The Dark End of the Street: New Stories of Sex and Crime by Today's Top Authors by Jonathan Santlofer, S.J. Rozan

stolen Terry away to protect her, not to defile her. That was his word, Miss Seaver. Defile.”
    â€œProtect her from what?”
    â€œNobody believed the poor boy. The baby had his crooked eyebrows.” The thurifer touched his own forehead. “The Taite eyebrows. Very distinctive.” He was on his feet. “Same time tomorrow,” he said, and left her.
    VII
    Amanda dined that night at the home of a younger family in the congregation, Patsy and Lawrence Morrow. Although members of the darker nation, the Morrows lived not along the Gold Coast but in a small, nicely appointed town house in Georgetown. Lawrence was something important at the White House; Patsy was a congressional aide; the children were delightful, and spoiled. Three other couples were at dinner, along with a single man, obviously invited with matchmaking in mind, and just as obviously not interested in Amanda; nor, for that matter, interesting to her.
    He left early, pleading another engagement.
    Over dessert—a slightly soggy tiramisu—Amanda mentioned that she had met Christopher Taite, who had been filling her in on some of the recent history of the church.
    Silence around the table.
    â€œWhich history is that, exactly?” asked Patsy, alarm in her eyes.
    â€œHe didn’t scare you, did he?” murmured somebody else.
    â€œAre you sure he said Christopher ?” demanded a third voice.
    Amanda was taken aback by the chorus of dubiety. She had hoped to discuss the murder from thirty years ago, not the bona fides of her informant.
    â€œIs there something I should know about him?” she asked.
    â€œThere’s an old Trinity and St. Michael’s tradition,” said Lawrence Morrow, his tone thoughtful. “A new rector shows up. A few days later, Christopher Taite drops by to frighten him. Pardon me. Her. Nobody takes Mr. Taite seriously.”
    â€œSome people do,” said Patsy, glaring at her husband.
    â€œThree other rectors left,” Amanda objected. “Did he scare them all away?”
    â€œThey were interim,” said Lawrence, before anyone could get a word in. Plainly he wanted to put an end to the topic. He was a lawyer, and had the lawyer’s precision with sophistry. “They were leaving anyway. Hence the word interim . Whereas you”—he was on his feet, signaling an end to the evening—“you, Mother Seaver, we hope will be around TSM for many decades to come.”
    The use of the honorific was meant to reassure. But as she said her goodbyes, nobody would meet her eyes.
    VIII
    Home was an apartment on Sixteenth Street, backing on Rock Creek Park, but Amanda decided not to return there. Not yet. Instead she drove up to the church. Although the building was shuttered and locked, a light burned, as always, in the spire. Exterior floodlights illuminated the facade on the street side.
    She let herself in through the garden entrance, shut off the alarm, flipped on the lights, headed for her office. She spent a moment examining the dented thurible, then pulled from the shelf two volumes of the church registry, immense leather-lined folios in which, by hand, deaths and births and other significant events were recorded. She found the year that Joshua Bauer had died, then the month, finally the week.
    Sure enough, there was the handwritten entry, in the beautiful script of Granville Dean, in those days the rector. Most of the names of the departed had a cause of death inked alongside, but not Bauer. He had been sixty-one when he passed away. In the margin was a small glyph, also handwritten, a cross, ornately drawn but turned at an angle, like the letter X . The symbol stirred a memory from divinity school.
    The angled cross was called a saltire, or crux decussata: sometimes known as a Saint Andrew’s cross because church tradition held that Andrew, the second Apostle to be called, had been martyred on one. Father Dean had been recording the murder without seeming