A Quiet Belief in Angels by R. J. Ellory

forehead varnished with sweat—the tension of some indescribable fear pushing me forward.
    My hand on the handle of my mother’s bedroom door.
    The sounds from within.
    An intuitive sense of knowing , an understanding perhaps of why the money came every week, the money wrapped in a piece of leather and tucked beneath a heavy stone. It had been up there, alongside the fence that ran adjacent to the High Road. The road along which Death had walked.
    Even now, all these years later, I can see her face.
    I opened the door and saw them there—she on the bed on her hands and knees, as naked as the day God made her, and he—Gunther Kruger—right there behind her, naked also, his hands on her shoulders, his face flushed and sweating, their clothes scattered across the floor as if they possessed no value whatsoever.
    No one spoke.
    Three people and no one spoke.
    I pulled the door closed. I slammed it, I think. I turned and started running down the stairs, across the lower hallway, through the kitchen and out the back door into the yard. I kept on running.
    Heard a story one time. Was a story about a boy whose father was forever threatening to beat him. Boy was no bigger than a fence post, and he was scared of getting beaten. Didn’t see himself standing up to such a generous thrashing, for his father was like a tree, kind of tree still standing after a hurricane. So the boy started running. Every day. Running to school, running home afterward, running around the field near his house three or four times before dinner. Mother thought he’d lost his mind, brothers and sisters teased him. But the boy kept on running, running just like Red Grange on the broken-field. Later the doctor said he had an “athlete’s heart,” enlarged from continual exertion. Later, they said a lot of things. Boy’s heart gave out it seemed. Just damn near exploded. Running away from the thing that scared him most finally killed him. Ironic, but true.
    I ran like that away from my house. Ran along the fence bordering the High Road, cut through the tupelo grove and across the corner of the Kruger fallow until I reached Reilly Hawkins’s place.
    Reilly was away, maybe after rats, maybe after a child killer, and I waited in the cool silence of his house for more than two hours.
    “Jesus Mary Mother of God!” he hollered when I appeared from the darkened corner of his kitchen. And then, “What the hell . . . ? Christ, Joseph, what happened? You look like someone damned near walked over your grave.”
    I told him what I saw.
    He was silent for a good while. He shook his head and sighed. He seemed to be thinking, not about what to say, but how to say it in such a manner as I would understand.
    “Folks is complicated,” he started. “Folks get lonely, they get afraid, and sometimes the only way they can make themselves feel better is by being close with another person, close like it says in the Bible.”
    “They were having sex, weren’t they?” I asked.
    “Yes, from what you tell me it certainly seems as though they were.”
    “And that’s not in the Bible.”
    Reilly smiled. “Sure it is—”
    “I know,” I interjected. “I know that sex is in the Bible, but not that kind of sex . . . not the kind of sex that a man has with another woman than his own wife.”
    Reilly nodded. “Got me dead square on that one, Joseph. Bible says that that kind of sex is the sort of thing you get in trouble for.”
    Neither of us spoke for a while.
    “She’ll be worried sick, you know?” Reilly eventually said. “She’ll be out in the fields looking for you.”
    I shrugged.
    “You gotta stay here, Joseph,” he said. “I’m gonna go over there and tell her where you are. I’ll tell her you’re staying with me tonight.”
    I shrugged again.
    “There’s some fresh milk and pieces of fried chicken in the cold box,” Reilly said. “Times like this it’s good to eat. You eat, I’ll go and find your mother, and then I’ll come back and show you