Page 11

"Oh, Jesus," he breathes. "Oh, sweet Jesus."

"Not tonight," I say.

He sees Evie then, and his face does something different. It hardens up and gets meaner, because she's a woman. She's smaller than him, and he's been a deputy long enough to think a badge still means something on his knees in the woods.

"You," he says. "You're making a really bad mistake. You don't know who you're⁠—"

"Cole Landry," she says. "You parked outside the diner on 8 every Tuesday and Thursday for three months this summer. You never went in. You just sat there with the engine running until my sister got off work, and then you followed her home."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Yes, you do."

He tries money first. He's got some put away, he says, forty thousand in a coffee can nobody knows about, and he'll dig it up tonight. When neither of us moves, he tries the kids. He's got two babies at home, a boy and a girl, and they didn't do anything, and they need their daddy. When that doesn't work either, he tries Judah. He tells us Judah Harlowe will find us both, that Judah's got the whole state police in his pocket and the governor's cousin on the phone, that we'll be in the ground by Halloween. He looks straight at Evie when he says that, and he smiles with the blood running over his lip.

"He knew you'd come home," he says. "He's been waiting on you."

I put my boot on his knee, the one bent under him, and I lean.

It doesn't take long after that. It never does with men like Landry. They're only brave while somebody else is holding the girl.

Twenty girls in five years. He counts them for us on his fingers when I tell him to, and he gets to twenty and stops and says he thinks that's all of them but he might be forgetting one. He picked them up. That was his job.

He picked them up from wherever they were supposed to be and drove them to wherever they were supposed to go, to the Sawyer barn or to the old jail or to the church, and he never asked what happened after. Marcus held them. Sometimes it was the Guidry boys or whoever Judah sent. Doc Marsh came and signed the paper. Douglas said the prayer.

"And Douglas picks them," I say.

Landry laughs. It comes out wet and broken, and it isn't a laugh anybody would want to hear.

"Douglas doesn't pick anything," he says. "Douglas just writes it down."

Evie doesn't move, but I feel her go still beside me the way a dog goes still when it hears something in the brush.

"Then who picks them?" she demands.

"The lady does."

"What lady?"

"I don't know. I swear to God I don't know. I’ve never seen her." He's crying again now, snot and blood together. "Douglas says it's always been a woman's hand. He says it's in the book, from the start, that the woman knows which girls are going bad before the men do. She marks a number in the hymnal in the back pew, and Douglas finds it on Sunday, and he writes the girl's name on the paper, and the paper comes to me. That's all. That's all I know. I’ve never seen her. Nobody sees her."

A woman.

There's a name in my chest that Marcus Sawyer gave me last night with his last good breath. Charlotte's got a special one this year. I've been carrying that name around like a stone in my boot, and I haven't said it out loud, because I know four women named Charlotte on the rolls at First Baptist of Harlowe and I don't know which one Marcus meant. A name without a face gets the wrong woman killed. I learned that at nineteen, and the woman's family never found out why.

I don't say it now either.

I look at Evie. She's looking at Landry, and the pistol in her hands is shaking.

Not a lot. A tremor, fine as a wire, running from her wrists up into the barrel. Her face is still. Her breathing is even. Her feet are set exactly the way they were set in the barn doorway last night. But her hands have figured out something the rest of her hasn't caught up to yet, which is that this is different from a hymnal stand in a basement. This one's on his knees. This one's looking at her. This one has a boy on a trampoline.

She's going to do it anyway. I can see that. She's going to do it with the barrel wandering, and she's going to put it in his shoulder or his jaw. He’s going to scream, and she's going to have to do it again. And she'll carry the second shot longer than the first.

I step in behind her.

I put my chest against her back, so she can feel where I am. I reach around her with my right arm and lay my hand over both of hers on the grip. She's cold. Her fingers are like creek stones. I close mine around them. I don't squeeze, I just hold, until the shaking stops traveling up the barrel and starts traveling into me instead.

She doesn't pull away.