The Identity Man

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A PAGE OF A NEWSPAPER lay sodden on the sidewalk. MINISTER JAILED IN SEX SCANDAL, the headline read. Peter Patterson made out the words before the gusting wind caught the paper up and carried it, wet and heavy as it was, tumbling away through the mist of slashing rain. Patterson watched the paper gray and dim and vanish in the darkness. He kept walking, the wind and water whipping at his face.

The things of the flesh, he thought with an inward sigh. The things of the spirit. The things of the flesh.

He was already nervous-already afraid-and now the headline made him melancholy, too. The minister's conviction had been a great disappointment to him, a stomach-twisting glitch in his moral universe. And yet Peter Patterson was grimly determined not to judge. The Reverend Jesse Skyles was a good man, he told himself, a true man of God. He had just fallen to temptation, that's all. Peter Patterson had plenty of experience with temptation, not to mention falling. True, he'd never tapped anything underage, but the object of Skyles's indiscretion had been fourteen. That was no child; they were juicy then… In any case, he could say this and that, make this excuse for himself and that one, but the simple truth was he had left his own trail of tears, a trail of misused women and abandoned sons. He was in no position to condemn anyone.

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