The Covenant Read Free

the sirens coming from every direction—police, fire, ambulance. The officer returned with a blanket and wrapped it around my shoulders. I looked at his name tag and said, “Thanks, Officer Lorio.”
    He made his way down the rocks to the body. It was a man about my age, full head of hair starting to gray, body trim and fit, the dark tan of a man who had worked outdoors for many years. Cut down in the prime of life. He was wearing a light jacket, pale green golf shirt, khakis, hiking boots. “What was he doing before he fell in?” Officer Lorio asked.
    â€œHaving some kind of fit.”
    â€œCan you identify him?”
    I shook my head. “I was here to meet a preacher named Deacon Falgoust. I’ve never seen him before, but I guess that’s him.”
    â€œThis isn’t your preacher. I know this man. His name’s Sam Loftin.”
    I remembered that Jenny’s name was Loftin and wondered if this day could get any worse. I didn’t have to wonder for very long.
    I noticed a woman walking toward us from the direction of Jenny’s house. She had a couple of kids in tow. Even though I hadn’t seen her in years, even though she was still a hundred yards away, I recognized her. Every third or fourth step, she had to stop herself from breaking into a run.
    â€œHere comes his wife,” I said. Lorio nodded heavily and climbed up the bank.
    When Jenny saw him, she started to scream. Her screams blended with the wailing of the first fire truck. He managed to wrestle her back to the house before her kids saw their daddy in the water. Eight or nine volunteer firemen trudged up the hill, dragging their boots through the weeds, bearing medical kits and a stretcher and God knows what-all, already sweating under their helmets. They looked tired and bored, as firemen usually do, even when the world is burning down around them.
    By this time, the Fayette County sheriff’s department had also arrived. Nobody seemed to know what to do first. The firemen wanted to save somebody but there was nobody to save. The deputies wanted to arrest somebody. I was the only one available for either service, so while one fireman strapped an oxygen mask to my face, checked my pulse and gazed deeply into my eyes, a deputy asked me what I had seen.
    I had recovered enough from the shock of events to realize I couldn’t tell them I’d seen a man who’d been dead for several hours waving at me barely twenty minutes ago. But that left me in a hell of a spot. Anything I said from this point forward was going to make it look like I was hiding something.
    So I played sick. I fell into the fireman’s arms, babbling nonsense and shivering. They strapped me on a stretcher and took me to the ambulance, grateful, I think, for something to do. They stuck needles in my arms and hung bags of fluids over my head. It was a wonder they could find a vein. I lay in the warm, antiseptic ambience of the quietly humming ambulance and listened to the beeping of my heart signal, trying to think of some way to explain what I had seen without coming off crazy or guilty or both. Eventually the shaking stopped. Eventually. Officer Lorio climbed into the back of the ambulance and I knew they weren’t taking me to the hospital.
    He didn’t have his cuffs in his hand, so they weren’t ready to arrest me just yet. After checking with the medics, he asked me to follow him to the MCC. “What’s that?” I asked.
    â€œMobile Command Center.”
    The fire trucks were still there, idling alongside the idling firemen, but now a half-dozen black Suburbans lined the other side of the street. One was a K-9 unit—I could barely see the German shepherd inside, panting against the tinted windows. A seventh Suburban was parked on the levee, a county coroner emblem decorating its driver’s door and its rear door open to accept its charge of flesh. Ten or twelve deputies loitered around it, keeping