The Brunist Day of Wrath

EPILOGUE

Two years later

Sally Elliott’s first novel, The Killing of Billy D, receives mixed reviews, but the attempt by a state governor to obtain an injunction against its distribution does push it briefly onto the bestseller lists, both fiction and nonfiction in some publications, and draws national and even international attention once more to the notoriously bloody events involving the radical eschatological Brunist cult and the court cases that arose from them. The book’s controversial mix of fact and fiction — dubbed “faction” in the press — disturbs many critics but is dismissed by others as imitative of a current fad among senior writers to “invade imaginatively” the lives of real living persons, typically criminals and politicians, if those are two separate categories. When she is accused of stretching the truth, she replies that it is a way of seeing the truth, for if you stretch something it tends to become more transparent. She worked hard on the prose in spite of the deadline pressures, the daily race against time, but that goes largely unremarked, except negatively by comparison to those senior writers, but her main goal is achieved: revived interest, at least on radio and television talk shows, in the death sentences passed upon Reverend Abner Baxter and his son and three others still on death row, enough to launch another round of appeals to overturn them. The talk shows are something new for her and at first she can’t resist shocking her audience and interviewers just for the fun of it, but, with coaching from her husband, she has gradually acquired a cooler persona. Plenty of brass still, but tempered by the strings, as he says. She still leaves her hair in a wild tangle. That’s who she is. But she wears shirts now instead of tees, sometimes leaves her old trenchcoat at home, and smokes without leaving the cigarette dangling in the corner of her mouth while she talks. May even, not to pollute the clean country air where now she lives, give it up altogether.

The Killing of Billy D was not the sort of book she had ever expected to write. She had thought she was going to start with something like “Against the Cretins” or “Riding the Hood” or a new western epic idea she had that summer, featuring Sweet Betsy from Pike as her lusty, journal-keeping narrator. But when she presented some of these pieces to the writing workshop upon her return to college in the fall, they were roundly ridiculed, not only by the class, which was largely made up of brainless Boobs Wetherwax-types with a few mad Christians disguised as writers thrown in, but by the professor as well, who scribbled dismissively on the copy he handed back: “A whimsical misuse of a vibrant imagination.” While having oral sex with him on his office couch (“I wonder,” she mused aloud around slurps, “if vegetarians avoid oral sex?”), he volunteered the further criticism, her vibrant arse bobbing in front of his nose in a room all too brightly lit, that she always adopts essentially the same point of view, namely her own, whether she calls it Goose Girl or Sweet Betsy or The Hood, and suggested (he had long hair and a cute little beard that tickled her thighs; she liked it) that she attempt a man’s point of view just as an exercise, maybe something out of her what-I-did-last-summer adventures she’d been telling him about.

So, all right, she turned to look once more at what she saw that day in the ditch. It was unbearable, but she was a writer and she would bear it. She had spent the rest of that summer talking with anyone who might help her see clearly what had happened. There weren’t many. Most of the Brunists had fled or been jailed, and those who had mingled with them tended not to trust her. All she knew for certain was that Billy Don was planning to exit the camp and meet her at the Tucker City drugstore before leaving the area altogether and that, before he could do that, somebody shot him in the head. She was convinced that person was his ex-roommate, Darren Rector, but she could find no one else who thought so. She revisited the place where it happened, but it was overrun with army troops and police and much of it was closed off. Even the ditch where the car was. She could only stare from some distance at the culvert where, sick with fear and grief and guilt, she’d spent that long afternoon. There were still wrecked school buses and an overturned backhoe at the foot of the mine hill the first time she went out there, but soon they were gone too. Eventually they let her up near the tipple to look for her lost things, and she did find her T-shirt, a colored rag half-buried in caked mud, and a lens cap, but her notebook was nowhere to be seen. Was someone reading it? Well, her first published work, so to speak.

By the end of the summer, the Mine Hill Massacre trials, as they were called in the media, were underway. An aggressive young district attorney, sniffing the possible fall of the governor and an opportunity to rise on the law-and-order issue, charged the cultists with murder and incitement to murder, as well as conspiracy to commit those crimes and others. It was a time of conspiracy trials, a popular current genre, a way to avoid having to prove the crime itself while maximizing punishment, no matter the offense. Simon calls it the worst law ever written. She herself was called on to testify about Billy Don’s eight a.m. phone call, what she witnessed from the coal tipple, and what she saw when she peeked into Billy Don’s wrecked car. She had to do a lot of explaining about why she was out there in the first place — developing a book about cognitive dissonance, she said (that kept them at bay) — and she confessed her fib about running away, admitting that she was lying in the culvert all the while, so scared she couldn’t speak. To explain why she was so frightened, she had to tell them that someone was shooting at her. No, she didn’t know at the time who it was, or who it was that shot Billy Don either, but when she started to tell them who she thought it was, they told her they were not interested in her opinion and dismissed her. The prosecutor pressed for the death penalty in over two dozen cases in addition to bringing similar indictments against an unspecified number of motorcycle gang members, the survivors thought to number between ten and twenty-five, for whom a nationwide hunt was on. In addition, over two hundred people were cited with disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, possession of unlicensed or stolen weapons, unlawful assembly, delinquency, trespass, and similar lesser crimes, and some of them were sent straight to prison, though most of the others were handed stiff fines, which, being indigent, they couldn’t pay, so they were also sent to jail for a time. “Scab justice,” as those who had been around earlier in the century called it. Jail them or shoot them.

By then it was clear that the forensic evidence against Junior Baxter in his more conventional murder trial was all but conclusive, the bullets in the heads of the two men at the camp trailer park matching the one in Billy Don’s brain, all three coming from the gun in Junior’s possession, still hot from firing at the time of his arrest, no prints on its handle or trigger except his. Moreover, when they arrested him within yards of the scene of the crime, he was wearing Billy Don’s broken sunglasses. Probably couldn’t even see through them. And he was certainly capable of it; he had shot at her, after all, and with even less reason. But she found it narratively more interesting to stick to her original assumption that it was, in effect, a dark love story, allowing her to get inside the warped mind of that megalomaniacal zealot and experience vicariously an act of impassioned yet cold-blooded murder. She named her victim Donny Bill, or Donny B and, stealing a famous name from the Anabaptists, called the killer Jan, a sexually ambivalent name for a pretty boy with blond curls, and one who, though eloquent and smart, was susceptible to spooky ideas, as in real life, so-called, both Darren’s and Jan’s. The Dark Lady who might have been responsible for Donny B’s fatal defection went unnamed and was eventually omitted. Mere debris. She set the story at the church camp but made them all Bible college students on retreat, avoiding the complications of the cult while keeping the weirdness of their beliefs, especially as embodied by mad Jan. Since she was telling the story from Jan’s point of view, she was able to use some of her research into the history of chiliastic sects and play with end-times language in suggestive sexual ways during Jan’s attempted seduction of Donny B, and she even managed to include a paragraph in which Jan, in a pure and saintly manner, not unlike Santa Teresa, imagines making love to Jesus, an act mostly concealed by mystical religious speculations and revealed primarily by the self-evident fact that the boy has been masturbating throughout. Donny B finally gets fed up with Jan’s mad touchy-feely evangelism and decides to leave the camp. Jan, jilted, is both enraged and grief-stricken and maybe afraid that Donny B might tattle on him, and he asks his friend to meet him up on Inspiration Point, away from the others, to say goodbye. Sally was losing sympathy with her crazed hero and his nutty apocalyptic imaginings and she had to work hard to make the genuineness of his emotions believable. Donny B was easier, a more or less commonsensical, good-natured guy who rarely said no to any request and so found himself up on the Point, all alone with Jan, with a gun in his face. His own, taken from his packed suitcase. The story ends: “‘Close your eyes, Donny Bill, and pray.’ Stubbornly he won’t do that. He just stares back at Jan with an icy glitter in his eyes. Sad. Only one thing to do.”

Sally didn’t like the story very much, her favorite bit being the Jesus paragraph (she got excited by her own sensuous description of Christ’s body and masturbated right along with Jan), but it was a big hit in the workshop. It was almost like being born again amidst well-meaning believers, and even the undercover Christians, with a few theological quibbles, praised it. Home at last! But then she followed it with a comicbook story about Sweet Jesus and his sidekick Dirty Pete, in which Sweet Jesus’ basic magical stunt is resurrection and the bad guys are all trying to learn his secret or expose him as a sham, and she got hammered again. The professor gave her some credit for light satire, but then effectively trashed it as a frivolous and arrogant provocation (which, admittedly, it was; she was tired of this clubby little gathering), and she left both workshop and college. Broke and jobless, she had no choice but to go home, weather her father’s drunken dopiness and her mother’s sad frustrations, and get the writing done.

That winter, West Condon was enjoying a rare if illusory moment of prosperity rising out of the summer’s horrors. Just about anyone who wanted a job had one, and a lot of out-of-towners were moving in to pick up the leavings. Her dad, unemployed and more or less unemployable, was an exception, though the new owners of Mick’s Bar & Grill gave him occasional free drinks and a sandwich to sit on a bar stool and regale the tourists with anecdotes from that memorable day, most of which he had to make up, having spent much of the time in a stupor on the floor. They’d hired Mick to do the cooking to keep it authentically inedible at twice the price and even put a wrecked helicopter, though not the same one, back on the roof again. Tourism had tailed off some since the end of summer, but the ongoing TV coverage of the conspiracy and murder trials still drew out-of-state cars and occasional busloads, so rooms were often at a premium. All the area motels were doing full capacity business, and townsfolk were offering rooms with breakfast in their homes to take in the overflow. Her mom had planned to do just that, hoping for construction company officials, before Sally came home and reclaimed her space. They were embarrassed when she offered to pay for her room, but in the end they accepted her help. The Roma Historical Society, once interested in the now decimated West Condon Hotel, acquired a cheap derelict motel near the Sir Loin steak house, an old one that still had individual cabins, offering their guests a bit of rustic tin-shower nostalgia, plus slot machines in the office lobby, conveniently situated a few yards beyond city limits, and a ten percent discount at the Sir Loin next door, which was doing good business like all the area eateries that remained, HELP WANTED signs in their windows for the first time she could remember. The gambling joints and whorehouses in and around Waterton were also prospering, it was said, thronged less with tourists than with locals, hard cash suddenly burning their pockets. Chestnut Hills had filled up again with squatters, hosting everything from poker games to prayer meetings, and roadside tents reappeared at the town’s edges. Old-timers said it reminded them of West Condon’s boom time in the first part of the century, when coal was king and laws were few, when the town was three or four times bigger than it is now and workers were living in railway freight cars fitted out with bunks and stoves — zulu cars, as they were called — and fighting was more common than fucking. Not exactly how it got said, but that’s how Sally wrote it in her notebook.

