repentance and as a mark of our mortal nature, let us now kneel before the Lord, our maker and redeemer.”