“Hey! It is you, man! Where were you? I looked around and you weren’t there and that hole was gone, too.”

“There was fighting. The girl who helped get us there…” She abandoned me flat, the fucking bitch. He swallowed the angry words. They shouldn’t be uttered in this holy place. Instead he said, “She panicked and she ran.” He remembered Mollie’s upthrust middle finger and the look of bitter triumph. Yeah, some panic.

The organist stopped playing. People were starting to stare. Franny saw more of the jokers who had been Baba Yaga’s prisoners. People stood and gathered around him. A gentle-faced man with a chitinous insectile body laid a hand on Franny’s arm.

“Thank you,” he said softly. He paused to push his glasses back up on his nose. “I thought I was going to die there. Thank you for giving me back my life.”

Only for a handful of days, Franny thought. “You destroyed the world. I hope it was worth it.” Baba Yaga’s voice echoed in his head. He wanted to confess, to admit his sin to more than God, but he couldn’t bear to destroy their joy and happiness however brief it might be. He just stood, accepting their congratulations and thanks though every grateful word seemed to scald his soul.

“Excuse me.” A woman’s voice, soft and husky.

Franny turned and found himself facing an older African-American woman dressed in a conservative woman’s business chic. Her hair was lightly silvered and her eyes were red from crying. An older African-American man stood next to her. He was big and powerfully built. Franny saw echoes of Jamal Norwood’s features in both their faces.

Standing next to them was a tiny perfect doll of a girl. She was beautiful enough to catch the breath in a man’s chest, a golden blonde with dark blue eyes glittering with unshed tears … and maybe eighteen inches tall if she stretched. How the hell did they ever? Franny cut off that line of thought with a mental knife.

“Are you the police officer who was with our son in … in Kazakhstan?” the woman asked.

“Yes, ma’am. I’m Francis Black.”

“Could we talk with you? We’d like to hear…” Her voice faded away.

The jokers, displaying that uncanny sensitivity that seemed to be a hallmark of all of them, moved away.

Franny led the couple and the tiny girl over to a corner near the wrought-iron stand of prayer candles. The flickering flames brought sections of their faces into momentary sharp relief, a jigsaw puzzle picture of grief.

“Did he die a good death?” Bill Norwood’s voice grated like metal dragged across rock.

The question would have taken Franny aback if during conversations with Jamal while they had waited for a suspect to show up he hadn’t learned that Big Bill Norwood had been a football coach. In fact his son’s coach. It was the kind of tough, show-no-pain response Franny would have gotten from his maternal uncle who coached his hockey team up in Saratoga.