Free Uncivil Seasons by Michael Malone

had her cross pointed at Rowell and was chanting as he shoved past her to pull his car door open, “It won’t be long! The dragon coming! I heard the voice say, ‘It won’t be long.’ That old serpent, he got the chain in his teeth, and he snap it! He
snap
it, and crawling out of the lake of fire and brimstone. He shall be
loosed
out of his prison!”
    “Get back!” Rowell, his face white, was in his car now, tugging on the door. “Will you get her away!” Sister Resurrection touched her hand, shriveled as a claw, to his. She had a hissing whisper. “God getting ready. We shall arise anew! Say yes! Say yes!” He shook the skinny arm off his sleeve, slammed the door, and left her, fallen to the curb.
    I tented my coat over my head and leaned down. “Sister, you all right? You shouldn’t be out in this cold rain. Come on. It’s late.” I pulled her to her feet. She was weightless and tense as wire, and the smell of her clothes in the rain was even fouler than usual. “You go on home. It’s late.” I pointed down the sidewalk toward the Methodist church two blocks east, where the minister had made her a place in the basement near the furnace. “You’ll catch cold.”
    I doubt she had heard me, but, still chanting her garbled revelations, she turned, and with her quick stiff stride, hurried away, her makeshift cross in one hand, and Rowell Dollard’s black umbrella in the other, jutted out before her like a sword.

Chapter 5
    The Hillston police are stationed in an annex connected through the basement to our new municipal building, although most HPD offices (like the detective division) have been moved into the main building itself. The lab people never come upstairs if they can help it, and Etham Foster, who runs the lab, would just as soon nobody ever came down to the basement, either. He’s a wary, saturnine black man of about forty, who looks like the basketball player he was; he had gotten himself through college playing that game, and said he had never picked up a basketball again after the day they handed him his diploma. When I walked into his lab, his long fingers were picking with tweezers at the bottom of Preston’s boot. And Cuddy, chewing on a glazed doughnut, was standing like a stork against the wall, watching him.
    Cuddy looked up. “Look who’s here, come down to pay a call. You and the Senator wrap it all up?”
    I said, “Sister Resurrection just scared him to death.”
    Foster glanced at us, then went back to placing bits of fuzz in a plastic bag as if he were alone in the place.
    “Good,” Cuddy said.
    “She was out front under that overhang, just about frozen.”
    “You know why she stays around this spot so much? She’s got a grudge against the powers that be, and this is where they be.”
    Foster turned his back on us and switched on the light under his microscope. Cuddy went on. “You know Sister Resurrection used to have a kid, a long, long time ago? Yeah, ain’t that downright amazing to think of? But he went bad, raised hell, and got himself shot.”
    “I hadn’t heard that.”
    “Well, this is a little bit of local East Hillston lore that wouldn’t necessarily have come to your attention over on Catawba Drive.”
    “Who shot him?”
    He licked glaze off his fingers. “Cop.”
    “You’re kidding.”
    “Sure. I’m a great kidder.” He walked around to Foster. “Okay, Doctor Dunk-It, what you got?”
    Foster slid in another slide without looking up. “No yellow fibers anywhere on your man’s shoes.”
    “Good. And no prints of his on the silver, either.”
    Foster said, “Doesn’t mean a thing.”
    His drawer was filled with fragments of Cloris Dollard’s life: fuzz from her yellow carpet, gravel from her driveway, hairs from her cat, blood from the top of a trophy that said she was the best woman golfer in Hillston. Etham Foster knew Mrs. Dollard as precisely as my father had known where against the skull to place the drill. I said, “Tell me about who