Chapter 7
The Sanctuary of the Inner Witness

“Hey, Hawk. what are you doing this afternoon?” asked Sally, putting down the newspaper. “Want to go to a memorial service?”

Hawk eyed her suspiciously. “For whom?” he asked.

“Bradley Preston,” she said. “There’s a service for him this afternoon at three, at a church out on the east side. I kind of feel like I want to go.”

“Why?” he asked. “He wasn’t a friend, or even an acquaintance.”

“Maybe Charlie’ll show up,” Sally said.

“Not friggin’ likely,” said Hawk. “And if she does, you won’t get near her. The family will close ranks, first of all, and second, the minute that service is over, Dickie and Scotty will be hauling her in. In case you’d missed it, she’s a suspect in a murder case.”

“No, I hadn’t missed it, though I definitely object to it,” Sally said.

“Why?” Hawk asked. “From everything you’ve told me, she had reason to want to hurt her father. Maybe she didn’t have it in her to strike back, but she could have gotten somebody else to do it. And how well do you really know that girl, anyhow? How do you know she doesn’t get herself wired up on meth every night and go bust windows, or doors, or somebody’s head? Hell, maybe she was the one who tore up the apartment on North Fourth. You don’t have any idea.”

“Okay. I don’t know her very well. But I’ve worked with victims of domestic violence. When they’re that beaten down, they don’t have the strength to fight back. It takes incredible guts just to run away. And you’re right, she’d be crazy to come back for the memorial,” Sally acknowledged. “But the Boomerang says that Beatrice Preston will be delivering the main eulogy. There was a picture of her in the paper. She was the one at the doctor’s office, leading the hymn singing. I think she gave the signal for the protesters to rush the patient,” Sally told Hawk.

She handed over the newspaper.

“Yeah, that’s her,” said Hawk, putting the paper down on the table. “The caption says this photo was taken in 2001. Her hairstyle hasn’t changed one hair since then.”

“Neither has yours,” Sally pointed out, “since 1975.”

“If it ain’t broke . . .” Hawk began.

“Come with me,” she said.

The Sanctuary of the Inner Witness was a large, flat building that looked more like a warehouse discount store than a church. It was surrounded by a sea of parking lots, filling up fast with pickup trucks and SUVs disgorging men in cowboy hats and women in conservative dresses, children with combed hair and clean, pressed clothes, older people leaning on canes and walkers.

The place was packed. Sally and Hawk, dressed in their most nondescript dark business suits, joined the standing-room crowd at the back of the chapel.

Laramie wasn’t as small as Sally was used to thinking. There must be hundreds of people in town who went to church at least once a week, whose values were in many respects 180 degrees away from hers and Hawk’s. She’d probably seen some of them at the supermarket or the bank, but she had absolutely no recollection of anyone she saw in this crowd.

Then she caught sight of two people she knew. Off to the right, sitting unobtrusively in the second-to-last row, Dave Haggerty leaned his elbows on the pew in front of him, resting his chin on his folded hands. He didn’t see her.

But Scotty Atkins did. By the time she found him, standing far back in a corner, she knew he’d seen her for a while. He nodded very slightly when their eyes met. He didn’t smile.

All these people in a church so new and makeshift, it didn’t even have fixed pews. The congregation sat on folding metal chairs, noisy on the concrete floor. The dais was raised a good six feet above the seating area, so they had a clear view of the proceedings. At one side of the platform, a trio consisting of guitar, bass, and synthesizer worked through a lugubrious arrangement of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” Most people in the church were still fidgeting, chatting, getting settled.

Then the minister walked down the center aisle, shaking hands as he went. He was young and handsome and greeted with warmth by his parishioners. Ascending the steps, he took his place in the pulpit. Brad Preston, he said, had been a pillar of the community, an upholder of traditional family values, a heck of a first baseman for the church softball team. He’d shouldered his earthly burdens, and was now released from those bonds. Pretty familiar, tame stuff, to Sally’s mind. She’d been expecting hellfire, or a little damnation at least. She caught herself wondering, as Beatrice Preston ascended the steps, received a hug from the minister, and took her place in the pulpit, whether what she’d heard about Evangelicalism was vastlyoverstated.

Beatrice wore an exquisitely tailored black crepe suit, with a cream-colored blouse secured at the neck with an oval brooch—a cameo, visibly handsome even from Sally’s distant vantage point. Bea’s blond hair was in its trademark perfect sweep, her face a matching cameo of composure and compassion. She dipped her head for a moment, closed her eyes, raised her chin, opened her eyes, and began to speak.

“Bradley Preston was my husband,” she intoned, her voice as sweet and clear and ringing as a church bell. “But he was also your son.” She nodded toward a weeping white-haired woman in the front row. “Your brother.” She extended a hand toward the grim-faced man and woman flanking the mother. “Your neighbor, your colleague, your friend. Brad dedicated his life to timeless values. His death should be a call to us to build a world where the godly are not scorned, where the wicked see the path to righteousness.”

In the front and middle of the church, people were crying. Even back where Sally and Hawk stood, she could feel people reaching for handkerchiefs, see them wiping their eyes. Beatrice Preston had a lovely speaking voice, and she used it with confidence and skill.

And now Bea lowered the pitch of that voice, confiding in the crowd. “My husband,” she said, “was brutally murdered. In the days and nights since, I have wondered how such a good man could come to such a horrific fate. How could the just and merciful God be so senselessly cruel? I came close, brothers and sisters, to doubting God’s wisdom and His will.”

Audible gasps. Hawk leaned over and whispered, “Guess she isn’t known for her skeptical nature.”

“Unlike you,” Sally whispered back, putting a hand on his arm to prevent a reply.

