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Minna nodded. “Well, it is the most excitement Tommy’s had since he caught his best friend making out with his girlfriend behind the bleachers back in high school. You really can’t blame him. Nor the aldermen. I’m an alderwoman, Miles, and so I’ve already gotten a dozen or more calls.”

“No,” Katie said. “You’re right, it’s been a long dry spell for Tommy.”

Miles called his sister-in-law, Cracker, told her it was finally over. He’d considered asking Cracker if she’d ever known Sam to be ill while Miles had been away, but decided against it. He knew to his soul that if Alicia hadn’t told him about taping Sam with blood on his palms, she wouldn’t have told anyone else. But she had given it to someone. Who? Perhaps her ancient priest, an old man who’d been kind and was failing physically and mentally. If she gave it to him then he must have passed it on to someone else, someone who’d given it to Reverend McCamy. They would never know now, and, truth be told, it didn’t matter. The video was now ashes buried beneath more ashes and shards of burned wood.

When he’d hung up the phone, Katie had nodded. The last thing Sam needed was to have the media proclaiming him the newest candidate for sainthood, or a freak, or a helpless pawn. She could just see a TV guy asking Sam to please try to make his hands bleed again for the cameras. And here was Dr. X, psychologist, to give a historical perspective on the visible stigmata. Or those proclaiming he was a fraud or a victim of abuse, and exploited for it. Thomas Boone could say whatever he wanted, but everyone knew what he’d done, so she doubted anyone would believe him if he talked crazy.

And he’d said more to himself than to Katie, “What else did she keep from me?”

Katie hadn’t said anything, merely taken his hand.

They would come up with exactly what to tell everyone, including the mayor and the aldermen, including her mother, but just not now, not when they were both so tired, like they’d been hung out to dry.

She looked over at Miles, a paper plate on his lap, a half-eaten slice of cinnamon nut bread sitting in the middle. He was sound asleep.

She smiled and nodded off herself.

35

Although two days had passed, Katie still felt unanchored, her brain adrift. She’d dealt with the TBI, attended a special town meeting called by Mayor Tommy Bledsoe, of the long-lived Sherman Bledsoes, to explain exactly what had happened. She’d swear that nearly every citizen in Jessborough was present, along with her mother, of course, and all the mill employees who’d been given the day off to hear the details. There was some media—not national media, thank God. She had told all concerned that Reverend McCamy had been mentally ill, that he had evidently seen Sam when he’d visited Washington, D.C., that something about the boy had attracted him and so he’d arranged to take him. She assumed he wanted to raise him, mold him into what he saw himself as being, make him his successor, and that was surely the truth. He had just gone over the edge. It sounded idiotic to Katie, but not as idiotic as the just plain crazy truth. She and Miles had repeated their story so often that Katie imagined she’d be believing it herself soon.

Neither she nor Miles could explain what they’d seen on the video. She wondered if they ever would. She wondered how and why it had happened to a three-year-old boy. Some sort of bloody rash? Had his fingernails pierced his palms? Or was it a reaction to a medicine? More than likely, because Sam had sure looked sick. And Alicia hadn’t said anything of it to Miles. Miles was fretting over that, but Alicia was long dead, and Katie knew he’d have to let it go.

She’d even called together the congregation of the Sinful Children of God and told them how very sorry she was that Reverend and Mrs. McCamy had died in the fire at their home. She wove the same tale, telling them that Reverend McCamy had been consumed with getting Sam, no one really knew why, and then told them the scene of his final disintegration, his complete mental breakdown, and his suicide. There was