Mara Saunders arrived late one night when the Reverend William Stickers was in bed with a parishioner, a seventeen-year-old blonde named Caroline.
It had been pouring rain all day, and from the looks of her Mara Saunders had been walking around in it for hours. Her long hair hung down around her head in tangled wet strings and her face was streaked with what must have been make-up. What had once been a green cocktail dress was plastered to her body in a way that was not in the least erotic and had mudstains as high as the waist. She wore high heels and soggy nylons and stood on the doorstep looking at Stickers with such wild intensity that he almost slammed the door back in her face from fear.
"I need some spiritual advice," she said in a choked voice. And as he stood reluctantly aside to let her come in, the Reverend Stickers felt probably more helpless than he ever had in his life before. He was still facing the woman in paralysis, unable to find even a word to say to her, when Caroline showed up in a short robe and led Mara Saunders to a bedroom to provide some elementary physical succor.
Spiritual advice was not something Bill Stickers was often asked for. And Mara Saunders, sitting in his study an hour later with fresh make-up and wearing one of his bathrobes, was older and more respectable than most of those who sought his advice. He'd guess her age at close to forty, although he was seldom a good judge. The Hamlet's Hamlet habitués Stickers usually dealt with were seldom over thirty and most were considerably younger.
Bill Stickers had dusted off his divinity degree and taken over a small Protestant Church on Coleridge Lane after three years of dealing drugs in the Hamlet's Hamlet section of St. Theresa. His parishioners were largely drawn from his former customers, and the problems they brought in ranged from the prosaically physical to the esoterically psychological. His round boyish face had beamed reassuringly on callers who came to him with long, complicated stories of mundane troubles. But when it came to questions involving God, Satan, faith, or the Bible, Stickers had found that his flock were much better off ministering to each other than coming to him for solace. And so he looked at Mara Saunders, who had been so upset by a problem she termed spiritual that she had been driven through the rain at the expense of her appearance, her clothes, and possibly her health, with considerable trepidation.