"People have lots of different ideas on how to apologize and who to ask for forgiveness," she said, looking at him for some reaction that would help her understand his urgency and vehemence. "Some people pray. Some people talk to a minister or confess to a loved one. Some go straight to the people they think they've wronged and ask their forgiveness, or do good deeds to try to outweigh the bad. Others don't think any of that is necessary."

Boughtflower pounced on this last statement. "They're fools then. I know enough to know that if you take sins with you when you die, n.o.body can save you from punishment."

The old man again lapsed into bitter silence.

"Is something on your mind, Mr. Boughtflower? G.o.d's very good at forgiveness. You could say that it's an area of special expertise," Lindsay said.

His eyes darted around the room, seeming unable to focus on her face. "I've decided to do something good, something to save my family, maybe something that'll even help me when I go to meet my maker. I need your help seeing it through."

"Me?" Lindsay asked.

"I heard Meeks say you're the preacher from the news, so I had my granddaughter look you up on the computer. Is it true? That you got the better of that crook, Swoopes?"

"I suppose it is. Mostly I got lucky."

"That's not how it sounded on the news," Boughtflower said. "It sounded like you're somebody who can do what needs to be done. And you're a minister, so you won't tell n.o.body nothing about it."

"I'm happy to help in any way I can."

"I made a will that'll give all the money away when I go. All of it. They don't know about it, but I'm telling you it's for their own good. I want you to see that it gets done how I want it. The lawyer said the will was all copacetic, but he's a lawyer." He invested the word "lawyer" with such disdain that it came out of his mouth like a curse. "I need somebody with no skin in the game, somebody tough, to make sure it gets done exactly like I say. That's you." He pointed a stubby finger to Lindsay's chest.

"I'll try, Mr. Boughtflower, but from my experience it's better not to leave behind surprises for your loved ones to find after your death. It can be confusing and painful. If it helps, I can set up a time for you to talk with your daughter and her family about your wishes."

"You don't understand," he said, with growing intensity. "We hid the body. The money belonged to everyone, but we stole it for ourselves. I've been wrong. I've done wrong. My whole life, it's weighed me down. You gotta help me give it back before it's too late. If I don't stop this, that money's gonna drag us all straight down to h.e.l.l." As he spoke, Boughtflower reached out and grabbed Lindsay's thin wrists. The pressure of his grip was like a vice, a burning vice.

"I don't understand what you mean. What body?"

"Just do this," he growled.

Lindsay shook her arms free and put her hand out to touch Boughtflower's forehead. "You're burning up with fever, Mr. Boughtflower. I need to get the nurse." She reached out and pressed the nurse call b.u.t.ton on the bedrail.

"Promise me," the old man wheezed. Another coughing fit seized him, and, as he choked and struggled for breath, further conversation became impossible. The nurse rushed in to help him, and quickly summoned more medical personnel for a.s.sistance. As doctors and nurses rushed in, Lindsay was pushed back toward the door. Even as she left, she knew it would be a long, long time before she'd be able to forget the vivid intensity of Otis Boughtflower's eyes as he lay gasping on his hospital bed.

Chapter 6.

"You've got to be kidding me." Lindsay emerged from her car and circled to the pa.s.senger's side to inspect her tire. She'd finished her nightmarishly long double shift and was still reeling from Boughtflower's strange confession about hiding a body and stealing money. He was by no means the first patient she'd tended to who felt the crushing weight of remorse and fear as the end of life drew near. But he was definitely the first who'd confessed to being involved in hiding a dead body. She'd already done a quick internet search on her phone to see if he'd ever partic.i.p.ated in any kind of crime that could explain his statement, but found nothing. Now, as she was finally heading home, she felt the telltale drag of a flat tire as she backed out of her parking s.p.a.ce. Sure enough, the rubber of her right front tire clung limply to the rim.

She hobbled the car into an open s.p.a.ce and popped the trunk open to remove the spare. She hadn't changed a tire in more than a decade and wasn't looking forward to the prospect of doing so in the hospital parking lot at 20 minutes past 7 a.m. on a Monday morning. She called AAA-the membership was a standing Christmas present from her father-but the dispatcher who answered told her it'd be at least an hour before a mechanic could get to her. Next, she put in a call to Warren. He picked up on the first ring.