The big money was in construction, supported by state and federal disaster relief funds, and there were several companies in town vying for contracts, including two new home-based outfits, Bonali Family Builders and West Condon NOW, a consortium put together by the bank president and other local businessmen. The acting mayor/city manager favored the former, but the city council was still dominated by friends of Tommy’s dad, and moreover, he was able to pull in a sharp young architect from a big-city firm owned by a fraternity brother of his, making it difficult for Bonali Builders to compete except by way of intimidation and backroom influence. Charlie had appointed his dad president, his sister bookkeeper, and had hired his private army of Dagotown Devil Dogs as construction workers; it wasn’t clear where the start-up money was coming from. Angela was also the new secretary in the temporary mayoral office above the Knights of Columbus hall, occupied by the city manager. Sally, protecting her writing time, signed on three days a week with West Condon NOW to help write up proposals and pitch their designs, and was given a desk in the old Chamber of Commerce office where her dad once clowned about, bullet holes still in the Main Street windows, left there for the tourists to photograph.

When Tommy came home from business school for the holidays that year, he called Sally and asked her to join him out at the Blue Moon Motel on the night of New Year’s Day to listen to their homegrown country star Will Henry celebrate the music of Duke L’Heureux and Patti Jo Rendine, who were that same night the feature attraction at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry. Their songs had hit the top of the charts several times over, and three of them were still in the top ten that yule-tide season, including their famous tribute to the Moon itself, making the motel the newest country music Mecca. “Old Will sings like he’s got a sax reed up his nose,” Tommy said, “but it should be worth a laugh.” The night was fully booked, but his dad knew the owner, they’d add a table. She said okay, why not? Just the right night for such a reunion: day after the night before. She wondered what they would find to talk about. And then, in that week between Christmas and New Year’s, she was gifted with grisly openers. A child had gone missing and his parents said he often played around the old abandoned Deepwater Number Nine mine, which was no longer being guarded — kids liked to light the gas leaking out of the mine through vents in the fields behind the slag heaps, more than one had got his fingers burnt and hair singed — and they were afraid he might have fallen down the closed shaft somehow. He hadn’t (he was finally found out at the lakes, curled up beside his bike, lost and hungry, in the bird sanctuary), but the decayed unidentified corpse of a white male in his twenties or thirties was discovered at the bottom. All they could say about it was that it looked like it had been badly chopped up and had been there for a while.

So Sally asked Tommy over their first beer who he thought that body was, and he said he had no idea. Everyone’s attention was on the murder trials just getting underway at the time, the networks replaying all the most violent footage from that catastrophic day, and Sally asked if Tommy had watched any of it. He had. Tommy had helped to identify the red boots left on the hotel roof when they blew away the biker who was wearing them as belonging to his former high school classmate Carl Dean Palmers. They had APACHE burned on the inside of them, which was Carl Dean’s new chosen name, and that went along with the feathers and the red Indian makeup. But now that he’d seen him in the replays, Tommy said when Sally asked, that guy dancing on the hotel roof was definitely not Carl Dean. “That dude could have played basketball, but not Ugly. He’s more the squat wrestler type. When he jumps, his feet probably never leave the ground.”

“But then how do you think his boots got up there?” Tommy didn’t know, didn’t really seem interested. He was scanning the SRO crowd. Angela Bonali was there in a side booth, looking about ten or fifteen pounds heavier than the last time Sally saw her, squeezed in with Joey Castiglione and Monica and blind Pete Piccolotti. It was some kind of celebration. Tommy feigned bored disinterest, Angela excessive affection for her new partner, a loud gaiety. Sally watched from the wings. Will Henry was singing about a ghost in a graveyard. “That wasn’t the first time that week a guy’s feet got separated from the rest of him,” Sally said to the back of Tommy’s head. “A few days before, there was that dynamite explosion at the church camp which killed a bunch of people. One of the bodies was found without a head, another without its feet, which were discovered later out at the state park where the bikers were holed up for a night or two afterwards.”

“Hah,” said Tommy, turning toward her. “So you figure the guy was in a hurry and just cut the boots off with the feet still in them.”

“Something like that. But the body without the feet was identified and that wasn’t Carl Dean either. We know now how the boots might have got from the dead guy at the camp to the one on the roof. The question is: how did the first guy get them?”

Tommy stares at her a moment over his beer. “Ah, I get it. You think maybe the guy dumped down the mine was…?”

“He still had his feet on, but nothing on them except the tatters of rotting socks.”

“How do you know?”

“I asked. Forget the socks. I made that up. But they said, yes, he was essentially barefoot. So, all right: the day of the rape. You were waiting for Carl Dean at Lem’s garage, but he didn’t show up. His truck was packed and parked in front of the camp lodge. He was on his way out of there, but something interrupted him. Unfortunately, the cultists set the van alight; they thought it was the devil’s van or some such lunacy. The people I talked to last summer told me that both Aunt Debra and the Collins girl said Carl Dean was there at the rape, but they were confused about what part he played. They were both traumatized, especially the girl, so it was probably all just a blur. But Carl Dean was evidently in love with that girl and had come all the way back here to see her. And she was in trouble. What I’m trying to say is that it looks like your friend, whom everyone has vilified, was really a hero.”

“Brilliant, Holmes. Good for old Ugly. But a dead hero.”

“Longevity’s not a goal for most heroes. They’re going for something else. It’s why we remember them and not much of anyone else.”

“Mm. Poor old Pete over there’s another. I’ve been by the store a few times to see him. He says he knows they’re making a big deal out of what he did and everyone’s talking about how he sacrificed himself out of love for Monica and her kid, but actually that wasn’t on his mind at all. The ball was in the air, he said, and as soon as his feet left the floor, he was back on the court. Went up for the interception and follow-through jump shot and knew he had to sink it before the buzzer.”

“Wow! I know that feeling. When the thing itself takes over and you’re just its tool. Okay, here’s another, not so scary. You know that Olive Oyl wallflower who used to pull sodas in Doc Foley’s drugstore?”

“Beanpole Becky? Sure.”

“Well, she turned up on TV the other day to describe the killing of Doc Foley and her own near-death experience. She said in that flat deadpan voice of hers that the whole thing has affected her orgasms, making the interviewer’s eyes pop. He asked if she meant that it was, you know, interfering with…? ‘No,’ she said. ‘I mean they’re better.’”

Tommy thought that was hilarious, and the rest of the night, like Becky’s orgasms, went better. Trading hero tales was a good idea. Tommy turned his back on Angela’s party and over the next couple of rounds, in and around the over-amplified music, they talked about his mother’s wacky trip to Lourdes with Concetta Moroni, paid for by an old boyfriend; the Bali postcard the ex-mayor sent the city council; and Christmas week’s big news that Priscilla Tindle, who was back with her husband, had given birth to a daughter whom she was reportedly naming Mary after the child’s grandmother, though maybe that was just one of her dad’s jokes. Sally’s mother had visited the preacher in the mental hospital and found him neatly shaved and barbered, smoking his pipe again, and completely sane, so far as she could tell. It was like the Jesus in him had sort of boiled off, or dropped away like the husk of a seedpod. His wife — Sally’s “Aunt Debra”—was, and perhaps still is, in a women’s prison, where she was apparently becoming something of a spiritual leader, talking with the birds and creating her own pollyanna branch of Brunism, and her adopted orphan had had, in her mother’s words, “a very successful surgical intervention. Really, they’ve done a great job with the poor boy. He’s very relaxed and pleasant now and he doesn’t remember a thing about his mixed-up past. Of course, he doesn’t recognize anybody either.” Sally, her own brain wobbling a bit in her skull at the thought of this “intervention,” took a mental note at the time about magic spells: You only hear about those who break their spells. Most don’t.

Tommy said he was glad she was working for the West Condon NOW consortium and told her more about his dad’s battles with the governor, the city manager, and Charlie Bonali, who had formed a kind of unholy alliance, the police chief part of it, his dad the common enemy. With the mayor absconded, there was a vacuum in town and Minicozzi and Bonali, both seen as heroes of a sort, were filling it. The governor was dumping money into the town, but it was all going through Minicozzi, and there were probably kickbacks. Bonali’s building company got the big city hall restoration job without any competitive bids, Minicozzi claiming some kind of emergency powers. Already there were serious cost overruns, yet nothing seemed actually to have been done beyond fencing it off. The bank was robbed that day of the dynamite and the bikers were blamed, but his dad was pretty sure it was the bank lawyer. “Dad’s determined to bring the governor down. He’s putting his money in the next elections on the hotshot D.A. who nailed the Brunists.” Tommy said he had no problem with that guy pushing for all those executions in order to make his name. “Look at how many people got killed because of those rabid freaks.” Sally said that if they were freaks, then most of the rest of the country was, too, because a recent poll suggested over eighty percent of all Americans believe pretty much the same apocalyptic fantasies, it’s only that not many have put a particular date on them. As for the absentee biker gang being the ones who terrorized the town, not those who had been arrested and charged, Tommy shrugged and said they were all part of the same family and the same fanatical cult. “They all wore Brunist shit on their leathers. Their tattoos. Their minds were fucked by their religious leaders, who have to be held responsible.” The media often spoke now of the Baxter clan, referencing famous criminal families of the past. Old black-and-white photos of group hangings of captured bandit gangs were shown on television. Paul Baxter was on the original list of indictments until his head was found in the state park, whereupon he was replaced by Nathan, known now to be the masked gan-gleader advertising himself as “Kid Rivers.” There were countrywide “Dead or Alive” posters up for him and he was number one on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list, the mug shots showing a mean-looking kid about fourteen years old.

