I pulled the dregs of the gin through my teeth and remembered how Enoch would hold my father’s hand as he trembled up our town house steps. My glass thudded, empty, onto the bar.

“Anything for the Byrds,” I said.

Down on the street, on the frozen, broken pavement of that road some still call Broadway, the heat from Berk’s felt far away, and the lights from the Eastside glowed only faintly over the top of the fence. Judy lit a cigarette and took a slow, sacred drag.

“I thought you were without vice,” I said.

“I am opposed to the devil’s intoxicants,” she said, her Haitian lilt discarded in favor of a bracing Westside brogue. “That does not mean I am without sin.”

“Mam is waiting,” said Enoch.

Mam was a woman in a soiled white cloak leaning on the fence beside the barred Waverly Place gate. She had thin peach lips and, beneath her hood, hair translucent white. She wore a heavy ivory glove on her left hand. Her right she offered to me.

“Helen Byrd,” she said.

“Matriarch of the Electric Church,” said Enoch. “Widow of its founder, the prophet and martyr Bulrush Byrd. Mam. And this is my sister Ruth.”

Ruth had a pointed chin and flat hair. A heavy scarf covered most of her face. She stared through me blankly, looking so much like her mother that it made me a bit dizzy. With only the flickering light of Berk’s faraway fire to guide me, it was hard to tell if Helen looked young for her age, or if Ruth was old for hers.

“I’m not impressed,” said Helen after she finished sizing me up.

“I’d be worried if you were. What is it you want?”

“Something has gone missing from our church. My children insist you are the woman to find it. I don’t agree, but they don’t care.”

“If you’re waiting for me to defend myself, don’t bother. I’m too cold to beg.”

She scowled more, somehow, and went on.

“It is the finger of Róisín of Lismore, a saint. Our saint. It is a fixture of our ministry, the centerpiece of our faith, and it was stolen from our church earlier this week. I am told you specialize in finding tiny things.”

“It’s the little finger,” said Judy. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to be funny, but I did my best not to laugh. “Left hand. Pickled.”

“When was it stolen?” I said.

“After dark on Thursday night,” said Helen. “Ruth noticed it missing at dawn.”

“No one saw anything?”

“If we had, we would not have come to you.”

“Who has access to the church after dark? Just the four of you?”

“The whole city has access to the electric faith.”

“What?”

“We leave our doors open to the neighborhood,” said Enoch. “That any passing vagrant might take shelter. We have nothing to steal.”