"Hey," he said. "How was your shift?"

"If I were ranking all chaplain shifts in the universe, ever, it would be runner-up in the Weirdness category and definitely in the top ten for Suckiness," she replied grimly. "You know it's bad when you're actually jealous of your colleagues who are home with a stomach virus."

"Sorry to hear that," Warren said. "Why don't you get some sleep, and I'll pick you and Kipper up after work tonight. We can sit on my couch and share a pizza."

"I was hoping I could see you sooner," Lindsay said. "Like right now, for example. You'd look awfully s.e.xy lying on the ground changing my flat tire."

"'Fraid I can't. I'm on my way out to Lake Cammack to check out a burned out truck. Do you want me to send Vickers over to give you a hand? He was just eating his first Croissan'wich of the day when I left the station."

Freeland Vickers was the longest-serving member of the New Albany force. From everything Warren told her, Lindsay was fairly certain his long law enforcement career could be attributed to the careful way in which he conserved his energy by never doing anything that wasn't absolutely required.

"No, thanks," Lindsay sighed. "Triple-A will probably be here before Vickers even finishes his coffee. I'll give it the old college try, and when I inevitably make it ten times worse, I'll hide all the tools and tell the triple-A guy it was like that when I found it."

"Good plan," Warren laughed.

"Probably not what Jesus would do, but there's surprisingly little biblical guidance on saving face in front of a car mechanic."

"Text me later so I'll know you made it home. And call me if you change your mind about Vickers."

"Aye-aye," she said. "I'll see you tonight. As a matter of fact, we might even be able to have our pizza-and-couch time at my house. The final inspection is supposed to be this afternoon." She paused. "Hey, if you have time today, can you use your fancy policeman skills to look into something for me? You know Otis Boughtflower, the sock factory guy I told you about? I think he may have confessed to a murder and robbery."

"What? It seems like everybody would've heard about something like that."

"I know," Lindsay said. "He had a really high fever when I talked to him, so maybe he was delirious. But he seemed pretty convinced it happened."

"I'll see what I can find out," Warren said. "Maybe something happened when he was still a juvenile. Sometimes even serious crimes used to be swept under the rug if the family was well connected."

Lindsay signed off and let out another deep sigh. She shifted the stacks of papers, pairs of running shoes, and other detritus that littered the trunk, flipped open the trunk floor and began trying to heave the spare out of its resting place. It didn't budge.

"Need a hand?"

Lindsay spun around. She'd been vaguely aware of the sleek, silver Mercedes pulling up alongside her, but she'd been too engrossed in her task to notice the driver rolling down his window and leaning out to offer his a.s.sistance.

"Uh, sure. I'm usually a do-it-yourself kind of gal, but I seem to have fallen at the first hurdle here." She gestured to the spare, still firmly wedged in its holding well.

The man turned off his engine and got out of the car. He was so absurdly handsome that Lindsay almost laughed out loud-chiseled jaw, wavy black hair, tanned skin, and sparkling eyes the color of cinnamon sticks. Almost literally a knight in shining armor, though in his case, his "armor" was a $40,000 car. Lindsay had an odd, fleeting thought that he and Otis Boughtflower's haughty granddaughter would have impossibly beautiful children.

The man extended his hand. "Adam Tyrell."

"I'm Lindsay Harding. This is so nice of you. But before you do anything-full disclosure: I have Triple A coming in about 45 minutes. But in my experience, that could mean anything from an hour to next Thursday, and I'm really impatient."

He smiled the kind of smile that probably caused susceptible women to fall into a dead faint. Even Lindsay found her knees going a little weak. "I consider myself warned." He rolled up his sleeves as he spoke, revealing well-muscled forearms. He leaned over the trunk and said, "Here's the first problem. The toolkit has fallen back here. See? That's why you were having so much trouble getting the tire out." Once he removed the tool kit, he easily lifted the tire to the ground.

