KANE STOOD AT THE BACK OF THE CHURCH, LISTENING to the old priest recite the opening prayer in a thin, quavering voice. He tried to recall the last time he’d been to Mass. His mother’s funeral? Probably. A long time ago, anyway.

The church was a long rectangle with the altar at the front, a choir loft at the back, and rows of pews, divided by a center aisle, in between. The ceiling was high to accommodate the choir loft, and the side walls were pierced at regular intervals by stained-glass windows of abstract pattern. The altar had been turned around since Kane’s youth, so that the priest faced the congregation instead of away from it, and had been stripped of its ornate tabernacle and raiment. His mother would have said the altar looked absolutely Lutheran.

These were just some of the changes. The Mass was said all in English now, audience participation was encouraged, and there were even women helping out on the altar. That last change would have sent his father off sputtering after the service in search of the nearest drink. But then, what wouldn’t?

Maybe the biggest change was in the congregation. This was the main Sunday-morning Mass, and the church was full, but most of the worshippers were Kane’s age or older, not the same multigenerational sprawl Kane remembered. Few young people or families seemed to be attending Mass these days.

He knew the Church was having all sorts of trouble. Not enough people becoming priests or nuns. Sex-abuse problems with men who had been—in some cases, still were—priests. The split between what the laity thought about a whole range of social issues and what the old men in Rome decreed. Kane just hadn’t realized how much trouble the Church was in. This morning, in this building, the Roman Catholic Church looked like a dying business.

The priest was moving at a brisk clip. I suppose a church service is like a baseball game these days, Kane thought. If it lasts too long, people get bored and stop coming. But it was a far cry from the incense-filled, two-hour Latin High Masses he’d served in as an altar boy.

After leaving the hospital, Kane had gone home and called the police chaplain and a few of the people who had served with Simms on the force. When he figured he had enough aid and comfort headed June Simms’s way, he’d repacked for the trip to Rejoice. But he hadn’t felt up to driving right back. More proof that age is creeping up on me, he’d thought. That, and he hadn’t wanted to leave the safety of the four walls of his apartment just then. So he’d ordered in pizza and spent the evening reading, falling asleep with Montaigne on his chest and awakening with a start just in time to shower and dress and drive to the cathedral for Mass.

He wasn’t really sure why he was there. He felt both restless and tired. He felt like something big was going to happen, but he had no idea what. A big break in the case? A big change in his life? Maybe both? He knew that the only way to find out was to be patient, but he didn’t feel patient. What he really wanted to do was to make a run for it, to escape this steaming wreck he called a life for someplace he could make a fresh start.

The thought made Kane smile. He’d be the first man in history to run away from Alaska to make a fresh start. He thought about the old gag that was probably still making the rounds in lawyer circles, about getting rich by offering an Alaska Special to newcomers: a bankruptcy, a divorce, and a name change, all for one low price.

He thought about his reluctance to try to interview Charlie Simms and to return to Rejoice. He’d never had that kind of problem as a cop. He’d always gone straight ahead. At the start, as a uniform, he’d felt the rightness of what he was doing, working to make the city he lived in safer. The department had been rawer then, full of big personalities and wild behavior, and, far down on the chain of command, he’d rarely run up against political restrictions. As he’d gotten older and come to understand the limitations of his job better, he’d still gotten satisfaction from solving puzzles and from working in an organization that, despite its many flaws, tried to uphold standards and protect citizens. As the department had gotten more paperwork driven, and he’d bumped into political constraints more frequently, he’d managed to ignore it all by just paying attention to what he did every day, to trying to solve crimes and put bad guys in jail.

Then, one day, he’d been the bad guy in jail. Inside the department and out, the wheels had ground him up. Minority groups had called for his head. The newspaper had joined in. Jeffords had decided to do the politically expedient thing. And the machinery inside the department had rolled relentlessly forward, producing the evidence to convict him.

Being on the wrong side of an investigation had hurt. In an organization like the police department, dominated by male values like stoicism and cynicism, he’d never let himself admit that he loved his job or made himself face the fact that it somehow filled needs that couldn’t be touched by anything or anyone else in his life. Once he was no longer a part of it, though, he’d seen that clearly.

In prison, without an anchor for his identity, he could feel his drive and certainty slipping away, replaced by the prisoner’s apathy and fear. He began to doubt himself, what he’d done, who he was. And even though he’d been exonerated, was free to go where he pleased and do what he pleased, he was still a prisoner of his fears and doubts.

He wasn’t a cop anymore, and never would be again. So what was he? A civilian, like the kid trooper said. A civilian whose time in prison and lack of other job skills severely limited his employment opportunities. About all he was suited to was private work. He wasn’t happy about that. The private detectives he’d known as a cop were either sleazy or incompetent, and he had a hard time seeing himself as one of them.

But he needed to do something. If he didn’t, all that was left was retirement, sitting in some condo someplace warm, collecting his pension, eating cat food, looking at his silly legs sticking out of a pair of shorts, and counting the minutes until happy hour. He wasn’t ready for that. He never wanted to be ready for that.

Maybe he was at Mass to seek help with his weakness, a miracle. God, he thought, I’m a drunk. Cure me. I’m a killer. Save me.

“The Gospel for today is from Matthew, chapter ten, verses twenty-four to twenty-six,” the priest said. “‘The disciple is not above his master, nor the servant above his lord. It is enough for the disciple that he be as his master, and the servant as his lord. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how much more shall they call them of his household? Fear them not, therefore: for there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known.’ ”

Is that a message to me? Kane thought. Was this, finally, God answering a prayer, if only in the scratchy voice of an old priest? Is God telling me to quit being afraid and just do my job? “For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known.” It might not be a miracle, but it was a coincidence.

His life was full of uncertainty now. So be it. He’d just have to accept that and go forward. The police force, prison, his marriage, they were all in the past. He was, amazingly, a new man at fifty-five, a new man in reluctant search of a new life.