Dead ReckoningHenry retired from preaching to compose poetry. His preaching had been more poetry than prose to disguise his uncertainty about pretty much everything, his wiles devoted to concealing his fear that he was heir mostly to his alcoholic, agoraphobic mother, dead twenty years. Now, at the insistence of his hard shell, litigator wife, Alice, he's gone to the attic to get rid of the rotting box that holds his mother's detritus. As he thumbs through a tiny