Susan Lamb
Writer/Naturalist

Synopsis
    The Bishop's Woman is the story of Anna Maloney, a young urban lawyer chosen as a "devil's advocate" to investigate reports that the Virgin Mary has been appearing to a group of women in the remote mountain town of Maderaville. The reports are suspect, since the supposed visitations occur in an old building that the women are hoping to save from demolition. Maloney is the bishop's choice to investigate the apparitions because she spent her high school years in Maderaville and must surely know the territory. But she is a reluctant emissary, having fled the town ten years before. Her return to Maderaville exposes not only the secrets of those who claim to have seen the Virgin Mary, but also much that Anna has long kept hidden from herself.

Prologue
Miracle in Maderaville
    Martillo leaned his sledgehammer against the battered wall and brushed grit off his sleeve. He had almost finished knocking loose all the fixtures in the house so that the salvagers could cart them away.

  Now he had only one room left. It was the lugar venerado, a cubbyhole off the kitchen where the Alvarados had knelt every morning of their lives before an image of the Virgin. People from the museum had already taken the image itself, eager to see it stored properly because it was so unusual. It wasn’t a wooden folk carving of the kind usually found in such household shrines. It was a floor-to-ceiling canvas with a life-sized Virgen de Guadalupe deftly brushed onto it with house paint.

A shadow entered the doorway of the doomed little house. Martillo looked around to see his mother standing there, clutching a paper bag from Taco Bell.

“Over here, Mama,” he sighed.

Legally blind, his mother Socorro nevertheless tracked him down wherever he was working. She always brought him a hot lunch right at noon. Martillo pictured his father Arturo waiting in his pickup truck outside, listening to the radio and watching the birds in the trees. His parents were very good people, he knew that. But considering how they spent their time, they might as well have been living decades in the past.

Socorro shuffled through the debris on the floor, moving toward his voice.

“Hot food for you, mijo,” she said. Then she realized where he was standing.

“What are you doing there?”

“I’m just going to pull down the shelves, Mama,” he assured her.

“They’re all that’s worth keeping.”

Socorro gasped. Her dim eyes seemed to focus on the niche where the image had hung.

“Madre de Dios!” she whispered, trembling.

“You have not left us!”