Junior, of course, is talking about his daddy. Martyrdom has been very good for business. Nothing like a small-town murder to rally the national press around an otherwise banal construction project. Craver sees the two of us. His brief smile is beatific, disconnected.
“Wait here,” Pea whispers. “I’ll be back soon.”
She rubs the back of my neck and then runs in the direction of the condemned church. Craver watches her leave, then snaps his gaze back to Junior. He’s taking questions from the assembled representatives of our fourth estate.
“Gerry Davis, New York Sun, I have a question for Mr. Benjamin Craver—”
“Ben Craver,” says Junior with an abrupt, waxen smile, “has joined us today, as I said, in a remarkable show of support and solidarity and an attempt to help heal our community. But he is not well—”
“How do you feel about the move of the graves to First Methodist? Your opposition to the gravesite—”
“I think his presence here is a good indication that he feels that the placement of these bodies in sacred ground, where my own father has been buried not even a month ago, is a worthy compromise. Now—Ben, for goodness’ sake, man, you don’t need to answer—”
Craver has very slowly moved his wheelchair forward. Those of us in the front row can just make out his splintered voice. “It’s all right. I can say … I am very pleased to be here today. I am happy to have reached this … accord in this sacred space. I am grateful to Bobby Bell Junior and the investors for … allowing me to be here.”
Junior closes his eyes and flexes his hands carefully at his sides. Craver smiles with a perfect, holy cruelty. And as a fusillade of barked questions and photographic flashes obscure the strangeness of the moment, I feel it. One finger of a silk glove sliding between the veins of my left wrist. Not a direct threat, nor an immediate one, but undeniable. No sign of Pea at the old church, so I scan the crowd behind me. There’s more I could do to find the source of this threat. But Pea told me to stay. I’m afraid for her—more afraid than I’ve been in my life—she is pregnant—and our child has warned her about what will happen here.
Then: Alvin sprints from the back of the church and starts across the graveyard. He hollers something that I can’t make out for the roar of the crowd. Murderer, they scream. It’s him. Good God, where are the police? Pea chases him just a few steps behind. I start toward her, but she waves her arms and I stop with my gun in my hand and one foot in the air.
“Craver,” she shouts—at least, I think she does, I am reduced to reading her lips. The threat rolls over me again. My hands cramp. It isn’t directed at me, but it will catch me if I stay. I stay. I jump the ribbon and elbow my way closer to the police surrounding Junior and his associates.
A cop intercepts Alvin and wrestles him to the ground. Pea stares at me, but she goes back to help the kid. Craver, I have to reach Craver. He’s going to do something, that’s the only reason he’d ever have appeared here today. I run around the back of the police cordon, vault off the sturdiest of the gravestones, and push my way between a pair of linked arms. I land to the side of Craver’s wheelchair in a wobbly crouch.
“Davey,” he says, softly reproving. He doesn’t seem to have noticed the fracas around us. “You aren’t supposed to be here.”
“What are you doing?”
He blinks slowly down at me. The officers I pushed aside to reach him have grabbed me by my elbows. I hook one leg beneath Craver’s wheelchair. Buy myself a few seconds. “Giving this,” Craver says, spreading his arms wide, “giving us all, back to the Lord.”
The gesture makes his awkwardly fitted jacket gape between the closed buttons, a little at the armpits. A moment like a sliver of shaved ice: a bundle of wires running from his armpit to his stomach, connected to a series of dark-gray cylinders.
“Officers,” says Craver, very calmly, “please take this man away from me.”
My left shoulder wrenches when they pull me upright. It wouldn’t hurt so much if I weren’t also trying to get away. My warnings sound absurd. I babble them anyway.
I worked long enough back then in Craver’s store to see his storage shed, where he keeps the hunting rifles and their ammunition. And, occasionally, for when highway crews pass through, small batches of state-registered explosives. He always warned me away: One stick of TNT has enough force to blow up half of River House, Davey.
His comparison had struck me even at the time. So he hates them too, I thought, and felt that kinship.
I thought we’d come to the groundbreaking to stop Mae. But I forgot. I forgot that there are so many kinds of threats. And many kinds of strength.
An infinity of vengeance.
“Explosives,” I try again, “Craver has explosives, he’s going to set himself off—”
Some asshole with a federal insignia is pressing Pea’s face into the grass. Alvin shivers beside her, already cuffed. One of her knives
