Then she got close enough to the second one to see that it was the First Episcopal Church of the Nativity. Wait . . . didn’t the first one have that name?

  She walked back and peered again at the sign. First Episcopal Nativity Church, it said. Were they both branches of the same franchise?

  Somebody near her chuckled. “Strangers always get a kick out of that.”

  Spunky turned to face a bald man in a suit. “Oh, is it funny?”

  “Not to us,” said the man. “I’m Eggie Loft, and so many people hate me that I’m serving my eighth term as alderman, which means I get their phone calls when there’s a feral cat or a particularly clever garbage-can-tipping raccoon or a new pothole in a paved road.”

  “Isn’t there a whole board of alderman to take those calls? And a mayor and a town office?”

  “This is Good Shepherd, North Carolina,” he said. “We keep offering the position of mayor but nobody runs for it. And if somebody ever ran for one of the other alderman seats, they know that I’d retire, so they don’t do it.”

  “I see what you mean. They must keep you hopping.”

  “I take care of every problem they bring me, within a year.”

  “A year?”

  “These are patient people. A year is usually quick enough. But those churches—they are not a joke. When the Episcopalians split in two, it’s like it turned Main Street into a deep canyon. Nobody has cross over from one church to the other in . . . how many years now? Old Dan and Bubby McCoogle are eighty-seven this year, so yes ma’am, the Episcopalians are divided in half for nearly a century.”

  “But the churches have the same name,” said Spunky.

  “Neither one would give up the Nativity name,” said Eggie. “That would be like conceding the other side was right.”

  “Right about what?”

  “Exactly my point,” said Eggie. “I bet you’re Dr. Spunk, here to find out just how inbred our town is.”

  “That is not at all our purpose, Eggie,” said Spunky cheerfully, “and I hope you’ll call me Spunky.”

  “‘I hate Spunk,’” said Eggie, with so much scorn and fervor that Spunky was taken aback. She couldn’t answer.

  “I suppose you get that all the time,” said Eggie.

  “I’ve never run into anti-Spunk prejudice until this moment,” said Spunky.

  “First episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show,” he said. “Lou Grant tells Mary that she’s got a lot of spunk, and she starts to thank him, and he says, ‘I hate spunk.’” Then he laughed. At a fifty-year-old tv show.

  “I’ve never seen it,” said Spunky.

  “Obviously, or you’d be laughing too. It’s one of the great moments in television history. Right up there with, ‘As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.’”

  Spunky had to shake her head.

  “I guess you weren’t watching television in 1978,” said Eggie.

  “If you believe in reincarnation, maybe I was,” said Spunky. “And you aren’t old enough, either.”

  “You caught me. Born in 1983. But my father loved telling that one. WKRP in Cincinnati was his favorite show. He never watched Cheers because he didn’t hold with drinking. Had no problem with cleavage, though—when Loni Anderson was on the screen, you couldn’t look at anything else.”

  “So you were born a decade before me, but you grew up in an earlier decade.”

  “That’s it,” said Eggie, chuckling. “And he always quoted Lou Grant’s ‘spunk’ line because he knew I’d meet you someday.”

  It was her turn to chuckle.

  Then he cocked his head and asked a question. “How come you don’t use your first name? Spunky seems to be a nickname from your last name.”

  “My first name is Delilah,” said Spunky, “which is only one tiny step better than Jezebel.”

  Eggie nodded wisely. “My given name is Egbert,” he said. “But of course you assume the spelling is e-g-b-e-r-t.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “My father went to college for a little while, so I was named e-c-g-b-e-r-h-t, king of Wessex in the early 800s. He was the first Saxon king to be recognized as the king of all England. Very famous, at least until the Normans arrived.”

  “I remember hearing all about King Ecgberht in . . . no class offered anywhere ever,” said Spunky.

  “Hence, I go by ‘Eggie.’”

  “It takes a formidable name to make ‘Eggie’ preferable,” said Spunky.

  “I couldn’t very well call myself ‘Lofty,’” he said. “So my last name was useless.”

  “Yes sir,” said Spunky. “‘Eggie’ wins.”

  “They told me you were walking around looking lost,” said Eggie, “so I came out to explain the churches to you.”

  “Did you think that was an explanation?” asked Spunky.

  “I’m quite sure it was an explanation. Remember that it happened about fifty years before I was born. I have already told you exactly everything that I know. There was one church, and then there was two, and they’ve been fighting like . . . like Christians ever since.”

  “Fighting?”

  “No guns, no knives, no ambushes,” said Eggie. “That’s Kentucky or Bosnia or West Virginia. Here, we just choose up sides and never, never, never regard the other side as fully Christian, or their pageant as the real Nativity play.”

  The fact that he was shaking his head made it clear he thought it was at least a little bit crazy.

  “Can’t people just go to both?” asked Spunky.

  “You can, because you’re an outsider,” said Eggie. “Only you can’t, because they begin and end at the exact same moment on opposite sides of the square. And each one faces toward their own church, so their backs are to each other. I can’t believe you didn’t know about the ‘dueling pageants of Good Shepherd.’”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Then why in heck did you decide to come here? That’s the only thing that’s even close to famous about this town.”