A honey blonde in a red shirt and skirt with white fringes coordinating with Will Henry’s red-fringed white suit had joined him to reprise the early L’Heureux-Rendine hits, “The Night My Daddy Loved Me Too Much,” “A Toybox of Tears,” “She’ll Let Me Know When It’s Time to Go,” and “I Thought I Knew Too Much about Love,” and then, by popular demand, for at least the fourth time that night, “The Blue Moon Motel,” with its rowdy appeal to get it on. “So listen up, cowboy, it ain’t never too soon,” they sang, “to pop your cork at the ole Blue Moon!” Tommy cleared his throat and said he was really sorry about his stupid badass behavior at the highway motel that night, he was out of control, a total jerk, and he hoped she could understand what he was going through and forgive him for it. She smiled and said sure (everybody in the joint was singing along now, bellowing out the lines, it was like church at its best), but when he told her he’d booked a room here as a kind of peace gesture—“It wasn’t easy, there were no vacancies,” he shouted over the raucous crowd, “but there was a last-minute cancellation!”—she smiled again and said no thanks. “Still holding a grudge?” “No, never did. But you’re not as cute without your funny nose guard.” He grinned and took her hand and said, “C’mon,” but she shook her head. She realized she felt nothing at all for this young man, which surprised her. She placed her other hand over his. “I’ve moved on, Tommy. Don’t take offense. But what can I say? You don’t really interest me any longer.” He seemed hurt by that and pulled his hand back, looking like he might revert to his badass jerk mode. Men are such sentimentalists.

And then, that winter, Sally’s life took a surprise turn. Her workshop story, “Jan,” was accepted by a prestigious national magazine. She hadn’t even sent it to them; her old workshop teacher had. To show he was open-minded, he had also submitted one of her “Against the Cretins” fragments to an eccentric avant-garde literary magazine, whose only literary criterion, he told her when she called, was dirty language, and that one, too, was taken. It seemed forever before “Jan” appeared, but within days of its publication (her prof had made a few cuts and moved a couple of paragraphs about, so she was torn between gratitude and fury, elation and frustration, though never mind, it was only a workshop exercise anyway), she was getting calls from agents and publishers, asking to see more. She was sure she could bowl them over with her more imaginative writing, so she rushed some of it off special delivery, though with each submission, just in case, she also mentioned what she might do with “Jan” if she ever developed it further. One of these letters got her both a literary agent and then a book offer from a big New York publisher. The publishers were not interested in the experimental work. They wanted a further expansion of the published story along the more conventional reportage lines she had suggested in her letter with the events clearly linked to the Brunist cult and the Mine Hill Massacre, which, with all the scheduled executions, were still in the national headlines, and they wanted it more or less immediately so that the book could appear while the subject was still topical.

To the dismay of her new agent who had negotiated the contract, she turned it down. She regretted her cowardly cover letter. She wasn’t a journalist. Breaking conventions is what she did. The agent said she was passing up an opportunity to launch her writing career, if the book was successful she could write how and what she wished thereafter, but Sally said that any book she wrote that she didn’t want to write was unlikely to be successful. Her agent was not very enthusiastic about the more imaginative work either, so she sent her stories around on her own, having been bitten somewhat by the publishing bug. After some time, the little vanguard magazine appeared with her “Cretins” story and they took a second, a “Big Mary” fragment, but the others all came back, and the “Big Mary” piece never got published because the magazine folded. With a little inside push from her agent and her former workshop teacher, however, her two published stories and the book interest did win her a fellowship that fall at a writers’ colony located in a mountain retreat far from West Condon, so she was able to give up her job with the construction firm. The architect friend of Tommy’s dad, also using that unsettling word “career,” offered her a full-time position at much higher wages either in West Condon or in the city if she wanted it, saying they were just about to break into big money, and she was tempted, but took a rain check, which she knew, unless devoid of writing ideas and utterly desperate, she’d never call in. He was a good-looking guy and, if he had come on to her, she probably, feeling lonely, would have accepted the offer and lived a completely different life, but he treated her more as one of the boys.

All of this had little impact back home. No one in West Condon was much interested writers who weren’t on television or in the news-paper — which was rare, since the town didn’t have a news station or paper of its own. Her only brush with fame was during the midsummer first-anniversary tourist surge when she spied a torn oil-stained copy of the magazine with her story in it on the floor of Rico’s Pizza Palace, probably dropped by a disappointed visitor — the editors had referenced the Brunist cult in their authors’ notes. She rescued it, has it still. The “big money” the architect spoke of was in anticipation of the imminent collapse of their local competitors. The year-long city hall ripoff erupted eventually into a full-blown scandal, due mostly to the relentless perseverance of Tommy’s dad. Minicozzi was indicted, his mob connections exposed (the governor did not escape the implications), and the president of Bonali Family Builders — who was not Charlie Bonali, but his dad — was sent to prison. Charlie disappeared into the city, along with Moron Moroni and some of the other so-called Dagotown Devil Dogs. His sister lost her job at city hall and got married. The police chief was demoted and a new chief was hired in from upstate. The town had neither mayor nor city manager for a while and was run largely by the city council. The town had not had much luck with mayors and there was little appetite to elect a new one, nor did anyone seem interested in the job. Most of that happened after Sally had left town, but her mom kept her informed.

Before leaving West Condon for the writers colony at the end of August (forever, she felt), Sally paid a final visit to the Brunist file drawer in the Chronicle job room. Somebody, she discovered, had been poking around in the files since she was last there. The drawer was open and the “Abner Baxter Family” and “Millennial Cults” folders were out on top of the cabinet. She asked and the little mustachioed print shop owner said the only other visitor had been the mayor, who was in just before he disappeared, buying up a stack of the final edition of the paper at a nickel each “for the city archives,” but he himself was in there with the fellow the whole time and he had no interest in the files. Does anyone else have a key? He didn’t know. He’d never changed the locks, and the previous newspaper people might still have theirs. “No need for locks, really,” he said with a cheerful, pink-cheeked smile. “This is a safe town where you can trust your neighbors.”

It was hot and stuffy in that windowless room. She put the hook on the job room door, took off her shirt, and started with the “Cults” file, which she wanted to explore as fodder for her Cretin Wizards, and in it she found the scrawled note: “The great majority of men do not think with abstract ideas, only with colorful images or with concrete facts. Abstract spiritual ideas and principles must be clothed in some vivid and compelling form, even if, like this note, borrowed from elsewhere. Thus, the heroic journey, the parables, the miracles, the Easter story, the cross.” Which she herself might have written, if not so succinctly. She copied the lines out in her notebook next to another thought she’d stolen from somewhere about imagination both illumining and darkening the mind, which she read as her kind of fiction versus the Christian sort, though she could see how it might work both ways. And then, without really registering the moves that got her there, she found herself stretched out on the leather couch again, smoking a joint and fantasizing about the new life that awaited her. It did not seem to include the cult or the town, not even as masked in the fairytale form of “Against the Cretins.” It was grander than that, more heroic, and at the same time more modest, at least in scale: Wit. Bright and quick and unforgettable. Ever since her night at the Moon with Tommy and their exchange of hero stories, she’d been playing with the hero idea. She had returned home that night and written: “She did not know if she was a real hero or a false hero, but she knew the first thing she had to do was leave home in order to proceed to what the Saturday morning cartoons called the ‘threshold of adventure.’” The new hero who emerged that night called himself or herself many names, but most recently Dawn, meaning lecherous, moist, wet, rutting; also graceful, but with the ancient sense of “one who has beautiful pudenda.” Perhaps, she was thinking as she lay there, Dawn’s first mind-opening adventure, sallying forth, radiant with purpose yet utterly in the dark, would be to awaken the Sleeping Prince in the Woods, that two-dick wonder (it was the circumcised one that mattered, though Dawn might not know that and have to try them both), then blithely send him on his way into the life of empty-headed princesses and ambitious chambermaids which were his destiny. Her hand by now was between her legs, hash in her lungs and behind her eyes. She was thinking about the Prince’s beautiful backside while he stood at the motel window, his sturdy prick glistening with the stains of a ruptured hymen, the bathing of it under the waterfall of the shower — feet, she knew then, just a euphemism in the Jesus stories. Her eye fell on the darkroom door with its glass panel, behind which the photographer had been hidden. She stood, took off the rest of her clothes, and lay down again, staring tauntingly at the secreted photographer and remembering Billy Don, the flushed expression on his face in the Tucker City drugstore when he showed her the pictures of this couch and the violated Bruno girl upon it, and she spread her legs and took her hand away and raised her inside arm against the back of the couch in imitation of one of those photos (the difference was the roach in her other hand), wondering if she had the imaginative power to make herself come without touching herself. While the invisible photographer watched, stunned by what he saw, but greedily snapping away. She was close to it.

