“I got tired of people needing something to believe in, needing what I couldn’t give ’em. The Byrds never quit. Even people you’d think are beyond the reach of human kindness, they try to help.”

“Like who?”

“Are you forgetting the many mornings Enoch saved your daddy’s life?”

“All right, that’s one. But have they helped anybody who deserved it?”

He stuffed the last wad of brisket into his cheek, wiped his hands on his pants, and said, “There’s a woman at St. Vincent’s you ought to meet.”

Her name was Stacey Tarbell, one of an Irish colony that the guardsmen had herded into the quarantine ward at St. Vincent’s, where the thick-walled rooms were small and easy to heat. Sitting in that little cell was like cozying up inside a tubercular lung. Even after too long in the cold, it was hotter than I could stand. I’d have liked to strip naked and lie on the stone, but the walls were plastered with images of the saints, and I didn’t think they—or the defrocked priest sitting next to me—would appreciate the spectacle.

Stacey had two chairs, and insisted Lamb and I take them both. She sat on her bed and told me, in a voice too cheerful for me to trust, that Helen Byrd had saved her life.

“How?” I said, laying the skepticism on as thick as the syllable could bear.

“My Tom worked the high steel, hammering rivets one hundred, two hundred feet in the air. One day it was wet. He slipped. That was all.”

“After the funeral, she asked me to pray with her,” said Lamb. “I told her I quit that a long time ago.”

“But he said he knew a woman who’s devoted to widows.”

“So what did she give you?” I said. “Money? Advice? A list of eligible widowers?”

“Lord, Gilda,” Lamb grumbled. “Can’t you have the smallest bit of faith in people?”

“I’m just trying to understand the nature of the services they provide,” I said in my calmest, most open-minded voice. Quite a lot of sweat was dripping from my forehead, my neck, my upper lip. I dragged the sleeve of my dress across my face, sopping up as much as I could. Stacey was waiting for me, I realized, her smile undimmed. I asked her again: “What did Helen do?”

“It’s funny,” she said, “really, she did almost nothing at all.”

“Very impressive.”

Now Stacey laughed, a sound as clear and untroubled as church bells on Sunday morning, and it occurred to me that maybe I was the fool in the room.

“She prayed with me, sang hymns, but mostly we talked. After that, I could sleep.”

“Did she show you the finger of Saint Róisín?”