A Quiet Belief in Angels by R. J. Ellory Page B

dogs and scoured the countryside from one horizon to the other. There were huddles of people talking in the street. Seemed that every day the newspaper had something else to say without saying very much of anything at all. Folks even mentioned the names of Georgia Bureau of Investigation Agents Carver and Oates, as if in bringing them back something would be different from their previous investigation. Carver and Oates never came, nor the man from Valdosta with a lie machine and a female assistant. Sheriff Dearing looked perpetually exhausted, as if sleep was a cohort of the killer and was evading him with great skill. There was talk of murder weapons, of knives, meat cleavers, other such suppositions. I watched it all, every single thing, and I wondered how someone would be found who had made it their business to remain undiscovered. Everyone knew they were innocent, and yet everyone knew they were a suspect, and would remain so until the guilty one was identified.
    He was not, and for some reason I believed it would stay that way.
    “This is a bad, bad thing,” Reilly Hawkins said. Once again he was seated in our kitchen. My mother had recovered from her illness, though Mr. Kruger still brought soup and sausages two or three times a week from his wife’s kitchen. I knew this was the case, because often, after school, my mother would send me over to the Krugers’ with washed pots and plates and her thanks.
    “This thing with these children—”
    My mother shook her head. “It’s not something I want to discuss, Reilly,” she said.
    “I want to talk about it,” I told her. “I’m old enough to know what murder is, and I’m old enough to know that there are crazy people. Miss Webber told us that the Germans are putting Jewish people in prison camps and that many, many thousands have died—”
    “Is she now?” my mother interjected. “I don’t know that that’s suitable material to be teaching young children.”
    “Not so young,” I said. “I know that the French police are arresting Jews in Paris and handing them over to the Germans, a thousand at a time. I also know that James Joyce died in Switzerland, and that Virginia Woolf drowned herself in a river—”
    “Enough,” my mother said. “So you know a lot of things, Joseph Vaughan, but that does not necessarily mean that we will discuss the murdering of young girls in our kitchen.”
    I looked at Reilly Hawkins. He looked away.
    “I knew all three of them,” I said. My voice broke with emotion. I felt tears coming. “I knew all three of them. I knew their names, what they looked like. I sat in Miss Webber’s class with them, and sometimes Miss Webber would have me read a story to everyone, and Ellen May would sit right up close like she wanted to hear every single word I said.” I could not hold myself. I stood up. “I want to talk about it! I want to know what’s happening and why we can’t do anything about these terrible things!”
    “Enough already!” she snapped. “You have chores to do. Go and clean the window in your bedroom, and then you can go over to the Krugers if you wish.”
    Anger rose inside me. I glared at my mother, and for a moment I saw through her determined expression. She was afraid, as afraid as I. She did not know what to say to make this thing any better.
    I felt I should reach out to her. I believed it would have been right to apologize, to tell her I was confused and afraid and I needed to tell someone how I felt. But that, in my small and narrow view, would have been tantamount to admitting defeat in the face of authority. I made a performance of stamping my way upstairs and along the corridor. When I reached my door I opened it and slammed it shut as if I had gone inside, then I turned back the way I’d come and crept along the hallway to the top of the stairs.
    “—willful yes, but rarely disobedient,” my mother was saying. “He has a bright and inquisitive mind like his father, and once he has hold of