They arrived at the church just ten minutes before the funeral mass for Cora Conway was scheduled to begin. It had been almost ten years since Ted Conway last attended a mass, and now, as he stood at the threshold of St. Ignatius Loyola, he hesitated.

His eyes instinctively went to the face of the figure on the cross above the altar, and though he tried to look away, the agonized gaze of the martyred Christ held him.

Reproaching him?

Accusing him?

Superstition, Ted told himself. None of it's anything more than superstition. But even as he silently reassured himself that it was nothing more than his own rejection of the religion he'd been raised in that had kept him away from church all those years, the throbbing in his head refused to let him forget the real reason he'd stayed in bed so many Sunday mornings. So what if I have a couple of drinks on Saturday night? Ted asked the silent figure that peered steadily at him from its place above the altar. A knot of resentment hardened in his belly, and he wished he had a drink. He started down the aisle toward the waiting pews, but the reflexes bred into him in the first ten years of his life overtook him, and his fingers dipped into the font of holy water that stood just inside the door.

His knees bent slightly in an automatic act of genuflection.

He crossed himself.

Only then did the tortured eyes of the figure on the cross finally release him and let him start down the aisle of the nearly empty church.

Janet followed, holding Molly.

Kim and Jared glanced uneasily at each other, then quickly dipped their fingers in the holy water in imitation of their parents and walked down the aisle, taking seats next to each other in the front pew. They stared at the coffin that stood in front of the altar, its lid closed.

Three sparse floral remembrances-along with the emptiness of the church-gave testimony to the loneliness of the years Cora Conway had spent at the Willows. As an unseen organist began playing softly in the background, Janet sighed and wished that she'd come to visit the old woman more often. Why had she assumed that her husband's aunt had friends who were visiting her? Obviously she hadn't. As the priest came in from a side door, signaled them to rise, and began the opening prayers of the mass, she quickly scanned the church and saw that it was still all but empty.

In fact, besides the five of them and the priest who was conducting the mass, there were only two other people present.

A middle-aged woman clad in a navy blue suit-her face veiled-stood in the very last pew, nervously twisting a pair of gloves in her hands.

And in one of the alcoves-barely visible from the church-Janet caught a glimpse of another priest. Had he come to the mass for Cora, or was he merely tending to his own private devotions, silently offering prayers to one of the saints, oblivious to the memorial service taking place only a few feet away?

The officiating priest finished his opening prayer, gestured to them to sit, then turned his back to them so he faced the coffin and the altar beyond. Raising his arms in supplication, he began to speak. To Janet's surprise-and for the first time since she was a little girl and had attended the funeral mass of her own grandmother-she heard the rhythmical cadences of the Latin mass.

"Jesus," she heard Ted whisper beside her. "If we'd known this was the deal, we wouldn't have bothered to come!"

Janet shot him a warning look. "She must have wanted it," she whispered back. "And it won't hurt us."

Ted's eyes rolled scornfully, and a few minutes later his head dropped forward onto his chest as he fell asleep.

An hour later, as the last phrases of the prayer of benediction rolled from the priest's tongue, Ted came awake and, responding to childhood memories similar to those stirring in Janet, straightened in the pew and dropped automatically to his knees. He crossed himself once more, then made his way past his wife and children to perform the single act his aunt had required of him.

Joining five men from the undertaker's who entered the church from one of the side doors, he took his position at the head of his aunt's casket to bear her out of the church to her final resting place. Janet, holding a sleeping Molly, stood with Jared and Kim as the casket passed, followed by the priest. As she started up the aisle, Janet glanced into the side chapel where she'd seen the elderly priest just as the service was beginning.

He lay prostrate on the stone floor, his arms spread wide. He seemed oblivious to the tiny procession passing behind him.

Janet blinked as she stepped out of the cool gloom of the church into the sultry heat of the Indian summer afternoon. As she followed the coffin toward the open grave that waited in the far corner of the small cemetery adjoining the church, she had the uncomfortable feeling that she was being watched. She tried to ignore it at first, telling herself that of course anyone who happened to be passing by the graveyard would glance in; perhaps even linger long enough to watch the burial. Surreptitiously, she glanced around, but before she could spot whoever might be watching, her eyes were caught by the inscription on a weathered bronze plate affixed to the door of a small mausoleum that stood by itself, set off from the rest of the cemetery by a rusting wrought-iron fence.

GEORGE CONWAY

BORN JULY 29, 1916

DIED JUNE 4, 1959

But how was that possible? Janet wondered. George Conway had committed suicide, hadn't he? Then how could he be buried here in sanctified ground? But when she saw the utter neglect the area around the mausoleum had suffered, she understood.

The ground upon which George Conway's mausoleum stood had been deconsecrated; the rusting fence had been erected not to protect the structure, but to shut it away from the rest of the cemetery, and all those who had died in a state of grace.

There was another crypt in the mausoleum, next to the one in which George Conway's body lay, and Janet assumed it had been George Conway's intention to have his wife buried there.

But the little procession passed it by. When the pallbearers stopped several yards farther on and set the coffin on boards that had been laid across an open grave, Janet saw that there were no other Conways buried nearby.

No two of the graves surrounding Cora Conway's bore the same last name.

Here, in the corner of the cemetery farthest from the church, was the final resting place of those who had apparently died as they'd lived-alone. Janet felt a great wave of sadness for her husband's aunt. As she struggled against the lump rising in her throat and the tears blurring her eyes, she felt a gentle hand touch her arm.

She heard a voice then, so soft that for a moment she thought she might be imagining it. "She wasn't crazy. She wasn't crazy at all."

The hand dropped away; the voice went silent. With Molly still asleep in her arms, Janet turned, but did not see who had spoken. Forcing herself to concentrate on the priest's words, she stared down at the open grave.

And once again she felt herself being watched.

The final litany done, the coffin was slowly lowered into the ground. Following Ted, Janet stepped forward, stooped to pick up a clod of the soft soil, then straightened up. Whispering a final goodbye to the woman she'd barely known, whose death three days ago had so totally changed her life, she let the lump of earth go. And then, as she looked up, she saw him.

She couldn't be certain how old he was-he might have been anywhere between forty and sixty. A thin black man in worn, nearly threadbare clothing, his face covered with a grizzled stubble. He stood on the cobbled sidewalk outside the fence, in the shade of one of the huge magnolias that spread over the cemetery. He was watching the little group gathered around the grave, and although deep shadows concealed the expression on the man's dark-skinned face, Janet could feel the emotion radiating from him like heat waves.