Free A Quiet Belief in Angels by R. J. Ellory

religious intolerance, a veritable witch hunt if you like . . . that’s what is being perpetrated against the Jewish peoples. It is a challenge to everything that the United States of America believes in, a challenge to the Constitution. There is no way we can honestly continue to disavow involvement. This isn’t a war between England and Germany, nor America and Japan. This is a war between the Allies and the Axis Powers, and the Axis represents everything that we abhor and condemn. This is a war for freedom, for power of choice, for religious forbearance. Believe me, if I were a man I would be down there at the recruiting office myself.”
    Outspoken she might have been, but Alexandra Webber was honest. The consensus of opinion turned against non-nationals—against the Italians, the Germans, even some Eastern European immigrants that had settled farms near Race Pond. There was a tension present at town meetings, something intangible yet unmistakable. The non-Americans started to withdraw from visible life. Even Gunther Kruger kept his children home.
     
    The tension broke on Wednesday, March eleventh, 1942, with the discovery of a fourth murdered girl.
    Her name was Catherine Wilhelmina McRae. She was eight years old. Her decapitated head was discovered by children playing near the same grove of cottonwoods and tupelos where the rat pit had been sited. Her body was found thirty-five yards away in a stream gully. There was no reason to assume that Catherine McRae’s killer was not the same person who had killed Alice Ruth Van Horne, Laverna Stowell and Ellen May Levine, and so the assumption was made.
    I knew Catherine’s brother, Daniel, better than I knew her. Daniel was a month younger than me. I was there when his father came to collect him from Miss Webber’s class. We watched him go in silence. His father’s face was red-raw from crying. Daniel was chalk-white and stunned.
    The three sheriffs—Dearing from Charlton, Ruby from Camden and Fermor from Clinch—met once more. This time there were no maps, no sandwiches and coffee, but instead a tri-county task force mobilized to scour the fields and surrounding countryside for anything that might relate to the murder of the McRae girl.
    Reilly Hawkins’s Vermin Unit was established under a different name. Men came from Folkston, Silco, Hickox, Winokur. Twin brothers came from Statenville in Echols County, related by blood to Sheriff Fermor on his mother’s side; they drove more than a hundred miles in a beat-to-hell flatbed to join the line. That line was more than seventy men by the morning of Thursday the twelfth, and without a word, with no direct statement or edict, the foreigners were evident in their absence. There was not one German, not one Italian—even the Poles and the French stayed home. It was just Americans, Irish-Americans, a couple of Scots, and a Canadian with one eye called Lowell Shaner. Perhaps that was when the trouble really started. Perhaps that was the moment that ill will and hearsay became the fuel for some violent fire of accusation, at first nothing more than a spark, an ember, but after two days of searching fields and gullies for any small indication of the McRae girl’s killer, the talk that was spreading became incendiary.
    “An American wouldn’t do something such as this.”
    “Who could have killed four girls? Surely it would have to be someone who didn’t respect life the way we do.”
    “Man who could do this wouldn’t be a churchgoing man, believe me.”
    And so, in its own small and narrow-minded way, the people of Augusta Falls began their own line of inquiry. There was talk—hearsay, rumor, scuttlebutt—some of it slanderous, some of it fiction, some of it generated by the type of people that liked nothing more than to incite ill will and bad feelings between folk who previously were neutral toward one another.
    There was so much talk of the killings I found it a difficult subject to avoid. Perhaps it was the