Born again… as Will Ryerson.

They'd advised him to choose a name close to his own to make it easier to cover slips when speaking or writing the new one. Will Ryerson now seemed more like his real name than Bill Ryan ever had.

But Father Bill wasn't dead. Despite everything that had happened, the priest part of him still wanted very badly to believe in God. The Jesuit within him still pushed at the envelope of Will Ryerson's persona. So he'd made concessions to it. He'd begun to say his daily office again. He kept hoping he'd find a way to go back. But how? There was no statute of limitations on murder.

But during these past three years in North Carolina he had found a new equilibrium. He was not happy—he doubted he would ever be really happy again—but he had come to terms with his existence.

And now, on this sunny Saturday morning, he spotted one of the few bright spots in his life strolling along the sidewalk. A slim knockout of a blonde trailing a wake of turned heads. Lisl. And she was alone. She was hardly ever alone anymore. He stopped at the corner, blocking her path as she stepped off the curb.

"Hey, girlie! Wanna go for a spin?"

He saw üer head come up, saw her upper lip start to curl as she readied a curt reply, then saw her smile. What a smile. Like the sun burning through low-lying clouds.

"Will! You've got the top down!"

"Perfect day for it. I'm serious about the spin. How about it?"

He was hoping she'd say yes. It seemed like an age since they'd had some decent time together to talk.

She hesitated for a second, then shrugged. "Why not? I'd have to be crazy to refuse."

He leaned over and pushed open the door for her.

"Been a long time, Leese."

"Too long," she said, sliding in and slamming it closed.

"Where do you want to go?"

"Anywhere. How about the highway? I want to go fast."

Bill headed out of town, wondering at the perversity of life. Here he was, a shabby, bearded, ponytailed, defrocked priest looking fifty in the eye, riding in a convertible under a perfect sky with a beautiful thirty-two-year-old windblown blonde. He felt like the high school burnout who'd just picked up the queen of the prom.

Maybe happiness wasn't an impossible dream.

"What are you grinning at?" Lisl asked.

"Nothing," he said. "Everything."

As he was overtaking someone on a bicycle, Lisl said, "Watch out for the geek."

Bill looked at her sharply. They'd passed this kid on his bike at least a hundred times in the past and she'd never made a crack like that. Although Bill didn't know his name, the kid was a familiar sight around town. He'd never spoken to him, but he could tell by his features, by the single-minded intensity with which he pedaled his bike, by his clothing and the incongruous fedora he wore every day, that he was mentally retarded. Bill could imagine the kid's mother making his lunch, stowing it in that dinky little knapsack on his back, and sending him off every morning. Probably worked at the Sheltered Workshop on the other end of town.

"Get up on the wrong side of bed this morning?"

"Not at all," Lisl muttered as they passed the kid. "They shouldn't allow mutants like that on the road."

"You're pulling my leg, aren't you? I don't know that kid, but I'm proud of him. Dressing himself, riding to work, and doing some manual labor probably taxes his abilities to their limit, yet he's out here on his bike every day, rain or shine, making it to work and back. You can't take that away from him. It's all he's got."

"Right. Until he has a spasm and gets hit by a car and his folks sue the driver for everything he's worth."

Bill reached over and felt her forehead. "You all right? Coming down with a fever?"

Lisl laughed. "I'm fine. Forget it."

Bill tried to do just that as they hit Route 40 and drove north, sailing along, talking about what they'd been doing, what they'd been reading, but in everything she said he detected subtle nuances of change. This Lisl was different from the woman he'd known for the past three years. She seemed to have calcified in the weeks since her Christmas party, as if she were building up a hard shell around herself. And all she seemed to want to talk about was Rafe Losmara.

"Any further word from the State Police on that weird telephone call?" he said, as much from a sincere desire to know as from a wish to move the conversation away from Rafe.

"No. Not a word. And I don't care. As long as I never have to hear that call again."

The way she shuddered reminded him of the old Lisl, and that was a relief.

Bill had been shaken up when Lisl had told him that the call was being investigated. And he still couldn't figure out how the North Carolina State Police had connected him with the call, or had wound up with that old photo of him. Had to be Renny Augustino's doing, especially since it sounded like the same photo the New York police had released five years ago. That one had been old even back then. Bill was now twenty pounds lighter and ten years older than the priest in that photo.

He was different in other ways too. That Christmas week in hell five years ago, plus the first year, the lost year of living on the edge in the Bahamas, had wrought their own set of changes. He'd hung out with scum during that year and had thought they were too good for him; he'd been cut and he'd had his nose mangled more than once in the drunken fights he'd started. Time had added deep furrows to his cheeks and alongside the scar on his forehead, and a bumper crop of gray to his hair. He was pulling that hair off his face now, usually tying it back, exposing the receding hairline at each temple. All that, plus the full beard, made him look more like a darker, heavier set version of Willie Nelson than the young, baby-faced Father Bill in the old photo. So he shouldn't have been surprised that Lisl hadn't recognized him. Yet he was. He wasn't used to good luck.

Traffic began to slow as the road became more crowded.

"Where's everybody going?" Lisl said.

"It's a warm sunny Saturday. Where else would everybody be going?"

Lisl sank back in the seat. "Of course. Big Country."

The giant amusement park cum African safari complex had opened a few years ago and had quickly become the biggest attraction on the eastern end of the state. The locals loved all the new jobs and the boost to the economy, but nobody liked the traffic jams.

"Want to go? We haven't been to the safari in a long time."

"No, thanks," she said with an emphatic shake of her head. "I'm not in the mood for crowds."

"No," he said, smiling, "I can see that you aren't."

Maybe she had PMS.

They finally came upon one of the contributing factors to the traffic jam—a stalled station wagon, an ancient Ford Country Squire, just like the one St. Francis used to own. The hood was up and a man in jeans and a flannel shirt was leaning over the engine. As they passed, Bill saw the stricken looks on the faces of the four kids in the back, the naked anger and resentment on the face of the overweight woman in the front passenger seat, and then he got a look at the man staring in bewilderment at the dead engine before him. Something in the fellow's eyes caught Bill in the throat. He read it all in a heartbeat—a laborer, not much dough but he'd promised to take the wife and kids to Big Country for the day. A rare treat. And now they weren't going anywhere. The tow truck and ensuing repairs would probably eat up much of his spare cash, and even if it didn't, the day would be spent by the time they got rolling again. If the man's eyes had shown plain old anger or frustration, Bill could have kept going. But what he saw in that flash was defeat. One more footprint on the back of an already struggling ego.

Bill swerved onto the shoulder in front of the wagon.