come up from behind. By the time it occurred to me that I should have snapped a photo of him, he was gone.”
“Did he say anything to you?”
“I don’t want you to think I’m crazy or anything, but he was right in front of me this time. It was so faint that I couldn’t be sure he was saying ‘Ursula’ again, because that’s what I had already heard earlier. Or maybe the noise he made was — was, um — just a hissing sound.”
Faith knew she sounded confused, so she took a few moments to clear her throat, and her mind. “Of course, after I got inside and Mr. Hewitt called, everything began to sound like Ursula.”
Faith Grant dropped her head and clasped her hands, as though she was praying.
“And that’s all you heard?” I was silently repeating Ursula’s name, comparing the sound to a hiss.
“He picked his head up right as he passed me, for just a second. The only other word he said was ‘sorry.’ ”
THIRTY-ONE
“WHAT would be involved in having you move in to a room here in the dormitory, in this quad?” I asked Faith.
“That’s the last thing I’d want to do, Alex. I don’t need the front office to know about this.”
“What if I gave you a choice of having Mike Chapman handcuffed to you for the weekend, or bunking in the dorms?” I said, reaching out to put my hand over hers.
“I’m partial to ministers with dimples,” Mike said. “I might let you out of the cuffs, but I’d hang pretty close to you.”
“There must be some guest rooms, Faith.”
“Yes, we use them for visiting scholars. I really don’t want to do this.”
“Give us the weekend,” Mike said. “There’s nothing I like better than a brave broad who wants to tough things out. But we need you to be safe till we sort through this.”
“Do you think the man I saw last night was the killer?”
Mike hesitated. I guessed that to be because he wasn’t even sure that Faith knew who or what she remembered correctly. She seemed flightier to him than she did to me.
I spoke to assuage her fears. “We’re not sure what we’re dealing with yet, Faith. There have been two vicious slayings in the city — maybe more somewhere else. And both victims here, just twenty-four hours apart, were strong women, outspoken about religious issues. We’d rather know you had some kind of security system in place.”
“Just tell them the heat in your place isn’t working right.”
“That’s not a stretch,” she said, flashing an impish grin at Mike. “You sure I can’t choose the handcuffed option?”
“I’m expensive to feed,” he said.
“And to water. You’ll be replacing the red wine with Absolut or Ketel One. Not to mention how he’ll try to rewrite your sermons,” I said. “I’ll tell you what would help a lot, Faith, is to understand this place, to see how you fit and what you do. If you think you’re a target for this guy, we’d like to know who else might be in danger.”
“I’d be casting a wide net, Alex. We’re such a liberal arm of the church — the most progressive, viewed as the most left-wing.”
“Has that always been true of Union?”
“For a pretty long time. Think of this country’s earliest institutions of higher education — Harvard, Yale, Princeton,” Faith said. “They were all founded as divinity schools. The only reason for a man to be educated at that time was to become a minister.”
“So this seminary was part of a bigger school?”
“We started as a mission school in the early 1800s. Part of Princeton University, which was the most powerful of the group for religious training. But the radical leaders grew to believe that you couldn’t do God’s work on a cloistered campus. The whole point of the ministry was to be in the cities, working with orphans and paupers, immigrants and prostitutes. Princeton was too isolated. So we split from the university, on the theory that cities are the best classrooms for knowing God, knowing Jesus.”
“And Union Seminary was that breakaway institution?”
“Yes, as a Protestant seminary, in the Reformed tradition. At first in Greenwich Village, moving up here in 1908, as the city spread north,” Faith said. “We needed to be where the heathens are, Alex, as they were called in those days. Still, it’s a primal impulse in our ministry to deal with social injustice in our work — to go to the margins.”
“Exactly what some of the Roman Catholics have been silenced for doing,” Mike said.
“Let’s say we’re more welcoming. We’ve got three hundred undergraduate students here, half of whom are women.”
“Is that a new thing?” I asked, trying to gauge the exposure of Faith and her colleagues.
“Not at all. It’s been that way for a couple of decades. A quarter of the group is African American, a fifth is Latino. And we’ve got a large LGBT community.”
“I hadn’t thought of the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender presence as a big part of the professional church community.”
“Many institutions aren’t quite as embracing as we are. So we train a lot of these students, even though many don’t get placed in jobs.”
“What do they do then?”
“Some of our best graduates are running secular organizations, nonprofits, mostly. Just another way of working on the side of the angels.”
“And women in the Protestant Church?” I asked. “How have they been received?”
“Pretty well, in America. They’ve even had an ordained woman bishop heading the Episcopal Church here. At one point I thought they were going to completely divide over the role of women. Then that moment passed, and all the turmoil has been about the acceptance of gays in the hierarchy. One thing you can count on is that any church that is anti-gay is also anti-feminist. Basic rule of thumb.”
“That doesn’t surprise me in the least,” I said.
“One of my good friends is a Lutheran pastor from South Dakota. Openly gay. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America — the ELCA — is the largest Protestant church in the country to let noncelibate gay ministers serve in the clergy, something that has caused wrenching dissension in many denominations. In her home church, her fellow Lutherans treated her sexuality as a demon that had to be exorcised. So we’ll take our victories as they come.”
“And you, Faith? Would you tell us about your beliefs?” I asked.
“I’m a Calvinist.”
“How’d you come by that?” Mike asked.
“Three generations of dirt-poor Kansans. Some were Lutherans, Dutch originally, from Pennsylvania. There’s a little bit of Cherokee in me that came on the Trail of Tears. The rest is a healthy mix of sharecroppers and horse thieves. The Grants were a rough bunch, but they were always religious. And how they hated the elitism of some of the Protestant sects.”
“It’s hard for me to imagine the way religion took hold on the frontier.”
“It was the only thing that held poor folk together, Mike. It was the idea that God loved them. You could accept the love of God and become a new person — a Christian. You weren’t just a product of your history and your culture — or should I say your lack of culture.”
“There were great divisions in the Protestant Church, too, weren’t there?” I asked.
“Certainly so. Around the turn of the last century, the Protestants divided,” Faith said, animated now, talking with her hands. “That split was between the head and the heart. The mainline church — the Eastern elite — that was all about the head. If you wanted to adore God, in their view, you built universities and you educated
