Page 56

I climb the steps and touch the bottom of the J, where the paint ran thickest. It's still soft under a dry skin. When I take my finger away, there's red on it. Whoever did this stood right here sometime in the night.

Daddy preached Jezebel more than once from behind those doors. She was the painted queen who led a king to false gods. In the end her own servants threw her out of a window, and dogs ate her body. Daddy always said that part slowly, so every girl in the pews would picture it.

Half this town saw me walk into church on Sunday beside Knox Hollister, with a pistol on his hip. For a year, every one of them heard I ran off. Now somebody has painted what they think I am across my father's church, where anybody driving down Main Street can read it.

I wipe my finger on my jeans. The red stays in the creases of my skin.

Shoes scuff on the walk at the side of the church, and I swing around with the iron.

My father steps out from behind the church in his undershirt and suit pants, with a coffee cup in his hand. He's looking up at the doors.

When he sees me standing on the steps under them, coffee slops over the rim of the cup and down his fingers. His feet quit moving.

I come down the steps until there's an arm's length of sidewalk between us.

"Delilah. Baby girl. You can't be here. Not after that."

"I didn't paint it."

"I know you didn't." He looks at the tire iron. "What are you doing with that?"

"Holding it. Who told you I got out?"

He opens his mouth. "The Lord laid it on my heart that..."

"Don't you dare put this on the Lord." It comes out of me loud enough to carry down Main Street. "He didn't say one damn word to me in that cellar, and He sure as hell didn't say one to you. Who told you?"

His eyes drop to his coffee. His free hand goes behind his back, the way he hid both hands behind him in the pulpit on Sunday so I wouldn't see them shake.

"Coleman," he says.

"When?"

"He came by one evening. The night before I... before I went asking after you. Said you'd been seen in the county. Said you might be confused, and if I heard where you were, I should tell him first. So he could help."

"And you went to the feed store the next day and asked about me out loud for the first time in a year."

"I was worried about you."

"You were looking for me. For him."

He lets that stand.

In the Thornton barn, I learned to hand a man one ugly fact and watch what he does with it. The night I ran, I came up through Coleman's barrel room past his brand on every barrel, so he knows I know whose cellar it was. What he doesn't know is whether I'll say so.

If I say it now, my father may run and tell him. I need to see my father's face when he hears it, so I say it anyway.

"Coleman kept me in a cell under his winery," I say.

The color drains out of his face. His mouth opens and shuts with no words coming out.

He doesn't ask me what cell. He doesn't say Coleman Whitlock would never. He doesn't call me a liar or confused. He stands there with one hand hidden behind him and the coffee cup trembling in the other.

My father isn't surprised enough.

"You knew," I say.

"No. Not that. Before God, I never knew that."