Beauty Queen

flew along through the soft wooded Westchester County estates, she could breathe more deeply. There was a kind of innocence here, even though she reminded herself that sin could flourish as well in a country mansion an it could in a 42nd Street massage parlor.
    She was just reaching the Westchester-Putnam county line, where the six-lane Route 684 narrowed down into old Route 22, when she saw the state trooper's red lights flashing in her rearview mirror.
    She pulled over, heaved a weary sigh, put her hand over her eyes and waited while the trooper swaggered up to her car.
    "Your driver's license, please."
    She handed it to him without a word. It already had one other speeding violation recorded on it within the three-year limit. She'd have to be more careful.
    "Senator Jean Colter?" he asked, grinning.
    "That's right," she said shortly.
    The trooper seemed to take a perverse pleasure in writing out a ticket for a woman politician.
    She drove on, and when the trooper was out of sight, the speedometer inched up to seventy-five again. Once she was on the winding old Route 22, however, she had to slow down to fifty-five. "I owe it to my children," she thought, "not to get myself killed. They need me."
    Now she was out of suburbia, and into the real farm country of upstate New York The rolling hills were crowned with soft woodlands and apple orchards. Holstein cows dotted the pastures beyond the low tumble-down stone walls that bespoke the colonial past of this area. Here and there, pastures were growing up with cedar and birch brush, and the barns were badly weathered—hints that the local agricultural economy was hard pressed by rising costs and taxes.
    In contrast were the splendid motels and restaurants with names like Heidi, L'Auberge Breton, the Elms, Bel Aire, that lured the tired vacationer. Little shops along the road offered crafts, homemade pies, farm-fresh eggs, antiques.
    The children. The thought of them made her stomach clench a little. During each school year, she sheltered them from the vicious realities of the city as much as possible— private schools, tutors, rides to and from school. During the summer, she sent them upstate to Quaker Hill, where her Auntie Mary stayed full-time in her father's country home. There, too, the watchful eyes of Reverend Irving could be on them, at Sunday school. She called them several times a day, and drove up two or three times a week. When they'd been smaller, she had knocked herself out making time to be with them. But somehow, someway, it had not been enough.
    The fact was that three of Jeannie Colter's children were growing up as wild as young mustang colts. However successful she had been as a politician, as someone fearlessly carrying the word of God into public life (where it was so sorely needed), she seemed to have been less successful as a mother.
    She slowed a little. Ahead, just off 22 on the right, hidden by trees and on a little hill, drenched in sunlight, was the snow-white First Baptist Church. Her church. It was one of the oldest churches in North America. It had been built in 1790, by Roger Tobias and his little group of those first Baptists who came to America from England seeking freedom from savage persecution by both Catholics and Protestants.
    She turned off 22 onto the little drive that wound through the trees up a little hill to the church. The church was plain and simple as the Word of God itself. It was built on a foundation of fieldstone dragged from the land around it. Its honest clapboard walls were hewn from the long-vanished virgin forests. The first congregation members had planted four sapling elms beside the fieldstone steps, to shade the tall double doors. Two of the elms were still there, tall and old now, shading the square tower with its little Gothic pinnacles. The other two had died of the elm disease, which the present pastor, Reverend Frank Irving, was fond of comparing to the moral decay of America today.
    The church was still owned by the local Baptist society, who had declined to have it named a national historical landmark because they didn't believe in tracing back authority. But the congregation cared for the building lovingly, donating time and materials. The men kept it painted and repaired, and the women planted and tended flowers around it.
    Nearby lay the little cemetery, which was also immaculate. The chipped old tombstones stood up straight as soldiers, and the grass was clipped as neat as a golf course. A few big