By the light of the moon

escorts were too busy – and
arriving guests were too caught up in anticipation of the pending
event – to take notice of a miraculous materialization in one
far, shadowy corner.
    'A wedding,' Jilly whispered.
    'This is the place?'
    'Los Angeles. My church,' she said, and sounded stunned.
    'Yours?'
    'Where I sang in the choir when I was a girl.'
    'When does it happen?'
    'Soon,' she said.
    'How?'
    'Shot.'
    'More damn guns.'
    'Sixty-seven shot... forty dead.'
    'Sixty-seven?' he asked, staggered by the number. 'Then there
can't be one lone gunman.'
    'More than one,' she whispered. 'More than one.'
    'How many?'
    Her gaze sought answers in the heavenward-curving voussoirs of
the serried vaults, but then slid down the polished marble columns
to the life-size sculptures of saints that formed the dados of the
pedestals.
    'At least two,' she said. 'Maybe three.'
    'Shep is scared.'
    'We're all scared, buddy,' Dylan replied, which at the moment
was the best that he could do by way of reassurance.
    Jilly seemed to study the friends and family of bride, of groom,
as though by sixth sense she could deduce, from the backs of their
heads, whether any of them had come here with violent
intentions.
    'Surely the gunmen wouldn't be wedding guests,' Dylan said.
    'No... I think... no....'
    She took a few steps toward the back of the unoccupied pews in
the last row, her interest rising from the assembled guests to the
sanctuary beyond the distant chancel railing.
    An arc of columns separated the nave from the sanctuary and also
supported a series of transverse arches. Beyond the columns lay the
choir enclosure and the high altar, with pyx and tabernacle, behind
which towered a monumental downlighted crucifix.
    Moving to Jilly's side, Dylan said, 'Maybe they'll come in after
the wedding begins, come in shooting.'
    'No,' she disagreed. 'They're here already.'
    Her words were ice to the back of his neck.
    She turned slowly, searching, searching.
    At the pipe organ in the sanctuary, the organist struck the
first notes of the welcoming hymn.
    Evidently, workmen involved in the restoration of the painted
plaster frieze had left windows or doors open, thereby admitting
some temporary tenants to high apartments. Frightened from roosts
in the ribs of the vaults and from carved-marble perches on the
ornate capitals of the columns, doves swooped down into the nave,
not the multitudes that Jilly had foreseen, but eight or ten, a
dozen at most, arising from different points overhead but joining
at once into a flock this side of the chancel railing.
    The wedding guests exclaimed at this white-winged spectacle, as
though it must be a planned performance preceding the nuptials, and
from several delighted children arose a singular silvery
laughter.
    'It's starting,' Jilly declared, and a sculpting terror wrought
her blood-streaked face.
    In gyres the flock flew through the church, from bride's family
to groom's to bride's again, progressing toward the back of the
nave even as they explored both sides of it.
    A quick-witted usher raced down the aisle to the back of the
nave, under the scaffolding, through the open doors into the
narthex, no doubt intending to prop open a pair of entry doors to
provide the winged intruders with an unobstructed exit.
    As though synchronized to the hymn, the birds soared, dived, and
swooped in their blessing circles from the chancel to the rear of
the nave. Drawn toward the draft caused by the open door, charmed
toward a glimpse of sunlight not filtered through stained glass,
they went where the usher had induced them, out and away, leaving
only a few luminous white feathers adrift in the air.
    At first transfixed by a feather rising on a thermal current,
Jilly's gaze abruptly flew to the scaffolding in the aisle on the
west side of the nave, then to the scaffolding in the east aisle.
' Up there .'
    The apex of each arched window lay about twenty feet above the
church floor. The top of the scaffolding thrust two feet higher, to
service the three-foot-tall band of carved and painted plaster that
began at approximately the twenty-four-foot mark.
    That work platform, where on weekdays craftsmen and artisans
conducted restoration, was perhaps five feet wide, nearly as wide
as the aisle below it, constructed of sheets of plywood secured to
the horizontal ribs of pipe that formed the scaffold cap. The
height, combined with the gloom that prevailed in the vaulted upper
reaches of the church, where the work lights were not