But her erotic imaginings were chilled by the lingering image of Billy Don, no longer that of him in the drugstore, but the final one: dead and bloodless in his wrecked car in the ditch at the edge of the camp, that hole in his forehead. She remembered suddenly that he was not wearing his dark glasses. This fact struck her at the time, it made him look so strange, he was never without them, even at night, but then she had forgotten it. Apparently Junior Baxter was wearing them when he was arrested, another strike against him. Junior had been found guilty of his murder and several other crimes on top, and had been sentenced to die in the electric chair. Arguing that charges of murder and conspiracy to murder seemed almost inadequate for the enormity of the crimes committed, the prosecutor secured death sentences for Junior’s father as well and for his surviving uncaptured brother, plus four so-called “Brunist Defenders,” two surviving Christian Patriots, and the entire membership of Nathan Baxter’s “Wrath of God” motorcycle gang, all sentenced in absentia, however many and whoever they were. Presumably this was good for a lot of votes. Abner Baxter’s closest lieutenant, Roy Coates, facing murder charges like the others, was given immunity for turning state’s witness, providing critical evidence against many of the “armed criminals” on the mine hill that day, including Baxter himself. This might have been the same reason Darren Rector only got a suspended three-year sentence; that and his pretty blond innocence. During the appeal process that followed, much of Coates’ testimony was found insubstantial and contradictory and was discounted, resulting in lesser punishments for two of those sentenced to death and the outright release of another, but all that was later on. Clara Collins-Wosznik and others named with her were charged with conspiracy to foment violence and civic disorder, but as they were no longer in the state and were not on the hill that day, the charges were eventually dropped. Not long after the sentencing, Nathan Baxter alias Tobias Rivers alias Kid Rivers was killed in southeast Texas in what looked like a gang execution, along with others assumed to be members of the Wrath of God gang, who had apparently renamed themselves the Crusadeers. Baxter had been hideously burnt and was all but unrecognizable, identifiable only by his Tobias Rivers driver’s license and wrecked motorcycle, making investigators cautious: Was this really Nat Baxter, or was he living on under yet another stolen identity?

Not only was the Billy Don murder case against Junior Baxter apparently all but watertight, Junior himself had in effect confessed, changing his plea to temporary insanity, the unfortunate tactic used by his court-appointed defense lawyer when things started to go against them. He was scheduled to be electrocuted in November. He did blurt out in his confused and inconsistent testimony that Darren Rector gave him the gun and told him to go guard the camp. Darren denied this, and the jurors chose to believe the one without “LIER” scarred on his forehead. But if Junior was telling the truth, when did that happen? Billy Don called her around eight that morning — that was in the trial record. He was probably killed soon after that. If it could be shown that Junior was at the mine hill at that time and for some time after, the verdict might have to be reconsidered. Might he have stayed behind in the camp earlier while the others marched over to the hill? No, he would have gone wherever his father went; no choice. Also, Billy Don was shot in the forehead from close range. No bullet holes in the car’s front window, so he was unlikely to have been shot while driving. Where, then, did the murder take place? If not at or near the ditch, how did the car get there?

She sat up abruptly with the uncomfortable realization that this was a story she had to write. If for no other reason, because she owed it to Billy Don. He was coming to see her that dreadful morning. And that may have been the reason he was shot. It would also be a way of paying her dues to the literary tradition while yet making it a story of her own. Even as she sat there, bony elbows on bony knees, her bottom sweating on the leather cushion, the basic structure revealed itself to her. She has often described this moment in interviews, leaving out the dope and the sweaty butt. She would name everybody, risking whatever legal actions, while exploring each character, each scene, imaginatively, as if they were characters and scenes in a novel, trusting that her imagination would tell her more than the “facts” alone could. There would be invented characters, too, filling out the religious typology and enriching the story content. She would relate it in an exploratory first person, moving as author from darkness to light, while keeping Darren and Billy Don center stage, as in “Jan.” The Baxters would be there, but backgrounded as part of the story of the cult. The Killing of Billy D was becoming a reality. Her body meanwhile had forgotten its appetites, overtaken by a mind on the boil. You think too damned much, she said irritably to herself, as she pinched out the roach and pulled her underwear on.

Mind erosion: the dust storms of daily excitement and triviality that blow away the sensitive topsoil of the spirit — the idea that attention-power is finite and precious, and that unless the individual is obstinate and cunning, this power may be dissipated, conventionalized. A note inspired by all that’s presently eating up her life, the spent storms of birthday parties, poolside yatter, boy-chasing, and pop culture immersion now displaced by travels on behalf of the book, TV and radio talk shows, newspaper and magazine interviews, book and film proposals, teaching offers, rallies and protests, the daily froth of news and chatter, sex. Unless such notebook jottings as this be counted, Sally hasn’t written a creative word of her own since the book came out.

Of course, to be fair, she has also been trying to save a few lives. The first routine appeals against the death penalties were turned down at about the same time she reached the writers colony, and she has spent most of the time since then fighting those judgments one way or another. They were what drove her through the research and writing of The Killing of Billy D, and at such an accelerated pace; forget the publishers’ nagging deadlines, for her it has always been a race against the executioners, hoping to use the book as a circuit breaker. Not an easy one to write. Not only was it a different sort of writing than any she’d done before, she realized as soon as she’d settled into her cozy little cell at the writers colony just how much research she needed, and almost none of it in books. There were so many people she should talk to, now scattered around the country, so many places to visit, images to collect. But she had no car and was saving her book advance and West Condon earnings for when the writers’ colony gig ended, so to get started she had to trust her memory and imagination. As a warm-up exercise, she developed character files for Darren and Billy Don, pouring into them all her memories and speculations, and then similar files for the Baxter family, the orthodox cult leaders, their opponents, all the secondary players in her drama. Who tended, threateningly, to multiply. Putting characters in was not what was hard, she realized. It was keeping them out. Moreover, her agent had, with difficulty, managed to sell her newest concept to the same publishers as before, and they continued to demand the full and true story of the cult, even if only as background, giving her a contracted deadline of six months for submitting the entire manuscript.

When her books arrived from home, boxed up with her notebooks, photos, drawings, and the Brunist files and newspapers she’d snitched from the Chronicle office, she was able to patch together a few paragraphs about the cult, its beliefs, its growth, its schisms, its relation to similar millennial movements of the past. All that was fine but, except as suggested by her “Jan” story, her book still wasn’t on its way. She had always resisted that workshop bromide, “write about what you know,” but she had no choice; not to be forever treading water, she launched the first rough draft with her own experiences that day in the culvert, the fall from the tipple being told in flashback as she lay there. Little research required, though it meant she was also, against her own outlined intentions, becoming a point-of-view character in the story. This character, she decided, would be somewhat like herself and yet not exactly herself. For one thing, she pasted an earlier version of the historical Sally on the fictional Sally, not the childish one who still believed, prayed, and fantasized an afterlife, but the one who lived unthinkingly in a world saturated with religion as one lived with air and water, using the Billy Don drama then as a way of freeing this character from a passive acceptance of the unacceptable, in much the same way that her imagined Sweet Betsy goes from innocence to bawdiness in her western epic idea, such that by the time she is cowering in the culvert she has come to understand that the real criminal that day was Christianity itself. Or, rather, the human mindset — in part, a susceptibility to made-up stories — that gives this dangerous nonsense such terrible power. Thus, a spiritual journey, after all, a remark she often makes in interviews or talk show conversations while explaining why that was not the book she ended up writing, each repetition gradually hollowing it out until soon she’ll be free of it.

Some people at the colony were writing their socks off; for others, it was just a free-sex exercise pit. Sally allowed herself to get laid when the opportunity arose, for now that she’d got the hang of it, sex had become important to her, but she didn’t let it get in the way of the writing. She had launched hundreds of stories over the previous year or two and had finished almost none. If this was going to be her life, she knew, she’d have to stop playing the dilettante. She had a book to write. She dedicated at least ten solid hours a day to the writing. Reading and writing. Plus two of hiking or roaming the hills on one of the colony’s bicycles — another kind of writing. Or unwriting. She clocked herself, kept a chart, made sure there was no cheating. For the first couple of weeks before Billy D took over, she seemed to have time to do it all, work on the book, write new stories, revise the old, read voraciously, fill more notebooks. She felt good, as good as she’d felt in years. She smoked less (though always a butt lit while fingers were on the keys, even if left to burn itself out in the tray), immersed herself in the beauty of the surroundings, reveled in the meal-time conversations with other writers. Many of them came from money, had been to the best schools, had had lots of literary mentoring and friends who were editors and publishers; but they didn’t intimidate her. She knew she had something they didn’t. Coaltown grit, for one thing.

But she was facing a deadline, and there were things she had to know before she could continue. She described her research needs to a writer at the colony one evening, a somewhat older man with suave moneyed ways, and in particular her desire to interview Junior Baxter on death row somehow, there being some things she had to know that only he could tell her, and he said he might be able to help. He loaned her a car to take wherever she wished, a fast road-hugging foreign sports car unlike any she’d ever been in before, much less driven — she felt hot in it — and he introduced her to an activist lawyer friend from the city, Simon Price of Price & Price, whom she was able to convince to help her fight the Brunist death penalties. The other Price was Simon’s wife, a lawyer who specialized in human rights cases — women’s rights, in particular. “Looks a lot like Haymarket all over again,” Simon said after studying her typed-up notes. Several routine gestures had not yet been made, so he was immediately able to get all the November and December executions delayed another six months while he prepared legal briefs and affidavits, and she brought this good news the next time she saw her wealthy friend at the colony. Though he seemed to know everything about literature, he didn’t seem to be much of a writer, usually just smiled when she asked him what he was working on. When not talking about her book, they discussed music, art, literature, politics, and in provocative engaging ways she’d not enjoyed before. He was the coolest man she’d ever met, and he seemed to like her, too. He laughed generously when she was being funny in her wiseass way, listened carefully when she got serious. He liked her enough that he invited her to his house one evening, promising to get her back in time not to disrupt her writing rhythms. They drove for an hour or so through thick forests to a luxurious home with beautiful views, a lot of art on the walls, thousands of books, a grand piano in the middle of a room set aside for it. Everything in its place, but as though unused. Like Dracula’s castle, she thought, but she didn’t say it. The sex on satin sheets was easy and good — maybe not passionate, but fun — the wine he served her sensational. It turned out he was one of the writing colony’s principal benefactors (an expensive dating club for him, she imagined) and a U.S. Congressman, wealthy enough to pay for his own campaigns, but a guy with a serious agenda, an agenda she mostly shared; she would vote for him. Much of the forest they had driven through was his, he said. They drove through it at least once a week after that and he always got her back to the colony by her usual bedtime. She was quite ready to stay over, to hell with the discipline, but he seemed to need her Cinderella hour even more than she did. Maybe there were other wives and lovers awaiting their turn, she thought, and her time was up.

