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Show 274 take pictures of his wife naked. (All this information came out later, of course.) He played chess sometimes, slowly and deliberately, frowning between moves and then moving decisively with the smile of someone whose strategy will become apparent later on, and always lost. He thought of himself as serious, and they little knew how closely he had listened to the discussion of the Great Apostasy. After Alice's baptism Lorin and Sorenson were frequently invited to their house for dinner. They saw her at church regularly, of course, looking as happy as a child who has just been given a room full of someone else's toys. The other members of the branch made her feel welcome, and when she clicked on high heels down the hallway to the main room just before Sunday school or the evening sacrament meeting, Lorin's pulse raced, and if he happened to catch her eye as she stepped past people's feet on her way to an unoccupied folding chair during the preliminary music (played by Sister Heinmiller, now recovered), he waved his fingers in greeting and she waved hers back, covering her mouth with her free gloved hand. Sometimes he and one of the other missionaries would chat with her after the meeting, and it was usually then that she would invite him and Sorenson to dinner. "If you can stand Richard," she always added. Richard was a pain in the ass, both during dinner and afterward, and made a great ceremony of offering wine to the elders and to Alice when they were seated at the breakfast bar having mashed potatoes and fried chicken, and drinking it himself when they all three declined, sniffing the bouquet, sipping, rolling it on the back of his tongue, playing with the stem of his glass. Lorin burned to tell him he hated wine, but obviously could not. Accordingly he talked mostly to Alice and let Sorenson do what he could to keep Richard from going to hell in his own |