Strange Highways

seems to reach out beseechingly to him, seeking the mercy that she has found nowhere else in the night. His heart swells so terribly with each apocalyptic beat that it cramps his lungs and prevents him from drawing a breath. As the iron treads of thunder roll across the mountains, he hopes that lightning will strike him, that he will join the blonde in death, because trying to carry on with life after this discovery will be too hard, too painful, joyless, and pointless. Then someone speaks behind him, barely louder than the susurrant song of the rain and wind: "Joey." If he's not permitted to die here, right now, in this storm, then he prays to God to be struck deaf, to be blinded, to be freed from the obligations of a witness. "Joey, Joey." Such sadness in the voice. He turns from the battered corpse. In the nebulous blood-tinted light, he faces tragedy, faces the ruination of four lives in addition to that of the woman in the car trunk - his own, his mother's, his father's, his brother's. "I only wanted to help," he tells P.J. "I only wanted to help."
     Joey exhaled explosively, then inhaled with a shudder. "It's my brother. He killed her."

    11

THERE WERE RATS IN THE CHURCH. TWO FAT ONES SCUTTLED ALONG THE back of the sanctuary, squeaking, briefly casting elongated shadows, vanishing into a hole in the wall.
     "Your brother? P.J.?" Celeste said in disbelief.
     Although she had been five years behind P.J. in school, she knew who he was. Everyone in Asherville and all the surrounding villages had known P.J. Shannon even before he'd become a world-famous author. As a sophomore at County High, he had become the youngest quarterback in the history of the football team, a star player who had led his teammates to the divisional championship - and then he had done it twice again, in his junior and senior years. He was a straight-A student, valedictorian of his graduating class, humble in spite of his natural gifts and achievements, a real people-loving guy, handsome, charming, funny.
     And the most difficult thing to reconcile with the body in the trunk: P.J. was kind. He gave a lot of time to charitable activities at Our Lady of Sorrows. When a friend was ill, P.J. was always first in attendance with a small gift and get-well wishes. If a friend was in trouble, P.J. was at his side to provide whatever help he could. Unlike many other jocks, P.J. wasn't cliquish - he was as likely to be found hanging out with the skinny, myopic president of the chess club as with members of the varsity team, and he had no tolerance for the nerd baiting and other cruelties in which popular, good-looking kids sometimes indulged.
     P.J. had been the best brother in the world.
     But he was also a brutal killer.
     Joey couldn't reconcile those two facts. It would've been easy to go mad trying.
     Remaining on his knees on the top altar step, Joey released the dead woman's cold wrist. From the touch of her flesh, in a manner almost mystical, he'd received a dreadful and shattering revelation. He could have been no more profoundly affected if he had, instead, just now seen a Eucharist transformed from a wafer of unleavened bread into the sacred flesh of God.
     "P.J. was home on a visit from New York City that weekend," he told Celeste. "After college he'd landed a job as an editorial assistant at a major publishing house, figuring to work there until he could get a foot in the door of the film business. We'd had a lot of fun together on Saturday, the whole family. But after Mass on Sunday morning, P.J. was out all day, seeing old friends from high school to talk about the glory days, and driving around a little to enjoy the fall foliage. 'Taking a long, lazy nostalgia bath,' he called it. At least that was what he said he'd been doing."
     Celeste turned her back to the altar platform and stood facing the nave, either because she could no longer tolerate the sight of the dead woman or because she feared that P.J. would creep back into the church and take them unaware.
     "We usually had Sunday supper at five o'clock, but Mom held it up for him, and he didn't get home till six," Joey said, "well after dark. He apologized, shamefaced, said he'd been having so much fun with his old friends, he'd lost track of time. All through dinner he was so on , spinning out jokes, full of energy, as if being in his old stomping grounds had given him a big kick and revitalized