Meanwhile, the writing rhythms he was protecting she was disrupting by note-taking travels through Brunist country, consultations with Simon, meetings with her agent and editors, prison visits, yet even so she managed to work on the book every day wherever she was, even if only for an hour or two. She had to. The days were dropping away like those calendar pages in the old movies, and she only had half-starts so far and a messy heap of loose notes. And the end of her fellowship loomed. What then? The peace of her studio and use of the car were each hers for only a short time longer, and she needed them both. So she drove back and forth a lot, reserving at least three days a week for her studio at the writers colony, the evenings with her wealthy friend unless he was in Washington — and once she met him there while traveling, and he seemed pleased, showing her off proudly (she felt proud) to his colleagues.

Her leash wasn’t long enough for her to reach Florida or Alabama or congregations to the west, but she managed to visit over a dozen Brunist churches along the eastern seaboard, large and small, attending services for the first time in years, taking notes, keeping her mouth shut. In one of them the preacher stopped her as she was leaving and said she looked familiar, hadn’t he seen her somewhere? She didn’t think so. Possibly at the Mount of Redemption? Oh, maybe, she said, and he continued to stare at her, his eyes narrowing. She eventually learned where Clara Collins-Wosznik and her friends from the Brunist camp were living, but she was refused permission to speak to them or even get near. She was told that Mrs. Collins was quite ill, and prayers for her were often a part of the services she attended. She didn’t know the name of either of the boys’ hometowns, but she had a rough idea where Billy Don came from and spent some note- and picture-taking time in several small towns in the area until she grew uncomfortable with the grim, thin-lipped attention she and her jazzy sports car were drawing. She did know how to find the Bible college Billy Don and Darren attended and spent one of her best half-weeks there. The staff and faculty were aware of their former students’ notoriety and were chillingly unhelpful (maybe her hair put them off; definitely not part of the local culture), but she was able to capture some of the school’s atmosphere, became acquainted with several students, some of whom later entered her narrative pseudonymously, and located many of the places Billy Don had described. Which in turn triggered her first completely satisfying book chapter, in which, sitting in the student cafeteria (which really did have homemade lemonade and boiled peanuts, just like Billy Don said), looking out on an autumnal campus (how she saw it, what her camera recorded), Darren lays out, in his riveting soft-spoken way, his vision of the approaching End Times, and Billy D’s life begins to change.

Simon had obtained all the trial transcripts and was studying them, and he passed on to her those of Young Abner’s murder trial. A close read turned up a few minor notes, not themselves very significant, but possibly useful in conjunction with more substantial evidence. The arresting officer, for example, declaring that the accused, found hiding in the nearby woods, was sullen and only resentfully cooperative, said that when he handed over his weapons, the officer remarked: “Let’s see if this gun matches the one that killed that kid in the ditched car,” and Junior, who said very little, said: “What kid?” The officer and prosecutor used the exchange as evidence of Junior’s duplicity—“He was just playing dumb,” the cop said. “You could tell by the cold-blooded look on his face.” The defense attorney did not argue with this. Simon was enraged at the lawyer’s obtuseness and the stupidity of the temporary insanity plea—“That sonuvabitch should be dragged into the dock on the same grounds!” he said — and by now, hoping to secure a retrial, had a list of some eighteen to twenty examples of ineffective counsel if not gross incompetence, including outright procedural errors by both lawyers. The unchallenged use of hearsay evidence, for example, as when a witness remarked that Junior was “a pal of the bikers, they raped a kid together,” the judge, too, failing in his duty. That rape scene had become important to her after her rescue of Carl Dean Palmers from ignominy, and she was convinced and had convinced Simon that Junior was as much a victim as the girl was. “I suppose it’s a problem with court-appointed lawyers,” she said to Simon, and he replied: “Nah, I’m often one. He’s just a shit lawyer. Maybe a chum of the prosecutor, doing him a favor. Probably how he got appointed an administrative law judge after the elections.”

There were a lot of cultists still imprisoned back in her home state, many of them sentenced to twenty years or more, and most of them were eager to accept Simon’s offer of free legal help in exchange for answering a few questions. Simon sent in a team of young legal volunteers with a list of thirty such questions for the first round, some of them meant to draw their cooperation by giving them a chance to explain themselves, others focused on what happened that day, with questions about Billy Don, Darren, and Junior Baxter mixed in, trying to pin down times and trace the movement of the handgun. When the answers came in, they compiled a list that suggested possible leads, and together they flew out for further interviews. By then she was married — a private civil ceremony in December, a brief ten-day honeymoon in San Francisco (they went to a lot of concerts) and wintry Yosemite — and was well installed in her new study, with the book finally taking shape. She had an outline for it, meaty yet succinct, which she was able to send to her publishers a week ahead of schedule. They were pleased, excited even, and began talking about jacket designs and book tours.

During the prison interviews, disguised as Simon’s secretary, she filled notebook after notebook, not only with information, but also with character descriptions and sketches, idiomatic novelties, odd personal anecdotes and histories, but if she was somewhat duplicitous, Simon was not. He inquired into their individual stories of that violent day, listened carefully, took precise notes of his own, and indeed has managed to get many of their sentences reduced and some of them freed. It was decided that, with her reputation, she would stay away from the initial meeting with the two Baxters, but even so, Simon said, they were uncooperative, Abner ranting in his Old Testament style, Junior sullenly impassive. The only moment he showed any emotion at all was when Simon asked him about the torn tunic with his name stitched on a label at the neck, found on the backside of the mine hill, and that emotion was only momentary surprise and an embarrassed flush. At his trial he had first said that Darren gave him the gun and sent him over to the camp, but now he wouldn’t speak of it at all. One prisoner told a volunteer that he did see Darren carefully cleaning and loading a handgun that might have been the one in the picture he was shown, though he didn’t know what Darren did with it, and he said he told the defense lawyer that, though it never got mentioned at the trial. But when she and Simon interviewed him, he was adamant that he would not testify in court. If they dragged him there, they wouldn’t get a word out of him. Never wanted to see the inside of a courtroom again until the Final Judgment, he said, and spat defiantly into a tin cup. After her own day in court, even if only as a witness, she was sympathetic. A weirder place than Wonderland, where the least thing you say can change your life forever. In the end it was a lot of work, and though she got material for her novel from it, it yielded little they could use in the capital cases. But she and Simon grew fond of each other on these travels, casually slept together in shared hotel rooms as though it was what grownup people always did, knew without having to say so that they’d be loyal friends for life.

Her marriage was a curious thing. Not at all what she’d expected. But expectations: what are they? Notions imposed by others. The stubborn entrenched ways of the tribe. He proposed to her by leading her to the west wing of his big country house and showing her the perfect study, fully equipped with picture windows looking out over the forest upon the mountains to the west, meaning that on sunny mornings she’d have an illumined postcard view of the mountains and often, in the evenings, spectacular sunsets. He said that if she married him this would be hers — the car, too, of course. In fact, just about anything she desired. She didn’t know if she loved him (what was that?), but she really liked him and felt inclined to say yes, but first he wanted to show her another room. In this one, the Dracula image returned. Bluebeard’s Chamber. It was windowless and full of instruments of torture: stocks, cages, velvet whipping stools, leg and arm cuffs in the walls, glass cases full of canes and belts and whips and paddles, elaborate ropes and pulleys meant for dangling victims, iron maidens, plus film screens and projectors and dance studio mirrors on the walls. “Scary!” she said. “Not for me. I’m just an old-fashioned squeamish all-American girl.” “Oh, it’s not for you. I wouldn’t enjoy that. It’s for me. And other men…” It took her a few moments to take it all in. She remembered his eagerness to show her off in Washington. This room would not win him a lot of votes. “You want me for cover. A kind of job.” “I guess you could look at it that way. But what marriage isn’t? This one’s just a little different. And I do love you, Sally. Love your mind, your wit, your good heart, love your young body.” It probably helps, she was thinking, that it’s on the boyish side. “In a sense I’ve been waiting all my life for someone like you, just as in conventional romances. And you can step out of it whenever you want.” Well, it was pretty weird, but somehow it made a certain sense to her, enough anyway that she smiled and said okay, why not. Try it out. Was the Chamber soundproofed? It was. While she was back in her home state with Simon, she remembered to call her parents and tell them she was married to a nice guy, a bit older, rich, a U.S. Congressman, and when she was more settled and the book was done, they could come visit. “Oh, why don’t you come here?” her mother said. “You know your father doesn’t travel well.”

The perfect study with the postcard views was waiting for her when she returned from the prison interviews (an immaculate snowscape: she couldn’t resist, she ran out and wrote on it), and for the first couple of weeks everything seemed to be going brilliantly as she typed up her notes, papered the walls with clippings and photo blowups, revised her outline and the five completed chapters, and launched a sixth — well over half the book done, according to her outline. It was the legislative season and her husband was away in Washington most of the time, which meant that — though she found that she missed him — every minute of every day was her own, her meals and the house and laundry cared for by a French Canadian woman who came in five days a week and who sometimes regaled her with funny family stories, often remarking, “You should write it in a novel!” They were indeed the sort of stories most novelists feed upon, but Sally was determined not to do that; just get through this one obligatory project, then back to the good stuff, already developing under her left hand, so to speak.

