Winter Prey

know what it is, but he does.”
    She said, “Another snowmobile ran alongside my Jeep when I was coming back from the LaCourts’ house, on the first night. I thought he was crazy.”
    “You didn’t tell me.”
    “I didn’t know.”
    He let go of her hair and put his arm around her shoulder, squeezed her, careful about her left arm. She squeezed with her right arm, then Lucas stepped back, took out his wallet, unfolded the photograph he’d stuck there.
    “You know this fat man,” he said. “He tried to kill you again. Who is he?”
    “I don’t know.” She stared at the photo. “I don’t have the foggiest.”

CHAPTER

17
    The priest said, “I’m okay, Joe. Seriously.”
    He stood in the hall between the kitchen and the bedroom. He was grateful for the call and at the same time resented it: he should be doing the ministering.
    “I had a decent day,” he said, his head bobbing. “You know all the talk about me and the LaCourts—I was afraid to say anything that might make it worse. It was driving me crazy. But I found a way to handle it.”
    His tongue felt like sandpaper, from sucking on lemon drops. He’d gone through two dozen large sacks the last time he went off booze. He was now working his way through the first of what might be several more.
    Joe was talking about one day at a time, and Bergen only half listened. When he’d gone off booze the year before, he hadn’t really wanted to quit. He’d simply had to. He was losing his parish and he was dying. So he’d gone sober, he’d stopped dying, he’d gotten the parish back. That hadn’t cured the problems for which bourbon was medication: the loneliness, the isolation, the troubles pressed upon him, for which he had no real answers. The drift in the faith.
    This time he’d sat down to write an excuse for himself, a pitiful plea for understanding. Instead, he’d written thestrongest lines of his life. From the reaction he’d gotten at the Mass that morning, he’d gotten through. He’d touched the parishioners and they’d touched him. He felt the isolation crumble; saw the possibility of an end to his loneliness.
    He might, he thought, be cured. Dangerous thought. He’d suck the lemon drops anyway. Better safe . . .
    “ . . . I won’t be going out. I swear. Joe, things have changed. I’ve got something to do. Okay . . . And thanks.”
    The priest dropped the receiver back on the hook, sighed, and returned to his work chair. He wrote on a Zeos 386 computer, hammering down the words.
    There’s a devil among us. And somebody here in this church may know who it is.
    (He would look around at this point, touching the eyes of each and every person in the church, exploiting the silence, allowing the stress to build.)
    The murders of the LaCourt family must spring from deep in a man’s tortured character, deep in a man’s dirty heart. Ask yourself: Do I know this man? Do I suspect who he might be? Deep in my heart do I believe?
    He worked for an hour, read through what he had. Excellent. He picked up the papers, carried them to his bedroom, and faced the full-length dressing mirror.
    “There’s a devil among us . . .” he began. No. He stopped. His voice should be slower, deeper, reflective of grief. He dropped it a half-octave, put some gravel into it: “There’s a devil among us . . .”
    Should he show some confusion, some bewilderment? Or would that be read as weakness?
    “ . . . deep in a man’s dirty heart,” he said slowly, watching himself in the glass. He wagged his head, as though astonished that these things could take place here, in Ojibway County, and then, yet more slowly, but his voice rising urgently into something like anger: “Do I know this man? Do I suspect who he might be?”
    He would rally the community, Philip Bergen would.And in turn the community would save him. He looked at the paper, relishing the flow of it.
    But . . . he peered at it. Too many hearts there, too many deeps. He was repeating words, which set up a dissonance in the listener. Okay. Get rid of the last deep altogether and change the last heart to soul. “ . . . in my soul do I believe . . .”
    He worked in front of the mirror, watching himself through his steel-rimmed glasses, his jowls bouncing, trembling with anger and righteousness, his words booming around the small room.
    Except for the sound of his own voice, the house was quiet: he could hear the Black Forest clock ticking behind him, the air ducts