Spencerville

Both men stood in the dark, a faint light coming from the church windows casting shadows over the gravestones. Keith said, "Neither do I."

"Mr. Landry, I'm sure your intentions are honorable, but the only honorable thing you can do now is to break off any contact with her. Things will work themselves out with God's help."

"And without my help."

"Precisely." He asked, "Do you or do you not intend to stay here to live?"

"I did, but I'm not certain now."

"I think your presence here is fuel to the fire. Can you go somewhere for a while? No doubt, your parents would like to see you."

Keith smiled. "Are you running me out of town?"

"I'm suggesting that if you leave, I can see a happy ending for both of you. If you stay, I see only disaster."

Apparently, he and Pastor Wilkes had reached the same conclusion independently of each other. Keith said, "I didn't think you were going to advise me on how to win another man's wife. I thought I was going to get hellfire and brimstone."

"That's the fundamentalist church down the road. Here we do love and compassion. Will I see you Sunday?"

"Perhaps. Goodnight."

Chapter Seventeen

As Keith pulled away from the church. Obviously, he thought, there was nothing simple about a simple rural community. In fact, life was simpler in the big city. Here, they cared about your soul and made you think about it, too, and that really got complicated.

Keith drove along the dark country road. He knew that the police could stop him anytime, anyplace, on any pretext, and he'd resigned himself to that. He'd been in the hands of the police in other countries, and he knew the drill, knew when they just wanted to scare you and when they intended to knock you around. He'd never had the experience of being really tortured and obviously hadn't faced a firing squad, though there was one time in Burma, years ago, when he knew they were talking about it.

Being a veteran of a few arrests, he couldn't imagine that the Spencerville police station could hold many terrors for him, but you never knew what they had on their minds until you got there and saw how they were acting. A more unsettling scenario than the unlikely possibility of dying in police custody was the more likely possibility of dying trying to escape arrest, which was far more common in the civilized countries. Keith didn't imagine that there'd be much of an inquiry if he was shot on a country road, especially if the police put a weapon in his hands after he was dead. But they'd have to supply their own weapon to plant, because he didn't have his with him, though he wished he did.

But was this police force that far down the road toward criminality and viciousness? He thought not, but Cliff Baxter certainly was, especially after being baited by Keith Landry.

He glanced in his rearview mirror but didn't see any headlights. He turned onto a series of farm roads and took an indirect way back to his house. The bottom line, though, was that there was only one road that passed his farm and one way in. If they were at all bright, they'd simply wait for him at either end of that road.

As he drove, he thought about what he'd heard in the church and in the parsonage, not to mention what happened outside. It all came down to Cliff Baxter, this sort of evil fog that covered the once sunny and happy countryside.

Enter the hero, the savior. "No. Exit the hero. Everyone here will get what they deserve, for better or worse." Wilkes was right. Leave it to God, or to Annie, or to the Porters, whoever acted first. "Do not get ego-involved in this."

"Here's the question, Landry — if Annie were not the wife of Cliff Baxter, would you take on this fight in the interest of justice?"

Well, he thought, he'd done that often enough, though he'd gotten paid for it. But there wasn't enough money involved for the risks he'd taken. Obviously, he'd been motivated by patriotism and a sense of justice. But when that waned, he'd been motivated by a selfish desire for adventure and career advancement, and that wasn't enough. Here, in Spencerville, he found he could accomplish several objectives with one act: By killing Baxter, he could do the town and himself a favor, free Annie, and then perhaps have Annie. But that didn't seem like the right thing for the right reasons, no matter how he dissected it.

He found himself on the road that led to Route 28, his road. Rather than get onto 28, he swung the Blazer off the road and followed a dirt tractor path that crossed the Mullet farm through the cornfields. He put the Blazer into four-wheel drive and navigated by the dashboard compass, eventually making his way onto his property, which was planted with the Mullets' corn, and within ten minutes, he came out into the clearing of his own farmyard near the barn.

He shut off his headlights, turned toward the house, and parked near the back door.