And then, suddenly, two months before her deadline, everything under her right hand fell apart. It was a mere patchwork of lists and fragments, she saw. Nothing held together. The writing was pedestrian, her digressions were tedious and for the most part stolen, the characterizations fatuous and condescending. The only chapter worth keeping was the one set in the Bible college cafeteria. The two before that, the personal narrative of her afternoon in the culvert and an imaginary reconstruction of Billy Don’s beer-drinking high school days were irrelevant and would have to be thrown out, and the one after it — an account of the boys’ missionary travels with the cult — was totally unconvincing. As for the later chapter based on her “Jan” story, she could see now that, shorn of its climax, it was as trivial as any other conventional fiction. And hordes of new characters had come piling in, some real, some fictional. She was completely bogged down in the new chapter she’d begun — their arrival at the camp and its reconstruction — which she realized she knew almost nothing about, having only a fuzzy childhood memory of the church camp and having been banned from seeing what changes the Brunists wrought, all that now lost to the fire. Worse: what lurked just beyond it was the centerpiece Day of Redemption chapter, which she knew in her abysmal ignorance she could never write — what happened after the old lady died? she had almost no idea — and then the climactic holy war chapters and the murder. Impossible. And what if she were wrong about Darren’s guilt? She was toying with a young man’s life. In the trial transcript, Darren says: “I am a religious pacifist. I have never had a gun in my hand all my life and I never will.” Numerous witnesses confirmed this about him. She was wrong. Junior did it. The “LIER.” She had no story. The whole sorry project was a shabby, witless, rickety, undisciplined mess.

When her husband called, as he did almost every day, she told him, laughing, the latest of the maid’s comical tales of family feuding and inbreeding, and said that she had decided to polish the Bible college chapter as a story and send it around and abandon the rest. He heard the panic in her voice, hired a plane for the weekend and flew home. He gently dragged her out of the trash heap that her study had become, first opening the windows to let out the sickening miasma of stale cigarette smoke, and led her into the bedroom, undressed her, and made love to her in a profoundly affectionate way of the sort rarely shown and then generally only after a punishing evening with his friends in the Chamber, leaving her crying softly on the pillow while he crafted a mushroom risotto with shaved truffles and cheese-flavored croutons in the kitchen. He tossed a green salad with garlic and lemon juice, opened a Barbaresco that even she with her nicotine-stunned palate could recognize as a serious wine, and put string quartets on the stereo system. Brahms? Mozart? She wasn’t sure, her musical education only just beginning. She started to explain herself; he put his finger to his lips. “Just listen to the music,” he said with a smile. After dinner he replaced the string quartets with big band music from the swing era and they danced for a while like lovers in an old movie and then went back to bed for another round of sex — slow, almost meditative in nature. “You’re really good at this,” she said, as he studied her from within and from above. “It’s like a skill you have. I suppose you could do it equally well with old crones or chimpanzees or trained seals.” “Probably,” he said, smiling down on her. Appreciatively, she thought. “I do have quite a lot of sex. But only rarely the opportunity to make love.”

She woke to find breakfast awaiting her and her study locked from the inside. Which frightened her. Perhaps, fearing for her sanity, he was destroying it all. She raised her fist to bang on the door, thought better of it, returned to her breakfast, hit the on-switch on the coffee-maker. Eventually he joined her, kissed her gently on that nice place behind the ear (she rather hoped he’d nip her lobe, but he didn’t; what he might call consistency of style), and said he’d spent some time with her typescript, he hoped she didn’t mind. She did, but at this moment she was too fond of him to say so. He praised it, found it “vivid, provocative, dark yet funny,” etc. He had something else to say. She could wait for it. “I especially loved the high school beer party and the flagellation scenes.”

“You would. But I’ve taken them out.”

“Really? Also, I didn’t find the cemetery story.”

“It’s gone, too. It didn’t seem to fit in anywhere and I’d have had to explain too much if I used it.”

“A pity. When you told me the story I remember laughing a lot and at the same time feeling a gathering anxiety, not so much because of the setting, but because of increasing apprehension about the blond boy. He seemed quietly and dangerously crazed. Not someone you’d want to be alone with in a cemetery or anywhere else. I think it would make a good first chapter. It sums everything up while keeping it all intriguingly mysterious.”

“I have a first chapter.” He smiled, sipped coffee, said nothing. “You don’t think I have a first chapter.”

“You have a kind of foreword. Or afterword, maybe. Not in the voice of ‘the girl,’ as you call her, but in your own. It is too argumentative for a novel chapter, but it works as a way of explaining how you got involved with this story and why you decided to write it. It’s a place where you can summarize the cult history as you came to know it and comment on it in your own voice, and that saves you having to do that inside the novel itself. You’re going to want to end the novel much like you ended the story, and you can use the afterword to fill in the rest of what happened that day and to report on the trials and sentences that resulted, which are part of the book’s motivations. Also, in our very first conversation at the writers’ colony, you unleashed some of your pet theories about cognitive dissonance and collective effervescence, and the afterword would give you the opportunity to indulge yourself a bit.”

“Not my theories, I’m afraid.”

“I know that. But they fit. Credit them if you think you must. But help us see what you see.”

“This is going to take forever.”

“Won’t be easy, but you may be further along than you think.” By now they had their coats and boots on, caps and gloves, and were entering the woods on a winter walk. About a mile further on, she knew, having been there before on her own, the land fell away and he or someone had built a rustic outlook with rough-hewn picnic tables for the summer. Always a surprise when one got there because neither the overlook nor the valley could be seen from the house. On the way, as they shuffled through the snow, stirring up creatures on either side of them, he pointed out that she already had enough for a book, though only half was probably worth keeping, and he encouraged her to rethink her removal of the flagellation and rape scene, because she probably wanted the boys with their alternating points of view to think more about Young Abner. When she protested he wasn’t her character, Darren and Billy Don were, and besides he was totally unattractive, a stupid, sullen boy, he reminded her that Young Abner was the one on death row and said maybe she could try to make sullenness and stupidity interesting. “Make room for plain, ordinary ugliness. The everyday tragic drama of the impoverished spirit.” She was thinking about this. She was resisting it. But he may be right, she was thinking. He is right, damn him. They emerged from the woods and reached the overlook. The air was exhilaratingly cold and clean. As they talked, the book settled into its new shape. It was as if she were gazing out upon it, metamorphosing before her eyes down in the snowy sunlit valley: the cemetery openers, the Bible college cafeteria meeting with some background bits cannibalized from the high school chapter, the two friends drawing together during their travels and establishment of the camp, their falling apart after the attempted seduction scenes of her short story, Darren moving toward the Baxterites, Billy Don staying loyal to the Clara Collins people. The cult schism: way to talk about that.

“Sounds good,” he said. “What’s left?”

“The end of their relationship. The murder.” Six chapters, counting the afterword, three of them more or less written. She took off one of her gloves to pull out a cigarette, but he also took a glove off and held her hand and that was better. She felt spectacularly healthy.

Before her husband returned to the Capitol, he had one night with his friends in what he called the “library,” but by then she was beavering away in her study once more, earphones on to stifle any sounds that might leak from the Chamber. The front two and back two chapters, she foresaw, would more or less write themselves; the middle two would be more difficult, but now that they were defined as coming-together and falling-apart chapters, all the peripheral material dropped away into the background, and her two characters rose to the fore. She was having fun writing again.

When he came to bed that last night, she hugged him and thanked him. He was trembling still from whatever it was he had just gone through. “You’re like something out of a fairytale,” she said.

“Think of me more,” he murmured, “as a character from one of those Victorian novels you profess to hate. A kind of ambassador from them, as you might say.”

“If it’s your mission, Mr. Ambassador, to lure me into those tired woods, you will not succeed. It’s the wildness I want.” He laughed softly, sleepily, squeezed her hand.

In interviews she is often asked what she is working on now. When she tried to answer the question seriously, she only drew baffled stares and impatient interruptions: Didn’t she have another faction in mind? So she finally learned to duck the question by pretending she didn’t like to talk about work in progress and then, after she’d repeated it a few times, she was no longer pretending. To her agent, she has to be more specific. Gets an irritable sigh in return. Bad girl. The word “career” comes up again. When Sally dismisses it, the agent wants to know what, then, she needs him for. “To hold my hand when the rejections come in,” she says with a smile, and he looks pained but shrugs and smiles back.

The interviewers also ask, inevitably, about her disputing of the trial verdict and her legally unproven assumption that the real killer, whom she names, was not the one convicted by the court. Isn’t she liable to legal action herself? Yes, she is. But she is right. Or so she says when asked. Actually, throughout the writing, the doubt never went away. Doubt and the overcoming of doubt — it was like something out of one of those Brunist sermons she attended. Have faith, my daughter. Essentially Simon’s message whenever she called him. “Don’t worry. Darren killed your friend, then handed off the murder weapon to Young Abner just as he said he did and sent him back to the camp as the fall guy, everything points to it, and because the kid is naïve and stupid he fell for it. Might be hard to prove in a court of law if you got challenged, but I don’t think Rector would want to take the risk. Expect Christian forbearance.”

After they received the typescript, her publishers were also suddenly doubt-stricken. They sent her a list of requested alterations, and the first one was that she change all the real names to fictional ones, as in her published story. When she refused, they began demanding harsh cuts. What they seemed to hate most was her best writing. She sent a copy to her old workshop teacher and asked his opinion. A bit hasty, a few loose ends, but it’s a well-made book with a compelling story, he told her. Don’t give in. “The literary judgments of commercial publishers aren’t to be trusted. They don’t trust them themselves and will eventually back down.” They did, but made her sign a statement accepting full responsibility for any legal actions against the book. Simon told her not to worry, she had a good lawyer on her side.

She was proofing galleys when Simon called to say he had managed to secure yet another stay of execution for all five of the remaining condemned — not including Nathan Baxter and his gang, who may or may not have died in the East Texas massacre — but that it may be their last opportunity. And he had good news for her. Through his contacts in the area, he had managed to obtain for her a ten-minute meeting with Clara Collins-Wosznik. Word had gotten around about his law firm’s defense of the imprisoned Brunists and they were grateful. But Clara was said to be very weak, and ten minutes was all they could allow. He had made it clear that they should stop demonizing Miss Elliott, a talented young woman committed to their cause and an invaluable research assistant for his legal team. Moreover, she had something important to tell them. “I told them what you told me. That it was an act of redemption.” It was another last opportunity: Once the book was out, that door would be slammed shut.

