Chapter 4: What the Prayer Circle Didn't Say

The First Methodist Church of Harlow's Creek had been built in 1923 from the same limestone that came out of the quarry, and on hot days you could smell it — a mineral coldness underneath the wood polish and the candle wax and sixty years of Sunday perfume, something that had no business being that present in a building standing forty feet above the ground. Mara had noticed this before. She noticed it more acutely tonight.

She took a seat in the last pew on the left side, nearest the door, with a clear line of sight to the front of the sanctuary and to every face in it. This was how she always sat in rooms she didn't trust. She had been doing it since she was seven years old and had not thought of it as a survival strategy until just now, settling onto the hard pine bench with its needlepoint cushion that some church lady had cross-stitched BLESSED in 1974 and which had since faded to BLESS D, which seemed about right for Harlow's Creek in general.

The church was three-quarters full. This surprised her and then didn't. Danny Cooke was the kind of boy who filled rooms when he was present, and apparently he was the kind of boy who filled them when he was absent, too. People had come in their summer dresses and their one good shirts, had come with their faces arranged into expressions of grief or concern, had come because a twelve-year-old boy had vanished into the quarry and because in a town this size a twelve-year-old boy was everyone's business whether they'd known him or not.