  “You mean besides having only one alderman and no mayor?”

  “Why pay for more government and waste time on more meetings than you need?” he asked.

  “Very sensible. Why pay to put on one more pageant than you—”

  “Oh, Dr. Spunk, we need those pageants. Else half the Episcopalians would leave town in a huff, and the other half would regard it as beneficial ethnic cleansing.”

  With a grin and a jaunty wave, Eggie Loft, Alderman, turned away and walked back to the city hall.

  Spunky’s immediate response was a desire to hurry back and tell Elyon about this weird holy war. Then she remembered that he was, after all, Elyon, so she headed for the nearest of the diners and began her exploration of the short-order menu.

  3

  Spunky didn’t really think of herself as good at meeting people, because approaching strangers made her crazy with worry. But once she was actually speaking to the person, the adrenalin kicked in and her brain was able to come up with a stream of very useful ad-libbed questions while noticing every fact about the person that she could ascertain.

  Because she excitedly asked rather charming questions, and then listened intently to the answers, people considered her a superb conversationalist. She used to protest, “But I don’t actually contribute anything to the conversation.”

  Most people, being unobservant, replied, “Of course you do.” The Professor, however, merely smirked and said, “What do you think people want good conversations to be? They don’t want your contribution, they want your raptly listening face, your responsive face, your inquiring face—and the only sound they want from you is a stream of polite burbles to indicate that you’re still listening.”

  Spunky knew quite well that it was this talent of hers (which she still didn’t really believe she had) that had prompted The Professor to partner her with a socially unskilled science-and-numbers guy. Elyon would do his job, and leave Spunky to win people over to the project.

  But ten thousand people? That was just insane. Elyon calculated the numbers. “If you work eight-hour days, and we allow fifteen minutes for each interview, which is absurdly low, and fifteen minutes of travel time between interviews, and then we allow an hour a day to set up the interviews, it will take more than eighteen thousand days, and even with no days off, that’s almost fifty-two years.”

  “You could help,” said Spunky.

  Elyon rolled his eyes—proving that he really had been a teenager once—and said, “Only if we want to be ridden out of town on a rail.”

  “Oh, come on, you wouldn’t be that bad at it,” she said.

  “The manager of that breakfast place asked me to stop coming in because the waitresses were complaining.”

  “Don’t you tip?”

  “Bigger and bigger tips every day.”

  “I can’t imagine you making passes at them,” said Spunky.

  “I’m not sure if I should be proud or offended that you can’t even imagine me making a pass, but no, I don’t.”

  “So how did you offend them?”

  Elyon shook his head. “If I knew, I would have stopped.”

  But Spunky already knew. It was the punctilious way that Elyon gave detailed orders and then quizzed waiters—and everybody else—to see if they really understood his instructions. When she called him on it once—“Why do you test them like this was an introductory course in serving food to Elyon?”—his reply was, “Because that’s what it is.” When pressed, he explained that he doesn’t like disappointment.

  When she emailed The Professor with a complaint about the sheer numbers of interviews, he fired back a snippy answer: “Didn’t you take statistics? Hand out the questionnaires. Follow up with interviews of a randomly selected subset of questionnaire responders and non-responders. With a little thought, we can cut at least ten percent out of that 50-year estimate.”

  He was being funny—she had to cut 98 percent out of it because the grant wasn’t infinite. But when she discussed his email with Elyon, it took the lad only two hours to write a program to randomize all the selections for them while still making them statistically representative.

  “We’ll have the complete genome from all of them,” Elyon said, “and that’s what really matters.”

  Spunky might have retorted that she was so happy to find out that her work was completely trivial while his was “what really matters.” Instead, she realized that if Elyon believing his work was far more important than hers, he’d stay out of her way. There would be no profit in correcting him.

  At first her activities consisted of visiting all the open businesses in town to persuade them to put up posters and stacks of flyers, announcing the Good Shepherd Genome Project:

  “It’s free, it’s quick, there are no needles. It will help if you fill out a questionnaire. Your information will be identified by a randomly assigned number and no one will ever know whose genome is whose. Insurance companies will not be notified of any health information found. Children and babies are as important to the study as adults of every age. If you can’t come to the GSGP clinic, email me and I’ll come visit. Signed, Dr. Spunk.”

  She had a nice way with design, so it was all arranged on the page in a completely readable form, and her manner of writing it was folksy and warm.

  But she quickly learned that the most important thing she did was converse with store employees until they liked her. Then, when she was gone, they’d talk about what a lovely person Dr. Spunk was, and how easy she was to talk to, and how trustworthy she seemed. If she said no needles, there wouldn’t be needles. If she said their names would be held back and the results wouldn’t be shared with anybody, then it would be true.

  She had to replenish the stacks of fliers several times, and by mid-November they had almost five thousand samples. Of course, Elyon could only process them at a finite rate, but it was pretty quick and he was up to three thousand genome records analyzed.

  Spunky had conducted about a hundred interviews. If you were generous about the definition of “interview.”