She was able to bring Clara a gift. Simon had asked to see again the things removed from Billy Don’s car in case there was something there he could use that he’d missed before. There wasn’t, but he found a framed document wrapped in a sweatshirt at the bottom of Billy Don’s carrier bag which, according to the inscription on the back, was Ely Collins’ last note before he died in the Deepwater mine disaster, something Billy Don apparently rescued at the last minute. The glass was cracked, but otherwise it looked undamaged. Simon was able to sign out for it on the condition it would be returned to the widow. Sally had a receipt for Clara to sign, which she did with a trembling hand. Might have been emotions, might have been her frailty. Her hair was gone and she chose not to cover her baldness. A kind of defiant nakedness with which Sally empathized. Brought out her gaunt masculine features, but her essential femininity was what you saw. The gentle matriarch. She was surrounded by other women who called her Sister Clara. All unsmiling, watching Sally. But moved, she could see, by the return of the death note. A red-headed toddler joined them. One of the prisoners they interviewed had said there was a rumor that Elaine’s baby was not completely human, but this was a real kid, a bit scrawny but feisty and bright-eyed. His mother came out to snatch him up and Sally asked her please to stay, she had something to tell her. Elaine turned away in alarm but her mother called her over to her side and fearfully she went there, toddler in arms, her mouth pinched shut. Sally said there were three things she was trying to accomplish: to free as many of the jailed Brunists as possible, to get all the death penalties thrown out or reduced to prison time, and to find out how her friend Billy Don Tebbett got killed. “Junior Baxter did not shoot Billy Don. We know that now. So who did?” The women looked at each other. Something was being confirmed. But what Clara said was: “We don’t know.” They didn’t know where Darren Rector was either and would say no more. Half her time was up, so, starting with the trail of the red boots, Sally told them the story of Carl Dean Palmers, looking straight at Elaine. “I just wanted you to know. He was so brave. One against a whole gang. All of them with guns and knives. He loved you. Enough to die for you. Few of us can say as much.” Elaine’s mother seemed to be wilting, her head dipping. “Ben always said…” she whispered, and one of the other women, nodding, said: “I knew it.” “He is lying in a pauper’s grave in the municipal cemetery. Not far from Marcella Bruno, actually.” The girl showed no sign of emotion, other than the fear that seemed to reside in her. But who knows, maybe she touched her. And then Sally had to leave because Clara had to be helped back to bed. The woman who had spoken introduced herself as Ludie Belle Shawcross and accompanied her to her car. “Billy Don, he was a sweetheart,” she said. “Not much of a believer and less a one as time went on. I reckon you maybe had sumthin to do with that. Which ain’t a concern. But if you’re thinkin’ it was Darren mighta done him, well, you could be right. He’s got a mighty high notion of hisself, like he’s set above the rest of us and ain’t obliged to play by the rules. He ain’t none too poplar round here for the way he’s took things outa Clara’s hands. And now she’s dyin’ he ain’t got no further use of her.” They stood by the car, talking for a few minutes, but when Sally asked if they could stay in touch, Ludie Belle said, “Druther not. Done’s done.”

When she returned, she called Simon to tell him that both she and the district attorney were wrong about where the killing took place. In the courtroom version, Billy Don used the pay phone outside the main lodge and Young Abner, returning from the mine hill to guard the camp, surprised him there. Billy Don was betraying the sect, and Young Abner, no doubt on his father’s orders, executed him when he emerged from the phone booth and dragged him into the car, or perhaps he shot him as he reentered the car. Young Abner then drove the car to the spot where it was found and ditched it. It was where he was found, hiding in the trees, wearing Billy Don’s broken prescription sunglasses like a trophy. In her fictionalized version, Billy Don uses the free office phone inside, where he finds Darren locking up before heading to the hill. Darren chats amiably with him on the way back to the car, gives him a farewell hug, and once Billy Don is behind the wheel, shoots him in the head. But, according to Ludie Belle Shaw-cross, the camp was still full of departing traffic, so Billy Don left his car in the trailer park and walked up to the office and back. They had all agreed on a meeting place near the state line, and Billy Don had told them not to wait for him, that he had an errand to run. Thus, after the phone call, he returned to an empty lot, his friends gone, Darren waiting for him. That fit with Junior’s claim that he’d found the sunglasses down there “where the two bodies were,” which had been dismissed by the prosecutor as another of his lies. More importantly, Ludie Belle said there were two beekeepers who had passed through, following the blossoms, both cultists at the camp, who had stayed behind long enough that day of the murder to collect their hives and who told her they’d seen Darren driving Billy Don’s car that morning. Probably hard to locate, but they check in with the cult from time to time during their migrations. Simon said, if they were believable and reliable witnesses, this could be the key; he’d try to find them.

Simon also mentioned he’d be flying out to speak with Abner Baxter and his son again, and she asked to go with him. It was too late for any major changes to her book, but she might be able to tweak her descriptions of Junior in galleys. And, anyway, she enjoyed Simon’s company. He was quick to agree. He enjoyed hers. Both Abner and his son had always refused to meet with Simon if she were along, and that was still true of the father, but the fear of death had softened Junior up, and Simon felt sure he’d accept her presence. She had had a glimpse or two of Junior in the past, and remembered him vaguely from high school, but this was her first time to sit down with him face to face. She had described him to her husband, based on things Billy Don and Simon had said, as ugly, stupid, sullen. She did not misspeak. Though barely out of his teens, he was already heavy in the jowls, soft and lumpy looking, with a witless, baggy stare. Sally had always associated self-flagellation with a certain intelligence and imagination. He didn’t seem bright enough for it, but there you go: no blanket judgments. His shaved head was a bright red where the new hair was growing, and she remembered that Billy Don had told her that after his humiliation and scarring, Junior had let his hair grow long to cover the scar and wore a headband, much as Billy Don hid his strabismus behind dark glasses. The exposed scar, looking raw as though he’d been scratching at it, somehow called to mind Billy Don as she’d last seen him — without his glasses and frighteningly vulnerable — and she felt a deflected tenderness toward the condemned young man in front of her. The scar, which could still be read, must draw a lot of ridicule from the other prisoners. Four letters like the four on Jesus’ cross, declaring him a king. Another “lier.” She didn’t tell Junior that. She told her notebook. While she took notes and risked a sketch or two, Simon went over everything once more, searching for any detail that might have been overlooked, from the gathering early that morning in the Meeting Hall, through the mass move to the mine hill, the troubles there, Darren’s hand-off of the gun, what Junior witnessed at the camp, and so on. Nothing really new, though Junior’s confused embarrassment about the fire made Sally wonder. They got up to go. “By the way, Abner,” Sally asked, not having thought of it before, “do you drive?” He flushed again, hesitated, looking guilty, shook his head. “You don’t drive?” He stared at her sullenly as though facing another accusation. She looked at Simon. Simon looked at her.

In bed that night, sharing a smoke with her, Simon laid out his case. He’ll go back to the trial judge with a motion for a new trial. He’ll ask that the defense attorney be called to testify at the hearing. The prosecutor’s scenario, starting from the phone booth outside the Meeting Hall, was almost completely wrong, but they would use it. All they had to show was that Junior could not move the car to the side road and ditch, no matter where one started from. That’s the secret. Not the truth, but a good story.

By the time of the revised second edition, The Killing of Billy D is banded with the declaration THE BOOK THAT SAVED A MAN’S LIFE! and the afterword and jacket copy have been adjusted to include the story of Young Abner Baxter’s release from death row and then from prison itself. His release, in turn, inspires a new round of talk show and news hour interviews, and on one of them the host, introducing the author, describes the book as an “affectionate portrait” of the title character, whereupon Sally breaks down in tears, as the pent-up grief for Billy Don, buried under all these strenuous months beginning to stretch now into years, bursts explosively to the surface. She has the presence of mind, when she recovers enough to speak, though blinded still by the memory of Billy Don standing waist-deep in moonlit lake water with his sunglasses on, to attribute at least part of her grief to that felt for Young Abner’s father, the last remaining cultist on death row, whose execution in the electric chair is imminent — two of the other three having been granted clemency, the third having killed himself — and that felt for all other persons around the country and around the world, facing the barbarism of state-authorized human slaughter.

Though partly stimulated by Sally’s book, Junior Baxter’s release, and a general shift of public opinion toward sympathy for the condemned evangelicals, the two last-minute clemency decisions followed directly upon the grotesque suicide of the third of the condemned, a Brunist preacher from a small church in eastern Tennessee. The man first went on a hunger strike and then secretly, before being force-fed by the prison authorities on the governor’s orders, swallowed the shards of a broken mirror smuggled in from the outside, the unspeakable horror of which, matched with the placidity of the dying victim, caused the prison chaplain and chief medical officer to resign or be asked to resign. The preacher’s farewell note, penned in perfect Palmer Method script, gave thanks to God, Jesus, and His Disciples and Apostles, to the Prophet Bruno, his martyred sister, and the Brunist “saints” Ely and Clara Collins and Ben Wosznik, and above all to his “spiritual guide, the great incorruptible holy man Reverend Abner Baxter.”

