“He’s immoral,” Stanley said with what he hoped was restrained emphasis. Yes, he thought, Gordon Bray radiated this.

“Gordon is not immoral. What on earth are you talking about?”

“It’s the feeling I get,” Stanley said.

Adam felt awful, and without warning.

“I’m not amused by this,” he found himself saying, more coldly than he had expected it to sound. He looked at Stanley’s suit vest and his brown jubbah. There was his customary headgear—always the baseball cap. Today it bore the insignia of the U.S. Park Police. He was sitting there, Stanley was, tearing the cuticle of his left pinkie. Adam looked a little more closely. In the church’s dim light, it looked as if the sides of both Stanley’s thumbs were scabbed over. Adam’s poor, challenged daughter had that habit. She wore five or six Band-Aids almost always on her fingers. But a grown man—Adam had never seen one do such a thing.

You couldn’t explain many a thing, or even understand one thing at first. As Vera understood scripture, meaning was a light that shone from certain angles on certain days and that could only be taken literally after great study, if at all. So she tried not to rush the word according to Baby—to wit, that she had seen men in black clothing setting up electronic equipment, causing a fire, disappearing, and subsequently, at another location on Roosevelt Island, come upon a white female hanging from a tree. You couldn’t make snap-crackle-pop judgments, as Vera was ever accustomed to do, if you expected to understand the unexpected. With certain events, the witnessing of them alone rearranged entire segments of known history. However improbable Baby’s testimony might be, Vera vowed not to stick it under the category of vision. It could be under the category of fact. It could have happened. She repeated this sentence to herself on a regular basis. She began the patient consideration of the ways in which it might have happened before trying to prove it hadn’t happened.

Part of this involved going back and photographing the park closure notice, the black ground, the piles of sod, and the tree, which she did put her hand on, a sensation that was not nearly as interesting or uncanny as she had thought it would be.