He knew it was nuts to miss her, much less court her by consciously refusing to put on his alarm. Coming and going was the prerogative of ghosts, after all. Whenever he left the system off, the old paranoia returned—punks invading his house, smashing his precious things and taunting his graying manhood. Just last week a guy in a hooded sweatshirt had held up a woman at gunpoint five houses away. It became a real conundrum—turn the system on, and his ghost wouldn’t come; turn the system off, and he might have human monsters to contend with.

As it was, the only hauntings he received now were the incessant phone calls from his father.

“Oh, Ray, just a little longer—”

“I told you. I have a very important meeting I have to get to.”

“But today’s Sunday!”

“The literary world never sleeps, Dad. You know that.”

“I sure as shooting do not.”

“I gotta say. I do love your way with words.”

He hung up the phone, and if a man could kiss himself, he would have. The solution to his dilemma had suddenly revealed itself to him.

The buildings got shabbier as he drove south and west away from Santa Claus Lane. Sub-divided Victorians became halfway houses, Baptist churches became crack dens. A sign proclaimed: this church is prayer-conditioned. Haha. Young men idled on street corners in baggy blue jeans and white muumuus they seemed to think were T-shirts. He could scoff at them safely in the daytime, but come nightfall, when they pulled on their black hoodies and merged into the night, he knew he’d be quaking again.

Just before the eight lanes of the 210 came into view, a burst of redevelopment: beige shoeboxes overlooking the on-ramp with “New York–style lofts,” the trapezoid of a Mormon temple, a block-wide fortress with “All Welcome” sermons in Armenian, Tagalog and Español, offering last-minute salvation before drivers braved the freeway.

So many churches. Not too many, just so many. Raymond didn’t have anything against them personally—they’d been good to him. His last relationship had been with a married man—father of two and husband to a movie publicist shrike—and the only place they could rendezvous without the risk of running into anyone they knew was a church. Like Abelard and Heloise who tiptoed into a musty refectory to rut like minxes, or Matthew Lewis’s monk who ventured down to the crypt to ravage his love, Raymond found his neighborhood Presbyterian church, with its neo-Gothic nooks and crannies and cornices and curlicues, sympathetically disposed to urgent romance.

It also looked like a swell place for a funeral.