He entered a large meeting room with a two-story-high ceiling. The walls were rounded at the far end and square at the entrance where he and Dylan Delaney stood. A central aisle sloped down from their position between rows of seats. At the far side of the room, seven people faced the audience from behind a long and richly varnished desk or counter that followed the curvature of the rounded wall. Hope sat in the middle of the counter, with three town councilors to her left and three more to her right, including Bill Hightower. At the center of this semicircle stood an ornate podium. Rising up from there, about a dozen rows of fixed wooden seats had been arranged along the sloping floor. Riley remembered eager hours listening to lectures on soteriology and ecclesiology in a hall arranged like this during his seminary years. But the walls at seminary had been painted sheetrock and the seats had been built of plastic and aluminum. This hall, with its elegant wood furnishings and soaring multi-paned windows, was an unusually fine council chamber for such a small town, a testimony to the days two hundred years before when the builders of mighty clipper ships and whalers had created wealth far in excess of any other time in Dublin’s history.