  But there were almost as many questionnaires turned in as DNA samples, though many of them stuck to the health-related questions only. Biographical information usually started strong and then petered out when she got to the none-of-your-damn-business questions like, Have you ever moved away from Good Shepherd for more than a month? Why did you return?

  Maybe a lot of people felt as Elyon had assumed—that when they moved back to Good Shepherd it was a sign of personal failure in the outside world. But the non-responders on the biographical questions outnumbered the responders by a wide margin. They couldn’t all have failed.

  There was one thing about southerners that could be so maddening to Spunky. The way a southerner says yes is “Why, that’s such a wonderful idea! I’ll absolutely fill out the whole questionnaire.” The way a southerner says no is “Why, that’s such a wonderful idea! I’ll absolutely fill out the whole questionnaire.” The only way you can tell the difference is to wait and see what they actually do.

  Elyon was perfectly happy because he was racking up good numbers in his portion of the project, while she was falling short in hers. It didn’t dawn on him that the fact that the people in this hamlet showed up at the clinic in such high numbers was completely owing to her wooing of shopkeepers and clerks.

  Nor did he notice that his job was completely mechanical and quick, while hers required insight and responsiveness and observation and empathy and warmth and humor and verbal ability at a level that he couldn’t recognize, let alone carry out.

  Unfortunately, she was as blind to her contribution to Elyon’s success as he was. She thought her interviews all went well, and when she was there in person in their parlors—she couldn’t think of them as “living rooms” when so many of them looked like they were straight out of the set of Gone with the Wind—they would tell her stuff she would never have dared to ask on the questionnaire.

  In fact, she rarely had to ask anything that might be construed as prying, because when she simply listened raptly as they talked, they would ramble into stories that were so personal and even confessional that she could hardly believe they would tell them to a complete stranger.

  But by then she wasn’t a complete stranger. She was a deeply interested friend.

  There were no fifteen-minute interviews. It took that long just to get past the iced tea and the homemade rolls and the pralines, which apparently made the trip up from New Orleans to this mountain village on a regular basis.

  “If you’d just discipline yourself and keep them on topic, you could do the interviews in fifteen minutes,” Elyon said more than once.

  “If I ever did an actual on-topic, fifteen-minute interview, that would be my last interview because word would spread.”

  “Word that when Dr. Spunky comes over, she leaves within fifteen minutes? That would make you way more popular.”

  Spunky didn’t bother to argue. Understanding how to get people talking was something Elyon didn’t even want to learn.

  But as Thanksgiving approached, Spunky found that Elyon was getting fewer and fewer visitors to the clinic. It looked as if they might top out somewhere under six thousand samples and two thousand complete questionnaires. Spunky still had a few weeks’ worth of interviews lined up—but over the Thanksgiving weekend, though she had several invitations to dinner, nobody would commit to the time it took for an interview. Determined to work, and imagining that Thanksgiving dinner probably meant the whole day, she declined the invitations.

  In frustration, Spunky made her way to the town hall to have a chat with the only expert on Good Shepherd that she knew.

  Eggie didn’t have an office with his name on it. As far as Spunky could see, the town hall was a museum of Good Shepherd history. Walls in every room seemed to have themes. The volunteer firefighters’ wall. The constabulary wall. The town doctors’ wall. The plumbers’ wall. They had pictures of people dating back to the first cameras that came into town, it seemed, and on up to a few that were dated last year.

  Then there was the town government wall. Mayors, aldermen, individually and in groups, with a few framed newspaper stories. But there was no photo more recent that ten years before, and no picture of Eggie at all.

  “I just don’t like how I look in pictures,” said Eggie, who had apparently sensed that someone else was breathing the air in the building and came to identify the intruder.

  “I don’t understand people who don’t like their pictures taken,” said Spunky. “If you can go out in public wearing your face, then how can it bother you for somebody to take a picture of that face?”

  “I don’t mind having my picture taken,” said Eggie, “but nobody ever feels the need to take it.”

  “Not even when you’re, you know, making a speech? Welcome to the Fourth of July picnic? Whatever?”

  “Nobody waits for a speech before they start. Every family shows up to the town picnic and starts eating the food they brought as soon as it’s laid out and they said grace over it.”

  “So the actors come to the nativity pageants and just say their lines as soon as they arrive?” asked Spunky.

  Eggie laughed. “Oh, no, those have a starting time. But it isn’t me who sets them off. No starter’s pistol! They wait for the four pm bell from The Church Of—though the people from Nativity Church pretend they’re looking at their clock tower—and then they just start.”

  “Simultaneously,” said Spunky, shaking her head.

  “How else could we get maximum chaos and unChristian competition?”

  “Eggie,” said Spunky, “I’m running out of interviews and it looks like half the town is sitting out the DNA sampling.”

  “You mean you got half of them to give samples?” Eggie looked impressed.

  “More than half,” said Spunky. “But I think I’m also running out of talkative people.”

  “Not possible,” said Eggie.

  “Let’s just say they’re as talkative as they are lonely and unbusy,” said Spunky. “And I don’t stand much chance of interviewing any of the busy ones.”

  “Like human beings everywhere,” said Eggie.