The Early Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn by Gail Bowen

but, you know, Mrs. Boychuk would spend like hours with Carey – watching TV with him and talking to him about the programs and reading to him and telling him about things, but Mr. Boychuk – well, you could tell he, like, loved Carey and everything, but it just seemed real hard for him to stay with him. He’d come in and he’d sit and hold Carey’s hand for a little while and then it was like he couldn’t take it any more. He’d kiss him and he’djust leave. No, Mrs. Kilbourn, Mr. Boychuk didn’t come for Carey. Anyway, Soren is the spiritual head of Wolf River Bible College and all, but he wouldn’t have been the one to like talk to about Carey – that would have been …” Suddenly a laugh as musical as the tinkle of a wind chime. “Well, of course, it would be Mrs. Manz. She’s the matron for special care – sometimes I can be so dumb.” She smiled shyly, waiting for approval.
    I gave it heartily. “Well, thanks, Lori, that’s good to know. It was kind of you to go to so much trouble.” We both smiled – neither of us seeing a barb in a comment that equated human thought with trouble, and we parted friends.
    I didn’t make a conscious decision to call on Soren Eames. It just happened. I’d turned down Lori Evanson’s invitation to have lunch at their trailer and walked down the path that led to the chapel. Close up, it seemed to change, to reveal itself. Somehow up close you didn’t notice the hard-edged bravado of the building as much as the simple fact that everything fit so well.
    The Charlie Appleby Prayer Centre was a fitting building in both senses of the word. The parts fit together with the cool inevitability of a beautiful and expensive watch. The result, as I discovered when the front door opened to my touch, was a building where form and function meshed smoothly. It was a fitting building in which to worship God.
    The heart of the building, the octagon-shaped chapel, was a beautiful room. No stained glass or groined wood or silky altar cloths – just a room in which everything was practical and workable. All eight walls were glass – eight walls of windows filling the room with natural light. In the centre of the room was a simple circular altar. Suspended above it was an unpainted metal cross. Arranged in octagons around the altar were bright metal pews, covered in sailcloth cushions. The sailcloth was vivid: red, green, yellow, blue. I walkeddown the aisle and sat in a pew. From there I could see how pieces of pipe had been joined together to form the cross. It looked functional and heavy. Suddenly, everything caught up with me. Exhaustion and grief and the familiar clutch of panic. There had been other deaths: my grandparents, my best friend from high school, my father, my husband. I had survived, but as I watched the play of light on the cross, I began to tremble.
    I sat for perhaps half an hour. There were no tongues of flame. No pressure of an unseen hand on my shoulder. But after a while I felt better – not restored but capable of functioning.
    “I am going to make it through this day,” I said. There were no thunderbolts, so I picked up my bag and walked.
    I don’t know which I heard first – the man’s voice or the sobbing. But as I stepped outside the chapel, squinting against the harsh midday light, I heard someone in distress. The sound was coming from one of the wings – modules, Lori had called them – that radiated from the chapel like spokes from a wheel. The crying was terrible. It seemed to spring from a pain so pure and so private that I knew there was no help I could offer.
    But there was another sound – the sound of a man’s voice. At first, I couldn’t catch the words, but I didn’t need to. The cadences were as familiar to me as my own, and I listened with my heart pounding against my ribs as the sounds shaped themselves into words. “I thought it was the right thing to do, but now I don’t know.” Then something I couldn’t make out, then,