Divine Evil

know all kinds of things.” She set the beer down again. “I know who has trouble at the bank, who cheats the IRS, and whose wife won't do it more than once a week.” She pulled on the cigarette, exhaled. “And I know that you're pissing a lot of people off by asking questions when everybody thinks you should be looking for psychopaths under rocks in the woods. There's nothing I can tell you, Cam.”
    “Nothing you will tell me.”
    “I might have, once.” She picked up the cue and gave him a playful poke. “I might have done a lot for you once. Could've made things easy for you. But a woman like me looks out for herself, and I figure you're on your way out. A murder, an attack, slaughtered cattle, all since you've been back.” Her eyes were sly with secrets. “Maybe somebody ought to ask you some questions.”
    He leaned close. “Figure this. If you know something you shouldn't, I'm your best chance.”
    “I'm
my best chance,” she corrected. “I always have been.” She turned her back on him and leaned over the table again. She spared him one last glance. “I heard your mama was packing up, too. I wonder why?” Sarah shot the cue ball into the pack and scattered balls.
    * * *
    By the light of her bedside lamp, Clare leafed through her father's books. It wasn't the first time. Over the last few nights, she had read them again and again, trying to understand the connection they had with the father she had known and adored. Trying to understand at all.
    She'd found six of them, in the boxes upstairs. Six that dealt with what Jean-Paul had called the left-hand path. A half-dozen books, most of them dog-eared, that touted, even celebrated, the freedoms of Satanism.
    What frightened her most was that they were not the screaming ravings of uneducated lunatics. They were slickly, somehow persuasively written and published by reputable houses. As an artist she viewed freedom of expression the same way she did breathing: No soul could exist without it. And yet each time she opened a volume her skin felt soiled. Each time she read, she suffered. Yet she continued to read, as her father must have, in secret, in shame, and in sorrow.
    He had been searching, she thought. Jack Kimball had been an open-minded man thirsty for knowledge, always ready to question the status quo. Perhaps he had developed an interest in the workings of Satanic cults in the same way he had honed his interest in politics, in art, in horticulture.
    She sat smoking, then easing her raw throat with tepid tap water, wishing she could convince her heart as easily as she convinced her head.
    He'd been a man who enjoyed being fascinated and challenged, being shown a different route. A rebel, she thought with a small smile, determined to break the strict mold in which his parents had struggled to enclose him. Raised by devout Catholics, he had often referred to hisparents as Saint-Mom-and-Dad, as if they had been one holy entity.
    Often he'd told Blair and her stories about rising at dawn to make it to mass before school every day during Lent— and dozing through the sermon until his mother would jab him with an elbow. He'd had a never-ending supply of Catholic-school anecdotes, some hilarious, others a little scary. He'd told them how hurt and disappointed his parents had been when he refused to enter the priesthood. He had laughed when he related the way his mother had lit candle after candle, asking the Virgin to intercede so that her son would recognize his calling. But when he laughed, the bitterness had always come through.
    And she had overheard other stories—ones not for her ears. About how his parents had come to detest each other, how they had lived under the same roof, shared the same bed, year after year, without love, often using him as a kind of seesaw on which they weighed their bitter unhappiness. But there was no divorce in the eyes of the church, and those were the only eyes through which his parents could see.
    “Better to live in misery than in sin,” he'd recalled in disgust. “Christ, what hypocrites they were.”
    By the time he married, Jack Kimball had turned completely away from the church.
    Only to turn back, Clare thought now, almost as fanatically as his parents, some ten years later. And a few years after, he had picked up a bottle along with his rosary.
    Why?
    Was the answer somewhere in the books she had scattered over her bed?
    She didn't want to believe that. Didn't think she could face it. The father she