John Heineman, for whom also a Mass had been offered, would be kept in cold storage. After a year, when his death would not seem coincidental with those of Timothy and Maxwell, an announcement would be made to the effect that he had died of a massive heart attack.

He had no family except the son he had never accepted. In spite of the terror and grief that Heineman had brought to St. Bartholomew's, the brothers and sisters were agreed that in a spirit of forgiveness, he should be buried in their cemetery, though at a discreet distance from the others who were at rest in that place.

Heineman's array of supercomputers were impounded by the NSA. They would eventually be removed from John's Mew and trucked away. All the strange rooms and the creation machine would be studied, meticulously disassembled, and removed.

The brothers and sisters-and yours truly-were required to sign oaths of silence, and we understood that the carefully spelled-out penalties for violation would be strictly enforced. I don't think the feds were worried about the monks and nuns, whose lives are about the fulfillment of oaths, but they spent a lot of time vividly explaining to me all the nuances of suffering embodied in the words "rot in prison."

I wrote this manuscript nonetheless, as writing is my therapy and a kind of penance. If ever, my story will be published only when I have moved on from this world to glory or damnation, where even the NSA cannot reach me.

Although Abbot Bernard had no responsibility for John Heineman's research or actions, he insisted that he would step down from his position between Christmas and the new year.

He had called John's Mew the adytum, which is the most sacred part of a place of worship, shrine of shrines. He had embraced the false idea that God can be known through science, which pained him considerably, but his greatest remorse arose from the fact that he had been unable to see that John Heineman had been motivated not by a wholesome pride in his God-given genius but by a vanity and a secret simmering anger that corrupted his every achievement.

A sadness settled over the community of St. Bartholomew's, and I doubted that it would lift for a year, if even then. Because the beasts of bone that breached the second-floor defenses of the school had collapsed into diminishing cubes at the moment of Heineman's demise, as had the figure of Death, only Brother Maxwell had perished in the battle. But Maxwell, Timothy, and again poor Constantine would be mourned anew in each season that life here went on without them.

Saturday evening, three days after the crisis, Rodion Romanovich came to my room in the guesthouse, bringing two bottles of good red wine, fresh bread, cheese, cold roast beef, and various condiments, none of which he had poisoned.

Boo spent much of the evening lying on my feet, as if he feared they might be cold.

Elvis stopped by for a while. I thought he might have moved on by now, as Constantine appeared to have done, but the King remained. He worried about me. I suspected also that he might be choosing his moment with a sense of the drama and style that had made him famous.

Near midnight, as we sat at a small table by the window at which a few days earlier I had been waiting for the snow, Rodion said, "You will be free to leave Monday if you wish. Or will you stay?"

"I may come back one day," I said, "but now this isn't the place for me."

"I believe without exception the brothers and the sisters feel this will forever be the place for you. You saved them all, son."

"No, sir. Not all."

"All of the children. Timothy was killed within the hour you saw the first bodach. There was nothing you could have done for him. And I am more at fault for Maxwell than you are. If I had understood the situation and had shot Heineman sooner, Maxwell might have lived."

"Sir, you're surprisingly kind for a man who prepares people for death."

"Well, you know, in some cases, death is a kindness not only to the person who receives it but to the people he himself might have destroyed. When will you leave?"

"Next week."

"Where will you go, son?"

"Home to Pico Mundo. You? Back to your beloved Indianapolis?"

"I am sadly certain that the Indiana State Library at one-forty North Senate Avenue has become a shambles in my absence. But I will be going, instead, to the high desert in California, to meet Mrs. Romanovich on her return from space."

We had a certain rhythm for these things that required me to take a sip of wine and savor it before asking, "From space-do you mean like the moon, sir?"

"Not so far away as the moon this time. For a month, the lovely Mrs. Romanovich has been doing work for this wonderful country aboard a certain orbiting platform about which I can say no more."

"Will she make America safe forever, sir?"

"Nothing is forever, son. But if I had to commend the fate of the nation to a single pair of hands, I could think of none I would trust more than hers."

"I wish I could meet her, sir."

"Perhaps one day you will."

Elvis lured Boo away for a belly rub, and I said, "I do worry about the data in Dr. Heineman's computers. In the wrong hands…"

Leaning close, he whispered, "Worry not, my boy. The data in those computers is applesauce. I made sure of that before I called in my posse."

I raised my glass in a toast. "To the sons of assassins and the husbands of space heroes."

"And to your lost girl," he said, clinking my glass with his, "who, in her new adventure, holds you in her heart as you hold her."

CHAPTER 55

THE EARLY SKY WAS CLEAR AND DEEP. THE snow-mantled meadow lay as bright and clean as the morning after death, when time will have defeated time and all will have been redeemed.

I had said my good-byes the night before and had chosen to leave while the brothers were at Mass and the sisters busy with the waking children.

The roads were clear and dry, and the customized Cadillac purred into view without a clank of chains. He pulled up at the steps to the guesthouse, where I waited.

I hurried to advise him not to get out, but he refused to remain behind the wheel.

My friend and mentor, Ozzie Boone, the famous mystery writer of whom I have written much in my first two manuscripts, is a gloriously fat man, four hundred pounds at his slimmest. He insists that he is in better condition than most sumo wrestlers, and perhaps he is, but I worry every time he gets up from a chair, as it seems this will be one demand too many on his great heart.

"Dear Odd," he said as he gave me a fierce bear hug by the open driver's door. "You have lost weight, I fear. You are a wisp."

"No, sir. I weigh the same as when you dropped me off here. It may be that I seem smaller to you because you've gotten larger."

"I have a colossal bag of fine dark chocolates in the car. With the proper commitment, you can gain five pounds by the time we get back to Pico Mundo. Let me put your luggage in the trunk."

"No, no, sir. I can manage."

"Dear Odd, you have been trembling in anticipation of my death for years, and you will be trembling in anticipation of my death ten years from now. I will be such a massive inconvenience to all who will handle my body that God, if he has any mercy for morticians, will keep me alive perhaps forever."

"Sir, let's not talk about death. Christmas is coming. 'Tis the season to be jolly."

"By all means, we shall talk about silver bells roasting on an open fire and all things Christmas."

While he watched, and no doubt schemed to snatch up one of my bags and load it, I stowed my belongings in the trunk. When I slammed the lid and looked up, I discovered that all the brothers, who should have been at Mass, had gathered silently on the guesthouse steps.