Divine Evil

promised herself. For now, she eased away. “What happened here?”
    “Not now.” Over her head he saw the attendants struggling up the slope with their gruesome burden. “Go on home, Clare.”
    “I wasn't trying to pry into official business,” she began. When she reached for the door handle, she looked back, intending to call an apology to Bud. And she saw the thick black plastic bag. “Who is it?” she whispered.
    “Biff.”
    Slowly, she turned back to look at Cam. “What happened?”
    His eyes weren't hot now, but flat and distant. “We haven't finished determining that.”
    She laid a hand over his. “I don't quite know what to say. What will you do now?”
    “Now?” He rubbed a hand over his face. “Now I'll go out to the farm and tell my mother he's dead.”
    “I'll go with you.”
    “No, I don't want-”
    “Maybe you don't, but your mother might need another woman.” She remembered her own mother, coming home from a giddy evening with friends to find an ambulance in the drive, a crowd of people on the lawn, her husband in a body bag. “I know what it's like, Cam.” Without waiting for agreement, she slipped into the car. “I'll follow you over.”

Chapter 9
    T HE FARM WHERE C AM grew up had changed little in thirty years. In some ways it still held some of the charm he remembered from the years his father had been alive. Spotted cows still grazed on the sloping ground beyond the barn and milking parlor. A rolling field of hay waved in the light spring breeze. Rhode Island Reds pecked and squawked behind the chicken wire.
    The house was a rambling three stories with a wide porch and narrow windows. But the paint was peeling and dingy. More than a few of the windowpanes were cracked, and there were shingles missing from the roof. Biff hadn't liked to open his wallet for anything that didn't offer a profit, unless it was a beer or a whore.
    There were a few straggling daffodils, past their prime, along the rutted, muddy lane. Cam remembered that he'd given his mother money for a load of gravel two months before. He imagined she'd cashed the check, then handed the money over to Biff.
    He knew her kitchen garden at the rear of the house would be planted and meticulously weeded. But therewere no flowers in the beds she'd once fussed over. They were full of witch grass and choking vines.
    He remembered a day, much like this one, when he'd been five or six-sitting beside her on the ground as she turned the earth for a flat of pansies. She'd been singing.
    How long had it been since he'd heard her sing?
    He parked the car at the end of the lane beside his mother's aging Buick station wagon and the rusty pickup. Biff's shiny new Caddy was nowhere in sight. He waited in silence for Clare to join him. She laid a hand on his arm and gave it a quick, supporting squeeze before they climbed the sagging steps to the porch.
    He knocked, and that surprised her. She couldn't imagine knocking on the door of a house she'd grown up in, with her mother still living inside. She wondered if she'd feel obligated to knock before she entered the house her mother and Jerry would live in when they returned from Europe. The idea was painful, and she pushed it away.
    Jane Stokey opened the door, wiping a damp hand on the front of her apron and blinking at the strong sunlight. She'd put on flesh in the middle over the last ten years. Cam supposed her figure would be called matronly. Her hair, once a sassy blond, had faded to a dull, neutral color. She had it permed twice a year at Betty's, paying out of her egg money, but now it was scraped back from her face with two big bobby pins.
    She'd been pretty once. Cam could still remember being proud and half in love with her as a young child. Everyone had said she was the prettiest girl in the county. She'd been Farm Queen the year before she'd married Mike Rafferty. There was a picture of her somewhere, in a white, frilly dress, with the winner's sash across her breasts, her young, triumphant face glowing with delight and promise.
    Now she was old, Cam thought with a pang in his chest. Old, worn out, and used up. It was worse somehow because you could still see traces of that youthful beauty in the lined and tired face.
    She wore no makeup. Biff had told her that he wouldn't tolerate his wife painted up like a whore. There were shadows under the eyes that had once been a bright, interested blue. Around the mouth that every boy in Emmitsboro had dreamed of kissing