Unfortunately for Abner, such praise served as further condemnation, for the main charge against him from the outset has been his responsibility for instigating and directing that day’s most horrific events, the final episode in a long history of unrepentant criminal behavior. His followers, roaming vagabonds for the most part, chronically unemployed and disoriented by despair and poverty, were obliged to pledge blind obedience to him, following wherever he might lead in his uncompromising militancy. Even murder could become not a sinful breaking of the divine commandment but a sacred duty. Soldiers in God’s war to cleanse the earth of nonbelievers. That was the story about him, crafted by the prosecutor and the media. His three violent sons were believed to have been under his direct command — the motorcycle gang’s immaculately coordinated assault was said by the district attorney to have been Abner’s master plan, his march on the mine hill a sinister diversion to maximize the bikers’ damage, their attack on the town in turn serving Abner’s army on the hill by drawing away their adversaries, their final acts of murder and arson at the church camp aided and abetted by the oldest son standing guard for them (all right, he’s free, but new charges will be filed) — and his inflammatory rhetoric was likened to his early days as a communist agitator during the mine union strikes and internecine wars. He still cursed the haves on behalf of the have-nots, now under the cloak of religion, and prophesied the eventual redistribution of all property equally to all people, no matter by what means, as Jesus Christ, he heretically proclaimed, preached and intended. He was heard by several witnesses and on more than one occasion to call for a “day of wrath,” and the motorcyclists, led by his second son, wore “Wrath of God” on their leather jackets and tattooed on their bodies, as well as other cultic symbols. He was a major suspect in the death under suspicious circumstances five years earlier of young Marcella Bruno, sister of the founder of the cult (he has been heard to confess this crime), and was guilty of leading a destructive assault the next day on the St. Stephen’s Roman Catholic Church, though he jumped bail before he could be brought to trial. More recently, he was believed to have masterminded an armed invasion of the Brunist compound, and when jailed for his crimes, he attempted a forcible breakout, injuring the two police officers who eventually subdued him, for which reason he has until now been kept under close observation at the prison, mostly in solitary confinement. The legal occupants of the church camp were chased out by him and his followers, and those who lingered were ruthlessly exterminated. And yet, the only witness to any actual death caused directly by Baxter himself was his former closest ally Roy Coates, and Coates’ testimony, obtained in a plea bargain that spared him from a certain execution, was suspect. The specific victim in the Coates testimony was a member of the Knights of Columbus Defense Force and technically a deputized police officer, thereby adding cop-killing to Baxter’s crimes, though this Defense Force was an irregular and probably illegal group, and any such shooting, if it even happened, was arguably in self-defense. The brutal assassination of the county sheriff, however, was unquestionably the work of his sons and their gang, and this too was laid by the prosecuting district attorney, now the state governor, at Abner’s door.

Sally sees it all differently and says so on every possible occasion. While Simon files urgent appeal after urgent appeal, she uses what ever interview and talk show opportunities come her way as her bully pulpit, exposing the true realities behind the deceitful prosecutorial rhetoric, and continuing her assault on Christianity as the true culprit behind the crimes. She does her best to adhere to the cautionary guidelines laid down by Simon and her husband but never lets them get in the way of driving home a point with an imaginative flourish or two. Because she has become known for her reckless candor, interviewers and moderators often taunt her with questions meant to provoke another outrageous outburst. Both Simon and her husband have pointed out that letting fly with her unpopular opinions — she not only freely parades her atheism and her opposition to capital punishment and the conspiracy laws, she also vociferously champions all the liberal causes like civil rights, free speech, preservation of the wilderness, and prison reform, and rails against the inhumanity of corporate capitalism, the numbing banality of the networks, and the nation’s insane wars — has the negative effect of lessening the impact of her criticism of the Baxter case, reducing it in the public mind to eccentric leftwing soapbox oratory. Even her quoting of Adams and Jefferson is often taken as an insult to the nation and a calculated assault on its enduring values. She knows that, and knows too that these people are just using her as entertainment, turning her into a kind of sound-bite clown to fill the gaps between commercials, and she does her best to stay cool as her husband has instructed her, but restraint is not among her inborn virtues. In this she feels a certain empathy with Abner Baxter, whose thunderous grandstanding makes defending him such a nightmare.

In the end, the nightmare evolves into real-time horror. The preacher is accused of many crimes but few in particular, so the only defense, finally, is against the law itself. The Supreme Court refuses to hear the case, but Simon does get it before the state Supreme Judicial Court. He gives it his best and the judge is sympathetic and takes note of Simon’s eloquence, but tells him the court cannot change the law. “You should run for congress, Mr. Price,” he says. That they are facing failure sinks in slowly. “Don’t get your hopes too high,” Simon said when they began all this, “we lose more than we win,” but they both were certain they would win. They were right, and the right would ultimately triumph. When the last appeal is exhausted, they cannot accept it, but press on. And then — suddenly, it seems — the governor denies clemency, all options are closed, and the day of extinguishing Abner Baxter’s life is upon them.

Organizations opposing the death penalty have been in touch with her, and they let her know that they will be holding a vigil outside the prison where the execution is taking place and ask her to join them. She and her husband fly out in a private plane, and her husband hires a limousine to drive them to the prison, where they meet up with Simon and his wife. Sally likes Simon’s wife immediately. Passionate and smart. That ends that. But she and Simon will be friends still, and in this tribe of barbarians, that’s something. Because he is a Congressman, her husband is interviewed by the hovering media. He says: “I am opposed to capital punishment. Period.” She is proud of him. She hears him say so to the young newscaster and she hears him say so on the transistor radio she has pressed to her ear. The network she is listening to has a reporter inside the prison who will witness the execution and describe it for his listeners. Abner Baxter is said to be remarkably serene, having stoically accepted his fate, his blistering attacks on the faithlessness and corruption of those who put him here giving way to a quiet contemplative time. He is said to be reading the Bible. And writing.

Words. Their inscription. The pathos of that.

Night has fallen. They light candles as the hour draws near. They are not many. And they are not alone. A large parking lot has filled with cars and pickups, and tailgate parties are underway. Kegs of beer. Portable barbecue pits. A few musical instruments, blown or strummed randomly like an orchestra warming up. Someone is practicing a drumroll. They have rigged up a P.A. system to broadcast the reports from within and she can put away her transistor radio. They’re making a lot of noise. It’s like New Year’s Eve in Times Square. “It’s awful,” she says to her husband, “to think that we might be alone in the universe and that this is what we are.” Curious tourist-types gather, some joining the beer party, some coming over to their little group and accepting a candle, others approaching a larger mass of people, many of whom are now pulling on Brunist tunics. She has heard reports that they would be here. There are scores of them, and more arriving by the minute. What the occasional execution will do for a faltering movement. They also bring out candles. Abner releases a final statement, quoting Paul, which is read over the P.A. system by the reporter on the inside: “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.” The Brunists groan and kneel to pray. There is some keening, but they are largely subdued in their mourning. They are witnesses to a martyrdom. The making of a saint. They can all write a book.

She spies the blond curls. The Evangelist. No surprise there. It is no doubt he who has gathered the Brunists here tonight. The surprise is that Young Abner Baxter is with him. Well, a surprise, and not a surprise. When Junior got the news of his release, he didn’t thank them, just stared at them for a moment, then walked away, and she knew then that if the same circumstances as that day in the ditch should arise again, she’d once more be a target. Sally finds herself grinding her cigarette out underfoot and walking over to them. Is she feeling suicidal or what? The crowds around Darren stand and part. She hears hissing sounds. The Antichrist approacheth. Junior’s hair is growing back. His moustache. He wears a headband, also white, hiding his scars. Menacingly expressionless. As are most here. Darren wears an expression of sorrowful bliss. Like he’s high on something. A madman’s smile. Eerie by candlelight. “I’m sorry about your father, Abner,” she says. “We did everything we could.” No response, not even a blink. She feels like the only moving thing in a fixed tableau. “I’m sorry, too, about Billy Don,” she says, turning her gaze on Darren. He is wearing the dodecagonal medal Billy Don told her about, the one he stole from Clara Collins. It glitters in the night like something burning on his chest. His spectacles reflect the flickering candles like glowing half-dollars. She has not seen him up close or talked to him since that day on the mine hill, but Billy Don helped her to imagine him in his private ways, and she probably knows him better than he knows himself. Not probably; surely. “I miss him.”

“Billy Don is in Heaven, waiting for me with open arms,” Darren replies softly. She called his voice “quietly compelling” in her novel and it is, but his smug piety grates on her. “I do not think we will see you there.”

“Don’t be so sure,” she says. She knows what he has done, even if he no longer does. He should be sitting in Abner’s chair. But if he were, she’s well aware, she would be out here, just the same. “Your Heaven exists only in your head, creep, dies when you do. But, meanwhile, Billy Don and I will haunt your fantasy world, so watch out. Our games may be cruel. We will make enemies of your angels. Listen carefully to what they sing. You will know no peace.”

She feels suddenly exhausted. What has she said? She doesn’t know. The parking lot party is in full swing, raucous and obscene, cheering on the executioner. She turns to leave, unsure of what might happen next, her knees wobbly, sees her husband and Simon waiting for her a few yards away. Her husband takes her hand, Simon her arm. The countdown has begun and solemnly they walk away to the drummed beat of it.

The Kingdom has been decimated by the black magic of the Cretin Wizards with their cult of the Living Dead. The King hangs those he can catch, but they are everywhere, ineradicable as cockroaches. Their magic is merely a clumsy sleight-of-hand that can only delude the stupid, but, alas, there is no scarcity of stupidity in the world, nor in his Kingdom nor in his Castle, either. A lesson for the Goose Girl as well, launching forth on adventures of her own. She is no longer a Goose Girl, having bade farewell to her flock, a bittersweet occasion, for she had to choose one of them for her supper before setting out (IT’S THE SADNESS is tattooed across her breasts), and she is no longer Beauty either, if she ever was, even in her own imagination. Inspired by the nightmares unleashed by the Cretin Wizards, she has taken up oneirophagy and will be known henceforth as Dream Eater, the tribal Dreamtime itself her chosen banquet hall. If indeed she is the chooser not the chosen. Is that enough for one life? No, but it beats bedding down in goose shit. Dream Eaters of the past have all been monsters. She will be a monster, too. Is one, born and bred. She flexes her talons, bares her steely teeth, and then, locking the gate and hauling up the drawbridge behind her, she’s out of there. Done’s done.