Twisted

in the faces of condemned prisoners as they read the last correspondence they’ll ever receive.
    “We got the line open to the governor, Tim,” the warden drawled, “and he’s at his desk. I just talked to him. But I don’t think . . . I mean, he probably won’t intervene.”
    “I told you all along.” Manko said softly, “I didn’t even want those appeals.”
    The execution operations officer, a thin, businesslike man who looked like a feed-and-grain clerk, cuffed Manko’s wrists and removed his shoes.
    The warden motioned me outside and I stepped into the corridor. Unlike the popular conception of a dismal, Gothic death row, this wing of the prison resembled an overly lit Sunday school hallway. His head leaned close. “Any luck, Father?”
    I lifted my eyes from the shiny linoleum. “I think so. He told me about a cabin on Badin Lake. Western shore. You know it?”
    The warden shook his head. “But we’ll have thetroopers get some dogs over there. Hope it pans out,” he added, whispering, “Lord, I hope that.”
    So ended my grim task on this grim evening.
    Prison chaplains always walk the last hundred feet with the condemned but rarely are they enlisted as a last-ditch means to wheedle information out of the prisoners. I’d consulted my bishop and this mission didn’t seem to violate my vows. Still, it was clearly a deceit and one that would trouble me, I suspected, for a long time. Yet it would trouble me less than the thought of Allison Morgan’s body lying in an unconsecrated grave, whose location Manko adamantly refused to reveal—his ultimate way, he said, of protecting her from her father.
    Allison Kimberly Morgan—stalked relentlessly for months after she dumped Manko following their second date. Kidnapped from her bed then driven through four states with the FBI and a hundred troopers in pursuit. And finally . . . finally, when it was clear that Manko’s precious plans for a life together in Florida would never happen, knifed to death while—apparently—he held her close and told her how there wasn’t enough room in his heart for all the love he felt for her.
    Until tonight her parents’ only consolation was in knowing that she’d died quickly—her abundant blood in the front seat of his Dodge testified to that. Now there was at least the hope they could give her a proper burial and in doing so offer her a bit of the love that they may—or may not—have denied her in life.
    Manko appeared in the hallway, wearing disposable paper slippers the condemned wear to the executionchamber. The warden looked at his watch and motioned him down the corridor. “You’ll go peaceful, won’t you, son?”
    Manko laughed. He was the only one here with serenity in his eyes.
    And why not?
    He was about to join his own true love. They’d be together once again.
    “You like my story, Frank?”
    I told him I did. Then he smiled at me in a curious way, an expression that seemed to contain a hint both of forgiveness and of something I can only call the irrepressible Manko challenge. Perhaps, I reflected, it would not be this evening’s deceit that would weigh on me so heavily but rather the simple fact that I would never know whether or not Manko was on to me.
    But who could tell? He was, as I’ve said, a born actor.
    The warden looked at me. “Father?”
    I shook my head. “I’m afraid Manko’s going to forgo absolution,” I said. “But he’d like me to read him a few psalms.”
    “Allison,” Manko said earnestly, “loves poetry.”
    I slipped the Bible from my suit pocket and began to read as we started down the corridor, walking side by side.

T HE W IDOW OF P INE C REEK

    “S ometimes help just appears from the sky.”
    This was an expression of her mother’s and it didn’t mean angels or spirits or any of that New Age stuff but meant “from thin air”—when you were least expecting it.
    Okay, Mama, let’s hope. ’Cause I can use some help now. Can use it bad.
    Sandra May DuMont leaned back in a black-leather office chair and let the papers in her hand drop onto the old desk that dominated her late husband’s office. As she looked out the window she wondered if she was looking at that help right now.
    Not exactly appearing from the sky—but walking up the cement path to the factory, in the form of a man with an easy smile and sharp eyes.
    She turned away and caught sight of herself in the antique mirror she’d bought for her husband ten years ago, on their