7

Gray handles gleamed dully at the sides of the silver casket, waiting for pallbearers’ hands to lift and carry it out of the sanctuary. A jumble of flowers spilled like bony arms over the sides of the coffin.

Sifting chords from the church organ crept and echoed among the high rafters as if trying to shoulder out the silence. But that silence hovered behind the music, tangible, purposeful, an absence that Jason couldn’t escape. It was a menace, this silence. He tried to combat it by focusing on the music, by trying to think of what he might say to Kathy after her son’s funeral.

What does a man say to his secretary when her son is murdered?

He let his mind wander to his work, to the cavalcade of tasks and politics and schedules, but his thoughts managed only to taint the hollowness in the air when the organ finally silenced.

Kathy’s pastor rose from his chair and stepped to the pulpit. Jason glanced at the program in his hands and saw that the man’s name was Gates. His dark skin shone in the glare of the lights twenty feet overhead. Before his bulk the lectern looked spindly. No one else moved, as if the hush of the room were something fearful.

The minister placed a thick Bible on the lectern, closed. He lifted his eyes to those seated before him.

“Justice.” His voice resonated in the emptiness, firm, shattering the quiet. The word sat among them vibrating, quivering.

He stared at the coffin below him. Gripping the edges of the lectern as if he might tear it away, he said it again. “Justice.” His eyes searched the congregation. “It’s what we want for this boy. For his mother and father.”

Kathy sat with her sister in the first row, close enough to reach the coffin in two steps. Her head was directed away from it, the pastor holding her attention. On her other side was her ex-husband, Hal, the young man’s father, back rigid as a board.

The pastor looked from the coffin to Kathy. “We are with you, sister. We will stand by your side. As Jesus promised you, I promise you: we will never leave you nor forsake you.” He lifted his eyes to the congregation, and in a commanding voice, spoke. “Can I hear from the church?”

The people around Jason said, “Amen” and “Yes.”

Jason nearly spoke in agreement. He clapped his mouth shut. He wasn’t part of this church. Or any other.

“But there is a Savior. There is a God, who loved us enough to come himself, to put on flesh and walk this world.” He brandished the Bible. “We have his words with us. We have his testimony.” The Bible returned to its place on the lectern, and Pastor Gates scowled. “‘The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.’ He had compassion. He wept with mourners. Our God knows this pain, this sorrow. Because he suffered it too. Among his sufferings was the sorrow of this loss.

“You are not alone, sister. We are with you. Our Lord Jesus Christ is with you. God the Father, who gave his one and only Son, is with you.” He leaned back, chin tucked, mouth cupped downward, and inhaled deeply through flaring nostrils.

Jason gripped the edge of the pew on either side of his knees. Hard wood. Hard as stone. His legs itched to rise.

The pastor brought himself forward to loom over the lectern, and softly now, he spoke. “And there will be justice. Oh, our God is merciful. Yes, he is. But the murderers, the corrupt, those steeped in sin, those who have turned away from the true God and have replaced him in their lives with the sins they worship instead—for those, for those who have done things . . . like . . . like this!” He spread his hands to gesture toward the coffin, and it seemed that his emotions overcame him.

The muscles in Jason’s back threatened to snap. He shrugged his shoulders, tried to loosen them.

Leaning back, Pastor Gates gathered himself. “There will be justice, beloved church. You may count on this. You may stake your life on it. Because our God is a God of love. But he is complex. You cannot box this God, cannot package him and put him in your pocket. You cannot say love alone is the sum of him. He has revealed his qualities through his Word. His great compassion for us, his great forgiveness, great mercy. But it is a fearful thing, an awful thing—it is a terrifying thing to fall into his hands if you have trampled on his children.”

On the right of the platform, a cross was planted, rough-hewn, like someone had sliced at it with an axe to carve it out of a living tree. It arrested Jason’s gaze briefly before he looked away. His eyes pulsed with each throbbing heartbeat.

The pastor patted the pulpit. His dark eyes squinted at the closed Bible. “You cannot have love without defense. Even the animals know this. A mother bear is never more fierce than when her cub is in danger. How much more will God—the omnipotent God who created the universe, who has perfect love for you and for me—how much more will he love? And when that love sees itself despised, how much more will that God give vent to his horrible vengeance when the times have reached their fulfillment?

“In his time, brothers and sisters, justice will be done. Rest assured.” Pastor Gates turned and nodded to a woman who hadn’t gotten the memo about wearing black. She moved in her bright print dress to the organ and began to sing.

Her voice echoed like a ringing bell. The words were lost on Jason in the clarity of the notes she sang—and in what the pastor’s words had done to him.

Pastor Gates filled the chair to the side of the podium. He seemed not to hear the power in the singer’s voice or to see anyone in the sanctuary. Yet his words lodged in Jason, resonated in him, words too deep to name or understand. Some hard thing inside him was flayed away by Pastor Gates’s words, and he felt bare and raw.

He pulled his eyes from the pastor and rubbed his hands on his knees. Breath eluded him, and he gasped for it. He wondered if those seated nearby could see how his heart pounded at his rib cage and made his shirt quake.

He turned his head. At the other end of the pew, Brenda Tierney’s eyes met his. Emerald eyes he hadn’t seen since the interview. They glimmered with tears that shone as they caught the lights. She shook her head and looked down.

Jason couldn’t seem to turn away. The hypnotizing cut of her nose and cheeks drew him from the rawness inside him created by the pastor. Her eyes closed, her lashes joined to squeeze out a single tear that reflected like a diamond slipping onto her rounded cheek, trailing down the smooth cup underneath to her jaw, where an extended finger plucked it away. The trail of the tear remained, an icy line downward from her closed eyelids.

Silence overshadowed the room again. Its force was like a living thing, sucking all senses into it. He finally turned away from Brenda.

In the front row, Kathy and her sister rose like Siamese twins. Her ex-husband came after them and turned to stand at the foot of the coffin. His haggard face had aged ten years in the three days since Jason had last seen him. With this coffin before him, his eyes seemed to sag in their sockets.

Pastor Gates moved down the steps to meet them.

The lid was closed. There was nothing for them to see but the flowers draping the silver box.

Kathy buckled. She slid down her sister’s side toward the floor.

Pastor Gates rushed in. The silence of the church was broken by a murmuring rustle. People rose from their seats, stepped toward the aisle. The pastor wrapped his thick arm around Kathy and lifted her to her feet. But she moved in sections as if deflated, her head lolling forward.

Someone near the front said, “Let him through; he’s a doctor,” and a silver-haired man stepped into the aisle and toward the front.

Kathy’s ex-husband stood apart, at the foot of the casket, staring at it, unblinking, as if the commotion of Kathy’s collapse were a scene playing out in another dimension.