But the sanctuary, if that was what they called it, was high-­ceilinged, light, and plain. The walls were white plaster, the windows were mullioned clear glass with sunlight coming through in bars, stripes, and rectangles. She expected to smell old books and incense. Instead she smelled beeswax and bayberry from the thin green candles in pewter sticks at the front of the church. They were the only decoration, except for a simple, elegant, maple pulpit and a milk-­glass bowl of autumn flowers. She stood at the head of the aisle for a moment, then followed Willa, who seemed at home here, down to the platform-­altar and up two steps and through a door to the reverend’s office.

Reverend Ryder gave them tea and he and Willa talked about the Harvest Bazaar, whatever that was, while Rachel looked around the room. The shelves were full of books by Calvin, Zwingli, Jonathan Edwards, and someone called Laud. There was a photo­graph on Ryder’s desk of a blond woman holding a boy and a girl on her lap. And another photograph of a fishing boat called the Lady Helena out of Montauk. In the case behind his desk she found books by Dorothy Sayers on religion, a complete set of her Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, and a set of Chesterton and John D. MacDonald. The reverend had more mysteries than religious books. He saw her looking at them and said, “They have more ideas for sermons than all the tracts put together. For instance . . .” He took down Sayers’s The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. “In this one a man is murdered at his club and his body sits upright in his chair for two days before anyone notices. Two days. Of course, you can see the implications . . . the young woman who gets murdered on a street in Queens while thirty or forty or a hundred people refuse to notice. Or the poor old man who gets ill on the subway and falls off his seat while people snap open books and papers, terrified of noticing. But to do good you have to notice—” He stopped and laughed.

“You just heard the gist of last May’s prize sermon,” he said as he put the book back.

That afternoon she found a copy of Bellona Club in the shop and read it and for the next few weeks she read all the Wimsey books: The Nine Tailors, Murder Must Advertise, Whose Body? They were funny, sometimes good, sometimes silly. The deeper moral lessons of most escaped her, except that the code of honor of upper class England won out in the end.