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Belle Metcalfe stood on the steps of her cabin at Rocky Look Bible Camp and looked toward the dropped-down sun. A blue pickup shimmied along the valley road far below, fishtailing here and there on the loose gravel. Though she couldn't see the truck, Belle heard it coming. She knew that her niece Jeanette was finally home from an all-day trip with Drew Parks, and she knew, too, that they'd been up to no good. About the only thing she didn't know was that a hitchhiker sat in the back seat of their pickup, wondering what kind of weird fate had brought him here. The mountains to the east had turned dark purple. You could still smell dinner, though dinner was all done and the dining hall staff had finished washing up.

"What do you think about Jeanette and her boyfriend?" Belle asked her husband, Dean, who sat beside her on the steps having his after-dinner pipe before vespers. Belle was grey-headed, but Dean and his brother, Gratian, both had shiny curls of hair, black as you please. It grew down the sides of their faces like tree bark, and Fansher, the camp cook, liked to tell them they had African blood.

"There's a Afro-American in your woodpile," she'd say.

Could be true or could be not true. Most people said that Gratian looked like Abraham Lincoln, but poor Dean was too fat for that.

"I think it's about time little Jeanette found herself a husband," Dean said calmly. "She don't seem to have nobody else interested in her."

"That's because she's already dated every other man who set foot here! She's run through most of the counselors, none's good enough."

"I can understand that," said Dean. "The counselors are a little young for Jeanette, ain't they? She's past college age, she don't want a younger man."

"She's not past 30," said Belle. "She's only 26, and that Drew Parks is younger than she is."

"Oh, what you so worried about, Mother?"

"I'm worried about the way they act together."

"How do they act together?"

Belle whispered something to her husband, something that had the words "tight clothes" and "temptation" and "desperate" in it. He looked around warily, then knocked the ashes out of his pipe and stuck it in a clean brass spittoon beside the door.

"Well," he said, "she's not the beauty in the family; you can't blame her for trying to reel one in while her sister Delphi's off to college. This is a Christian boy we're talking about, isn't it?"

"Dean, do you hear what I'm saying? I'm trying to keep Jeanette out of trouble. She's so crazy for the boys. She reminds me of her mother."

"Oh, don't let's get started on to that."

"Get started on to what? Tell me your brother doesn't need help raising two girls alone. I think you should say something to him about this."

"I'm going down to the chapel. I'll see you at vespers."

"I wonder why God brings all these rascals our way," she mumbled. "Can't he bring just one decent fellow?" She watched her husband—so innocent, so trusting, too godly for his own good—pick his way down the hill toward the campground. When he was well out of sight she hurried jauntily after him. She slung past the pretty log cabin that belonged to his brother, Gratian—the cabin where little Jeanette and Delphi had been raised without a woman's guiding hand (other than her own) since their mother ran off so long ago.

She took a trail that did not lead to the chapel. This trail cut off through the woods toward the playing fields. It was ferny and damp, strewn with boulders and pine straw. Down near the softball field lay Jeanette's cabin, beside a row of pecan trees and a small parking lot with a sign thrusting up from the middle of it that said

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October 5 1998, Vol. 42, No. 11