Punish the Sinners Read Online Free PDF

not done it. Instead, he had let himself be led by the priest, just as he had always let himself be led. Ever since they had been boys together, it had been like that Almost as if Pete Vernon held some kind of power over Peter Balsam.
    As if the slightly older Vernon knew something that Balsam did not
    Once, indeed, Pete Vernon had said something that had stuck in Peter Balsam’s mind: “Our lives are entwined,” he had said. “They always have been, and they always’ will be.” Balsam had dismissed it at the time, told himself that the older boy was only trying to get his goat But now, nearly twenty years later, here they were, together in Neilsville …
    He became acutely aware of people staring at him as he walked along the sidewalk, and he resisted the impulse to return their stares. He concentrated, instead, cm looking the town over.
    Perhaps without the heat and dryness of the desert Neilsville could have been pretty. Its frame buildings, which would have been attractive set among the maples of the Midwest, looked only stark here in the arid country between the Cascades and the Rockies. They seemed to be waiting for something, some force of nature that would weld them together into a community. But it hadn’t happened. Each store, each house, stoodhuddled into itself, and as Peter Balsam walked among them he wondered if it was only he who felt the odd sense of rejection that seemed to personify the town. Surreptitiously, he began to examine the people of Neilsville.
    There was a sameness to them that he had seen nowhere else. They all seemed to be of a type, slightly older than their years—not a healthy kind of age, a wise kind of age, but rather a tiredness. A fear? The same wariness that he had perceived in the buildings was in the people—as if they were waiting for something to happen, and whatever it was, it was not going to be pleasant
    He caught several of them staring at him. They didn’t turn away in embarrassment when he confronted them. Instead, they met his eyes, and their lips tightened. Only then would they turn and whisper to their companions. Balsam wondered what they were saying to each other, but he could not hear.
    He stopped at the comer of First and Main to wait for Neilsville’s lone traffic light to change, and realized that he was standing in front of the office of the telephone company. He went in. Behind the counter, an elderly woman sat pensively at an empty desk. She looked up at him.
    “I suppose you’ll be wanting to order a phone?” she asked.
    Surprised, Peter nodded. “How did you know?”
    “Around here,” the woman drawled, “everybody knows everything.” She pulled a form out of the top drawer of her desk. “It’s Balsam, isn’t it?” she asked. Peter nodded. Without asking him any more questions, the woman began filling in the spaces on the order form. Finally she pushed it toward him for a signature.As he checked over the information she had gleaned from God-knew-where, she suddenly spoke.
    “You used to be a priest, didn’t you?”
    He looked up, startled.
    “Not actually,” he said. “I started studying for the priesthood, but didn’t finish.”
    “One of those,” the woman muttered. Then, as Peter signed the order for the telephone, she spoke again.
    “I understand Margo Henderson got off the train with you.”
    Peter decided to ignore the disapproving note in her voice.
    “Yes, she did. Very pleasant woman.” More than pleasant, he remembered. Beautiful. And at the same time he remembered Margo Henderson with pleasure, he remembered the woman Pete Vernon had sent to meet him at the station with annoyance. Anderson, her name had been. Leona Anderson.
    “Divorced,” the woman behind the counter said, jarring Petar back into reality. He realized she was still talking about Margo.
    “Well,” Peter said, smiling, “there are worse things to be.”
    “Are there?” the woman said, not returning his smile. “We’re mostly Catholic in