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.

“These are the children of our community,” Doak said. He gestured to the faces. Then he pointed to the two blank easels. “And these are someone else’s children, but they were killed and buried right along with ours, and we must pray for them, too.”

One picture was the stern one boys always take for their high school football picture. The scowling boy, looking so very tough…I’d seen him in his grave, beaten and cut, tortured beyond his endurance, every vestige of manhood stripped from him. Suddenly the tragedy of it seemed unbearable, and as Doak Garland’s voice rose in his sermon, tears flowed out of my eyes. Tolliver fished some Kleenex from his pocket and patted my face. He looked a little bewildered. I’d never reacted like this to a previous case, no matter how horrific.