Strangers

twenties, darkly tanned and good-looking. The woman was a couple of years younger, a pretty brunette. The little girl, five or six, was very cute. All three were smiling at the camera. Judging from their clothes - shorts and T-shirts - and the quality of sunlight in the picture, Ernie assumed that the snapshot had been taken in the middle of summer.
        Puzzled, he turned the photo over, looking for a scribbled note of explanation. The back was blank. He checked the envelope again, but it was empty: no letter, no card, not even a business card to identify the sender. The postmark was Elko, December 7, last Saturday.
        He looked again at the people in the picture, and although he did not remember them, he felt his skin prickle, just as it had done when he had been drawn to that place along the highway. His pulse accelerated. He quickly put the picture aside and looked away from it.
        Faye was still chatting with the cowboy-trucker as she took a room key off the pegboard and passed it across the counter.
        Ernie kept his eyes on her. She was a calming influence. She had been a lovely farmgirl when he'd met her, and had grown into a lovelier woman. Her blond hair might have begun to turn white, but it was hard to tell. Her blue eyes were clear and quick. Hers was an open, friendly Iowa face, slightly saucy but always wholesome, even beatific.
        By the time the cowboy-trucker left, Ernie had stopped shaking. He took the Polaroid snapshot to Faye. "What do you make of this?"
        "That's our Room Nine," she said. "They must've stayed with us." She frowned at the young couple and little girl in the photograph. "Can't say I remember them, though. Strangers to me."
        "So why would they send us a photo without a note?"
        "Well, obviously, they thought we would remember them.
        "But the only reason they'd think that was if maybe they stayed for a few days and we got to know them. And I don't know them at all. I think I'd remember the tyke," Ernie said. He liked children, and they usually liked him. "She's cute enough to be in movies."
        "I'd think you'd remember the mother. She's gorgeous."
        "Postmarked Elko," Ernie said. "Why would anybody who lives in Elko come out here to stay?"
        "Maybe they don't live in Elko. Maybe they were here last summer and always meant to send us a photo, and maybe they recently passed through and meant to stop and leave this off but didn't have time. So they mailed it from Elko."
        "Without a note."
        "It is odd," Faye agreed.
        He took the picture from her. "Besides, this is a Polaroid. Developed a minute after it was taken. If they wanted us to have it, why didn't they leave it with us when they stayed here?"
        The door opened, and a curly-haired guy with a bushy mustache came into the office, shivering. "Got any rooms left?" he asked.
        While Faye dealt with the guest, Ernie took the Polaroid back to the oak desk. He meant to gather up the mail and go upstairs, but he stood by the desk, studying the faces of the people in the snapshot.
        It was Tuesday evening, December 10.
        

    8.
        

    Chicago, Illinois
        
        When Brendan Cronin went to work as an orderly at St. Joseph's Hospital for Children, only Dr. Jim McMurtry knew that he was really a priest. Father Wycazik had obtained a guarantee of secrecy from the physician, as well as the solemn assurance that Brendan would be assigned as much work - and as much unpleasant work - as any orderly. Therefore, during his first day on the job, he emptied bedpans, changed urine-soaked bed linens, assisted a therapist with passive exercises for bed-ridden patients, spoon-fed an eight-year-old boy who was partially paralyzed, pushed wheelchairs, encouraged despondent patients, cleaned up the vomit of two young cancer victims nauseous from chemotherapy. No one pampered him, and no one called him "Father." The nurses, doctors, orderlies, candy-stripers, and patients called him Brendan, and he felt uncomfortable, like an impostor engaged in a masquerade.
        That first day, overcome with pity and grief for St. Joseph's children, he twice slipped away to the staff men's room and locked himself in a stall, where he sat and wept. The twisted legs and swollen joints of those who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, that mangler of the innocent young, was a sight almost too terrible to be borne. The wasted flesh of