"Nervous?" Bill said.

"Nah. I've been to lots of these."

"No, sweat, ay? Just a cool cat taking off for the weekend."

"Okay." Nicky's smile was slow and shy. "Maybe a little nervous."

"Just be yourself."

His eyes lit. "Really?"

"On second thought…"

They both smiled at their private joke.

The intercom buzzed. "The Calders are here," said Sister Miriam's voice from the front office.

"We're on our way."

He took Nicky's satchel and placed an arm on his shoulder as he led him down to the first floor.

"This is it, kid. Strut your best stuff for these people and you'll be in Fat City."

Bill felt Nicky's arm go around his back and hug him.

2

Bill waved good-bye to Nicky as the Calders drove away with him in the backseat of their new Dodge, then hurried back to his office and pulled the letter from under the desk blotter. It had arrived this morning from the Maryland Provincial and he must have read it and reread it a dozen times since then. Loyola High School in Baltimore had a spot for him! He would have preferred Loyola College, but at least this was a step in the right direction. He could report there on June 1, and come September he could begin as an instructor in the religion department… if he still wished to trade his current post for that of high-school teacher.

Wished? He was dying to get out of his current post!

And what a great location they were offering him! Just forty-five minutes down the Baltimore-Washington Expressway and he'd be in the capital, right in the heart of the action. There was always something going on in D.C., such as the new civil-rights bill before the Senate right now.

And it would put him far away from Carol. A few hundred miles would serve to cool his night thoughts. Maybe then he could get some sleep.

He kissed the letter and slipped it back under the blotter.

Nicky's going to find himself a home, and I'm going to rejoin the human race.

He began humming "Everything's Coming Up Roses."

3

The ground was thawed and the weekend was promising to be a warm one, so Jonah decided to get an early start on the garden. Come Friday afternoon most weeks he was bushed by the time he got home from the plant. But lately he had been full of life, bursting with energy, and the vegetable garden was as good a place as any to work some of it off. Maybe he'd be able to bring in some lettuce this year.

The first thing he was going to do, though, was set up a decent perimeter fence to keep the rabbits out. He would have loved to set up coils of razor wire to shred the greedy little rodents as they hopped into the garden, but the neighbors would raise a fuss when the same thing happened to their wild little bastards as they took their usual headlong shortcut through his backyard.

So he'd have to settle for chicken wire.

He planned to set up a two-by-four post at each corner of the garden, then string the mesh between it. Three feet would be more than high enough.

He began digging the hole for the first corner post. About eighteen inches would do it. Jonah liked the slicing sound the spade made as he jammed it into the soft earth, loved to feel the countless rootlets part beneath the blade as he drove it deeper into the ground with his foot. There was something delicious in disrupting the delicate balance below. Years of interplay; of give-and-take between the soil, the nutrients, the bacteria, the insects, and the vegetation—all altered forever with the thrust of a shovel.

When he had dug down about a foot, the dirt began to turn red.

Strange. He hadn't known there was any clay around here. And then he saw that it wasn't clay but a red liquid seeping up through the soil. He lowered himself to his hands and knees for a closer look. He sniffed.

Blood.

Jonah's pulse suddenly picked up as a shudder of elation raced through him. This wasn't a hallucination. This was the real thing. Another in a long line of signs he had been gifted with throughout his life.

Breathless, he watched the thick red fluid well up in the hole until it reached the rim, then ooze off into the garden in a thin, slow rivulet. Jonah would have liked to have let it fill the garden, to watch it cool and clot as dusk fell, but there were no secrets in these tiny, crowded backyards around here. It wouldn't do at all to have the neighbors wondering what had happened in the Stevenses' yard.

Reluctantly he began shoveling the earth back into the hole, stoppering the crimson flow. When the sod was back in place, he stepped back, reined in his excitement, and stood there thinking.

Blood flowing in his backyard. How else could he interpret that but as a harbinger of death, the death of someone close to his home? It was also a sign that events were gathering speed, and that he should not waste his time tilling the earth.

Saturday, March 9

1

Bill was reading his daily office in his room when the phone rang, startling him. Only a handful of people had his private number, and when they called, it was usually with bad news. So he was especially worried when he recognized Jim's voice.

"Jim! Is something wrong?" he said in a rush, remembering Carol's anxious call on Tuesday and Jim's vaguely hostile reception of his offer of help. Was Carol all right?

"No. Everything's fine, Bill. Really fine. I just wanted to apologize for acting so weird when you called me the other day."

"It's okay," Bill said, feeling his muscles uncoil. "We all get uptight now and again."

It was good to hear Jim sounding like his old self.

"Yeah, well, the will, the inheritance, the mansion, everything sort of combined to do a number on my head. Got me all bent out of shape. But I've got everything back in perspective now and I feel a whole lot better."

During the small talk that followed, Bill noticed that Jim danced away from anything that had to do with Hanley or the inheritance or who his mother might be. He gathered from Jim's too casual air and uncharacteristic use of jargon that he hadn't climbed completely out of the pressure cooker yet. He was dying to ask if he had learned anything about his mother but remembered how coolly that subject had been received on Tuesday, so he kept mum.

After hanging up, Bill sat by the window thinking how sad and ironic it was that just as he was reestablishing contact with an old friend, he was preparing to move a couple of hundred miles away.

And he was moving away. Old friend or not, Bill wasn't going to let anyone keep him here at St. F.'s. Nothing was going to delay his departure now that the Provincial had found a teaching spot for him.

He sat a while longer at the window, feeling unaccountably blue. What was wrong? Certainly he wasn't going to miss this place:

Then he realized that this was the time he usually played chess with Nicky. It seemed empty without him here scratching his misshapen head and picking his blackheads. But that was soon to be a part of the past. Nicky would be adopted by the Calders and Bill would be on his way to Baltimore.

He was about to return to his breviary when he noticed a late-model blue Dodge pull up to the curb in front of St. F.'s. It looked familiar. Just like—

Oh hell!

Nicky got out of the car and ran up the front steps, disappearing from view. Professor Calder got out of the driver's seat and followed him at a much slower pace. Bill quickly shrugged into his cassock and hurried downstairs.

Professor Calder was already on his way out when Bill arrived.

"What—?"

The professor waved him off. "It's not going to work," he said over his shoulder.