A Quiet Belief in Angels by R. J. Ellory Read Free Book Online

around Silco, even went back and searched the far end of the High Road once more, just to see, just to be sure. Of what, I did not know, and I did not ask, for once again there were hushed conversations in the kitchen of my house.
    Nothing ever came of the searches, and finally, inevitably, Haynes Dearing and Ford Ruby went back to arguing about John Wesley and the scriptures, kept on arguing until they concluded it had been a mistake to work together, to even think they could work together, and they vowed such a thing would never happen again. By the end of August I no longer heard mention of Laverna Stowell. Perhaps she was an angel too, she and Alice Ruth Van Horne, and maybe my father, if he’d managed to keep his hands clean and worked hard enough to make the grade, was sitting right alongside them. Perhaps I convinced myself that the nightmare had now really ended. Perhaps I believed that some itinerant vagabond, crazy and brutal and vicious, had passed through our lives and now had disappeared. For some unknown reason he had visited twice, but this I did not consider. The truth and what I imagined might be the truth were not the same thing. I wondered if some other county, some other state, was now losing its children to this boogeyman. I kept my eyes wide and my ears alert, even at night; the sound of animals moving between our house and that of the Krugers sometimes woke me, and I would lie there chilled and afraid. After some time, steeling myself for what I might see, I would slip from beneath the covers and make my way tentatively to the window. I saw nothing. The night unfolded before me in a cool, static monochrome, and I would wonder if my imagination wasn’t feeding my mind with small and fragile lies. I hoped with all I possessed that the nightmare had passed, but deep down, right there inside my heart, I knew it had not.

FOUR
    F IVE MONTHS HAD PASSED SINCE THE DEATH OF THE STOWELL GIRL, five months and another Christmas.
    Christmas had been hard on my mother. She and Mrs. Kruger, whose name I now understood to be Mathilde, had volunteered their services to assist in an influenza epidemic that had broken out amongst the Negro families. For many days she came home late and left early, and I spent much of my time at the Krugers’ house. I was thirteen years old, a few months older than Hans Kruger, a few years younger than Walter. Nevertheless, despite our similarity in ages, there was little we held in common. There were as many opinions as there were words about the war; there were rumors that Adolf Hitler was a madman, that America would be drawn into the fighting. Roosevelt was inaugurated for the third time, and already there was talk of the British using American arms and equipment, the cost of which would not be requested until after the conflict was over. Some—Reilly Hawkins in particular—said that it was the first step on a short road to collaboration.
    “They’ll call for us,” he said. “They’ll call for us to go and fight in Europe.”
    “And would you go?” my mother asked him.
    “No question about it,” Reilly said. “You gotta die for something, right? Seems to me it’d be better to die in a field in Europe fighting for something you believe in than die out here in the swamps from nigra influenza.”
    “Reilly,” my mother admonished.
    “Yes, ma’am,” he said sheepishly. “Beg your pardon, ma’am.”
    “What is it you believe in?” I asked Reilly. “You believe in war?”
    Reilly smiled and shook his head. “No, Joseph, I don’t believe in war. I’ll tell you what I believe in—” He stopped suddenly and looked at my mother as if for permission to speak.
    “Go ahead, Reilly, I’ll let you know if you’ve gone too far.”
    “What I believe in,” Reilly said, “is the freedom to think and believe and say what you feel is right. This man, this Adolf Hitler, well he’s nothing but a Fascist and a dictator. He’s getting those German people all fired up and