Lindsay squatted next to Adam and took on the role of operating theater nurse, handing him tools as needed. "So," she said, "what brings you to the hospital at this hour of the morning?"

"I'm visiting my mother. She had an operation a few days ago."

"Visiting hours don't start until eight," Lindsay said, cringing as she realized how pedantic she must've sounded.

"I know," Adam replied, loosening a wing nut on the flat tire. "I was going to get a cup of coffee first."

"Ah, yes. Our cafeteria does serve the finest horrible coffee in Mount Moriah. People who like ashtray-flavored coffee come from as far away as Greensboro. It's a Mecca."

"You're funny," he said. The way he said it sounded more like a scientific observation than a compliment or an expression of amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Sorry."

"Why are you apologizing for being funny?" Adam asked, an amused twinkle creeping into his eyes.

"Oh." She paused and thought for a moment. "Humor is kind of a thing I do when I'm nervous or upset or, you know, babbling incoherently to the man who is helping me change my tire."

She'd spent a lot of time during her chaplaincy training a.n.a.lyzing the way she automatically reacted to stressful, upsetting, or emotional circ.u.mstances with wisecracks. She also frequently found herself fighting the urge to say something-anything-in situations where silence would be a better response. Try as she might to cultivate the Zen persona she a.s.sociated with being a perfect chaplain, more often than not, she found herself relating more to Bozo than to Buddha.

"Well, you don't have to apologize. A good sense of humor is the quality I seek out more than anything else in a woman. I can handle short, tall, curvy, skinny, but I can't stand boring women." He gestured to her engagement ring, which she had involuntarily begun to fidget with again. "But I see that you're already spoken for."

She looked down at her ring, a deep crimson blush rising in her cheeks. "So, your mother had an operation? What's her name?" Lindsay asked.

He turned back to his work. "Valerie. Why do you ask?"

"I just wondered if maybe I knew her. I'm a chaplain here. I visit with a lot of patients, and I thought I might have seen her."

"We're not religious."

It was the kind of thing people often said when they found out Lindsay's vocation. She had long ago stopped being bothered by it, but often found herself, as now, worrying that others might be bothered by thinking that she might be bothered.

"So, do you live around here?" she asked.

"No. In fact, I've been working in Germany and Slovakia for the past three years. I just flew over to make sure Mother gets settled all right back at home."

"Wow. All the way from Europe. That's awfully nice of you."

She stole a glance sideways at his face. Has a cool European job, loves his mother, can change a tire, drives an expensive car, and possesses that face. Surely this guy must be an axe murderer. Or, given her track record, secretly gay. As she stared at the finely-honed angle of his jaw and his plump, sensuous lips, she had to forcibly remind herself that she was betrothed. And that he was way out of her league.

"Least I can do," Adam said. "She's the only family I have." He rolled the flat tire towards her. "Just lean that against the trunk. I can put it away."

She took hold of the tire and began to roll it towards the back of the car. Adam noticed her stop suddenly.

"What's the matter?" he asked.

"Nothing," Lindsay shook her head. "Well, actually, something. Do you see this? I didn't really look at it before. I just a.s.sumed I ran over a nail or something, but look. It looks like it's been slashed." A neat, almost surgically-precise, three-inch gash ran along one side of the tire.

"Huh," he said, moving his fingertips over the cut. "That is weird. Who'd do that to a chaplain? Do you have a psycho ex-boyfriend or something?"

She smiled tightly, as the memory of Leander Swoopes's cruel eyes flashed in front of her. "Something like that."

Chapter 7.

"Thanks for coming today. I know you probably had a rough time with having to come out in the middle of the night to pick Angel up," Lindsay said.

Lindsay had tried to fall asleep when she arrived back at her father's house after her shift that morning, but found that her brain refused to disengage. After tossing and turning for more than an hour, she got out of bed and called Dunette Oxendine, arranging to meet her at Simmy's rehab facility for an interview. Now, the three women sat around a small, round table in the facility's day room, sipping a beverage purported to be hot chocolate.