“Yes, I came within the merest feather’s breadth of doubting the will of our Lord.” Beatrice’s voice, breathy for a moment, began to rise. “But the Lord holds us in His hand.” Sally got a mental image of a little family and a little house in a big hand, some insurance commercial. A friend of hers had once observed that the true history of the West was about real estate. Maybe the true religion too?

“Or He can, if it is His will, simply open His fingers, and let us fall,” Bea said. “Like a feather, suspended on the air, we can drift, down and down, at our peril. Or the weight of our sins may be upon us, and we fall, like a rock, like a boulder, plummeting down and down to be swallowed up in the fires below, oh yes, swallowed up!”

And now they felt it. The whoosh of the air. The heat of the fire.

“The Lord tested me, as He tests us all. And faith came to me, like a sweet breeze, lifting me back up and up, saved me from the danger, from the very flames of hell. Faith found me, and LIFTED ME UP!”

“Praise the Lord!” someone shouted.

“Praise the Lord!” came echoing shouts.

And now Beatrice’s face began to glow, and she lowered her eyes and half whispered, “Oh, praise the Lord, yes, praise Him. And in the moment when faith saved me, I remembered something I had known a long, long time.”

The crowd waited.

“The Lord,” she said, “made Bradley Preston for a purpose. He took Brad from us too soon, to show us the way. But we will carry on his work, oh yes, we will!”

“We will!” came the shouts. “We will!”

Will, thought Sally. Brad Preston must have left a will. Maybe there was something in it that had caused somebody to kill him. At the very least, the will ought to give her a sense of how he’d felt about Charlie. She wondered if Dave Haggerty, her new friend, could find some way to get her a copy of that will.

“This is getting genuinely strange,” Hawk whispered to Sally.

They were just about to find out precisely how strange.

“And for those still lost, we say, come, come into the fortress of God’s love.”

Fortress?

“For ye wander as survivors on the terrible killing field, and if ye seek not the shelter of His love, oh, what a fiery fate awaits! Come, come and be saved, lest ye burn forever!” she cried.

“Amen!” cried a woman in the third row.

Bea returned to her stage whisper. “Do not think I speak only to strangers to the house of God. For do we not have those in our own house, in our own families, who may yet be lost forever to the flames? Is there one among us who would not save someone we love, a child, perhaps, hopelessly perplexed, in danger of falling forever?”

“Uh-oh,” murmured Hawk. “I think I know what’s coming.”

“Shhh,” said Sally.

“I don’t want to miss this.”

“As God loved His only Son, so Bradley Preston loved his only daughter, Charlotte,” said Bea. “A love that surpasses all time. Brad showed her that love, spoke to her in words and deeds of love. But the forces of evil shut her eyes and stopped her ears. She spurned him. She cast him away.”

Someone choked out a sob.

“Instead of divine love,” Beatrice told the congregation,

“Charlotte’s ears were tuned to the filthy whispers of the beasts of darkness. ‘Leave your home,’ they said. ‘Don’t honor your father and your mother,’ they said. ‘Seek your own gratification, your own grandeur.’ The secularists and the feminists tempted her away from the true path, brainwashed her in their philosophy and psychology and women’s studies courses, seduced her with their evolution-ist science, which denies God’s Creation. And there are so many children, lost in the killing fields. Your children, and mine. Right here, in our own town. Right now, even as we worship here, in the house of the Lord. They bore from underground, plant their vile seeds, spew their poison.”

“Mixed metaphor,” Sally mumbled.

“And they are not content merely to enslave the minds of our children; oh no, far from it, I am sorry to say.” Bea looked genuinely sad now, shaking her head. “They want their bodies. The want their very souls!”

“As a women’s studies professor, do you want your students’ souls?” Hawk asked Sally.

“Nope,” she answered. “And I definitely don’t want their bodies. Their minds, well, I think I get paid to want their minds, right? Now shut up and let me listen,” she told him.

Bea had taken a long pause, a drink of water, a very deep breath. “On the day my husband was murdered, many of us were but a few blocks away, standing up for righteousness. You will recall, as I do, the explosion, the panic, the terror. It felt like the beginning of a holy war, right here in Laramie.”

“Oy veh,” said Sally.

“You know, and I know, the story the authorities are telling, the ‘official’ story,” Bea said, the faintest mocking tone creeping in. “A nasty prank. Firecrackers in a junk car. Probably some high-spirited teenagers, trying to stir things up. But we were there. We heard it with our own ears. Saw everything with our own eyes. And surely there is a more plausible story.”

“You’d think,” said Sally.

“But I bet it isn’t the one she’s going to tell,” Hawk replied quietly.

“Has it not occurred to you,” Bea asked, “that the bombing at the abortion factory might be the work of feminists and others? They will stop at nothing to kill the unborn— would they hesitate at blowing up a car?”

Murmurs in the crowd.

“I don’t frigging believe this,” Sally said. “The woman’s crazy.”

“Something is terribly, terribly wrong here in Laramie,” Bea Preston intoned, shaking her head. “Something is terribly wrong in my heart, in the bosom of my family, in my beloved community. I say to my daughter: Charlotte, come home. Your father was taken from us for a reason. Take my hand. And I say to all of you here, join together. Take the hand of your neighbor.”

Sally felt the woman to her right take her hand. She took Hawk’s hand. He glanced at her, but hesitated as the man on his left reached for his hand.

“Will you join together? Will you defeat the enemy that stalks the righteous, right here at home? Say yes!”

“Yes!” thundered the crowd.

“Say yes!” Bea cried, lifting her hands.

“Yes! Yes!” The chorus rose and rose.

Never had the word “yes” filled Sally with such dread.