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"Still no."

"I ran the counter at the feed store on Main. I trained horses for half the ranchers in this county. Those people know my face." I set the empty bucket down. "Everybody around here thinks I ran off. If I stand behind that counter for one morning, they'll see I didn't. Once people know I'm back, nobody can make me disappear quietly a second time."

"And there goes the one thing keeping you alive. Right now nobody knows where you are. That feed store has a plate glass window on Main. Every truck that rolls by can see who's behind that counter. You stand there one morning, somebody follows my truck home. By supper, whoever sent that dark-haired woman to my gate knows exactly where you sleep."

"Nobody followed me here."

"Nobody had to. She found my gate the night before you did." He shifts the rifle strap on his shoulder. "There are only a handful of other rings between here and San Antonio, and every man running one has her picture now. The ones who've called back never saw her at a fight night. My guess is she came from whoever took you."

The men who held me may already be looking here. I don't remember saying Knox's name. But I came to on the concrete floor of my cell with one eye swollen shut, and Dutch was crouched at my bars, asking me who Knox was. I must have said it while I was half out of my head. I'd swear that's why the woman came to Knox's gate.

If I tell Knox that, he'll go hunting for Dutch tonight, and Dutch won't be alone. I heard Dutch's truck crawl those roads hunting me, and I watched one of his men read my tracks at a stock tank and phone it in. I don't know how many men Dutch has. Behind his own gate, Knox has the advantage. Out there, Dutch does. I keep my mouth shut.

"That guest house is a cage with curtains on it," I tell him. "You've got me locked up in there."

"I've never locked you in it." He tips his head toward the guest house. "Every key to that door is yours. The bolt's on your side. You lock that door from the inside, Delilah. Not me."

"That's not the same thing."

"No. It isn't. And town's still a bad idea this week. Your daddy's been asking around for you."

His fingers drum once on the pen rail beside him, hard. On my doorframe, he drummed them while he waited me out. I'd bet he's thinking about my father now, and this time he isn't being patient. He's angry.

My left hand closes into a fist against my thigh.

Knox goes on. "When you first went missing, I sat at his kitchen table, and he told me you were always restless. Since then he comes up my drive every so often, hat in his hands, and asks me quietly if I've heard anything. Never once asked me to look for you. Never asked anybody in town, either. Ozzie never heard him say your name all year. Then yesterday he's in the feed store and the Cattle Guard, asking anybody who'd listen if they'd heard from you. A year of asking one man in private, and now he's asking all of Main Street out loud."

The Cattle Guard. I was grabbed out of its back lot. My father walked in its front door and asked about me like I was a stray that wandered off.

And his asking around started the day after I reached Devil's Acre, less than a week after I walked out of that cellar. Nell was at the guest house yesterday morning, and Daddy was in the feed store the same day. The timing makes me think of Nell first. But Nell never gossips, and she never tells a soul in town what she treated or whose it was. I don't believe it was her.

"Somebody told him I got out," I say out loud.

Knox goes still. "Who'd tell him that?"

The man in the corner of the cigar room. My father owes him money. As long as he had me in his cellar, he could squeeze Daddy for it. Then he quit waiting and ordered me onto a truck. Now I've gotten away, and I can talk. My father is the one man in this county who might guess where I'd run. If anybody told Daddy I was out and sent him looking, it was the man in the corner. I don't know the man's name, and I've never seen his face. I don't say any of it.

Knox waits. When I don't answer, he nods once. "That's three things I figure you know and won't tell me. Where they kept you, the woman at my gate, and this. I told you I'd wait until you're ready to tell me who did this to you, and I meant it. But I'm counting."

"If my father wants to find me, he can come ask me himself."

"He comes up my drive, he goes through me first."

"He's my father. I'm the one who deals with him."

Knox studies me for a long moment. "Then you'll be standing beside me when you do."

It isn't what I asked for. But he isn't telling me to hide from my own father, either.

"I'm not driving you to town," he says. "Not yet. Here's what you get instead." He jerks his chin at the barn aisle. "This barn is yours. Feed, water, doctoring, all of it. Hector and Beckett are tied up on the gate, and these horses need somebody who knows what she's doing. I'll have a bolt on the inside of that tack room door by tonight and a radio on the shelf. There's a window over the saddle racks that opens onto the back pasture. You hear an engine you don't know, you get in there, bolt the door, and key that radio. If you have to, you go out the window."

I didn't ask him for the barn. He hands it to me anyway, the same way he handed me every key to the guest house, without making me say thank you for it.

"Fine," I say.

The barn is a start. It isn't the feed store counter, and I haven't given that up. I'm going to stand behind it again with half of Fredericksburg watching me do it.

He goes to the pen gate and lifts the latch. I don't mean to bring it up, but it comes out anyway.