"I feel fresh as a daisy," Dunette said in her soothing, honey-drenched voice. "If there's one thing I'm used to, being a home health aide, it's getting up in the middle of the night."

"Is Angel feeling better? She seemed pretty upset last night," Lindsay said.

"Well, she looks like ten miles of bad road right now, but she'll perk up. She's seen more than her share of dying, but it never really gets easier, does it?"

The three women were quiet for a moment before Simmy broke the silence. "Enough about death. I'm proud of Lindsay for the work she does, but if you ask me, she's too gloomy for such a young person. h.e.l.l, even if she were as ancient as I am, she'd still be too d.a.m.n gloomy. I forbid the mentioning of death when I'm around. Since I'm the reason for this whole operation, from now on I vote we stick to my approved topics: men, liquor, and men." She smiled affectionately at Lindsay and then turned her attention to Dunette. "So, you're from Pembroke, honey?"

"Are we allowed to talk about where we're from?" Lindsay teased.

"Yes," Simmy said with a chuckle. "I'll make a special allowance for getting acquainted talk. And we can also talk about other peoples' business, especially when the gossip is juicy."

"Well then, since I have your permission, yes, I'm originally from Lumberton, but I was living in Pembroke," Dunette said. "Moved up here to take the job with Boughtflower."

"What do you make of Mount Moriah so far?" Lindsay asked.

"To tell the truth, I was afraid it'd be one of them backwoods places full of white folks who got more tattoos than teeth," she laughed. "But it's all right. I can live with Angel to save on rent, and I been taking cla.s.ses at the community college to try and get into a nursing program. Not much else to do here, but there wasn't much to do in Robeson County, either."

"Still," Simmy said, "it must've been hard to leave your family behind."

"Not much family left to leave. All the older folks are dead, and I don't have children. And to tell the truth, it was good for me to get away and make a fresh start." She sighed. "I'm always up front with the people I work for, so you might as well hear it now. I haven't always walked on the straight and narrow. When you do a background check on me, you'll see that I did time a few years ago. You see, I got involved with the wrong man and did some stupid things. We smuggled cigarettes between North Carolina and New York. We'd buy them here for cheap and then sell them to bootleggers in the city. I drove the van. When we got caught, I spent two years locked up at the Southern."

"My granddaughter-Lindsay's mama-is locked up there, too," Simmy said, sounding as delighted as if she'd just found out she and Dunette came from the same hometown.

Dunette raised her eyebrows. "Usually when I tell folks about that they look at me like I got the plague."

"Well, you're in good company," Lindsay said wryly.

"I'm sorry for that." Dunette said, laying her warm hand on top of Lindsay's. "That's hard on a child."

"Prison isn't easy on anyone," Lindsay replied.

"I made a lot of mistakes in my life, but I've learned a lot, too. I promise that if you hire me, I'll work hard and do right by you because I know I need to be grateful to those who are willing to overlook what I done in the past. I got good references from all those who were willing to take a chance on me. I've paid my debt to society, and now I just want a fresh start. I spent a long time feeling resentful and blaming my ex-husband for getting me mixed up in all that mess. But I realize now you can't blame other people for your choices."

"Don't be too hard on yourself, honey," Simmy said consolingly. "Half the women in that place are in there for getting mixed up with the wrong man. I know that's the case with Sarabelle anyway. Men-and one man in particular-led her astray."

"Do you really think Sarabelle doesn't deserve the blame for ending up where she is?" Lindsay said.

Normally she would've nodded in agreement, especially when discussing her mother in front of a stranger, but the lack of sleep seemed to have made her p.r.i.c.klier than usual. She'd grown up with her father constantly making excuses for her mother's shortcomings and bad behavior, and now that he was finally moving on, Lindsay felt like he'd pa.s.sed his blinders over to Simmy.

"She had a hard life. Give her some slack. If her own family can't give that to her, who will?" Simmy countered.

"Because of her choices, I had a hard life, too," Lindsay said, more irritably than she intended. "You don't see me in prison, though."

Simmy stared at her silently. The old woman's face seemed to have caved in suddenly-hollow cheeks, wide eyes, slack mouth.