A QUIET BELIEF IN ANGELS

Not everyone sees things the same way. Sometimes people fail to see things right at all, not even when they are right under their noses and have been for years. Something like that happens to Joseph Vaughan in the closing days of the Second World War when Miss Webber, his former grade school teacher, shows up on his front porch and they become lovers: Joseph has never thought of Miss Webber's interest in him as personal before. That Joseph has a home in which to take Miss Webber undisturbed is due to his mother's having been taken up-state to the sanatorium, but any sensitive woman might end up there after the tribulations Mrs Vaughan has gone through: not just losing a husband and having to raise a boy in poverty; she has also given her body to a neighbour in return for seven dollars a week left at the gate; and that neighbour - once a German - is increasingly thought of as the likely murdered of the little girls who turn up butchered as the war goes on. Joseph is the boy who discovers one of them. 

Joseph, sensitive as he is, a boy determined to become a writer and describe the pains of living when you cannot protect the ones you love, misses much more than Miss Webber's interest. For all he and his little gang, The Guardians, try to spy things out they cannot find any evidence as to the killer's identity. Not a thing. This is Georgia and the various county sheriffs can find no clues either. The German family are burned out and move away but later Joseph is unlucky enough to be on the move about the countryside - sidetracked from the road to the sanatorium on visiting day by a little loving - when another body is found.  The killings are not stopping, and Joseph is surprised - that lack of insight again - that he is asked to account for his regular proximity. We might guess, though, that he is a good enough son not to tell the

sheriff, during questioning, that his mother has told him she burned out their neighbours, killing their daughter. A good boy would not do that.