Chapter 3

The envelope sat on the desk between them for a long time before anyone touched it.

The office was small — a desk, two chairs, filing cabinets along one wall, the safe open on the floor behind them. The window looked out on the parking lot, where the rain was still falling on the empty spaces, and the light that came in was gray and flat, the kind of light that made everything look the same age. The only color in the room was the blue ribbon of the folders in the safe, and the cream of the envelope, and the red of the wax seal that had not been broken.

Doyle stood at the window. He had his back to them, his hands in his pockets, and he was watching the rain fall as if it were the answer to a question he had not learned to ask.

"What does it say?" he said, at last, to the glass.

"I don't know." Wanda sat in the chair behind the desk — her chair, for thirty years, the one with the worn cushion that fit her exactly. "I told you. He sealed it in front of me."

"You watched him write it?"

"I watched him seal it." She paused. "He wrote it in the study, in the evenings, the week after he dictated the will. He told me not to come in while he was writing, and I didn't. It was the only time in thirty years he asked me to leave the room while he was putting words on paper."

Pastor Lindgren had not sat down. He stood by the wall, near the filing cabinets, his hands folded over his cassock, and he looked at the envelope with the expression of a man who has been asked to stand at the edge of a hole and is trying to decide whether to look down.

"The seal," he said gently. "It's his ring. The one he always wore."

"Yes," Wanda said. "The ring his grandfather gave him. He said it was for signing things that mattered."

Doyle turned from the window. In the gray light, his face looked older than his forty-four years, the softening jaw stubbled with the beginning of a beard he hadn't shaved that morning, the thinning hair darkened by the rain.

"Read it," he said. "Please."

Wanda picked up the envelope. She held it for a moment, feeling its weight, the heavy stock, the resistance of the wax, and then she broke the seal with her thumb and slid out the letter.

The paper was the same cream stock as the folder's inside back page. It was covered in Harlan Boatwright's hand — the same hand that had typed his own letters with a razor blade, the same precise, patient, slightly old-fashioned script that had signed fifty years of church documents and family checks. The letter ran to four pages. It was dated eight weeks before the funeral.

Wanda looked at Pastor Lindgren, who nodded, and then she read.