Tolliver came in, his face pinched with cold. He dropped a twenty into the slot. He was surprised to find me seated by Twyla, but he leaned over to shake her hand and to tell her how sorry he was. “We appreciate the use of your cabin,” he said. “It made a big difference, having a place to stay.” I hadn’t even thought of thanking her, and I was angry with myself.

“I’m very sorry Harper got hurt,” Twyla said, and I felt better when I realized I wasn’t the only one who’d forgotten to mention something fairly major. “I hope they catch who did it, and I’m sure it was the same bastard who killed our Jeff. This is something else I forgot,” she said, pressing a check into my hands. I nodded and slid it into Tolliver’s chest pocket. We started down the aisle to find a place to sit.

We paused by a pew with some free space in the middle, and when the pew’s settlers saw my cast, they were kind enough to all shift down to let us sit on the end. I said “Thank you” several times. It felt good to settle down on the padded pew shoulder to shoulder with Tolliver. We were far enough away from the door to avoid the effects of the constant gusts of cold air with each entrance.

Gradually the murmurs died down and the crowd became silent. The doors didn’t open and close anymore. Pastor Garland came out, looking youthful and somehow sweet. But his voice was anything but sweet, or peaceful, as he read the scriptures he’d selected for the occasion. He’d picked a passage from Ecclesiastes, he told us, and he started to read. He began, “To everything there is a season…”

Everyone around me was nodding their heads, though of course Tolliver and I didn’t recognize the scripture. We listened with great attention. Was he saying that it had been time for the boys to die? No, maybe his emphasis was on “a time to mourn.” That was now, for sure. The rest of his readings were from Romans, and the thread that ran through them was about maintaining your own integrity in a world bereft of it. And they were eerily appropriate.

There was no point in saying the murders were events the congregation had to accept philosophically. There was no point in saying the people of Doraville had to turn the other cheek; it wasn’t the community’s cheek that had been struck. Its children had been stolen. There would be no offering up of other children to be killed, no matter how much scripture was quoted.

No, Doak Garland was smarter than he appeared. He was telling the people of Doraville that they had to endure and trust in God to get them past the bad time, that God would help them in this endeavor. No one could disagree with that message. Not here, not tonight. Not with those faces at the front of the congregation, staring back. As I watched, a deputy ceremoniously added two more easels, but these were left blank. The two boys who were strangers. I felt touched.