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Troopers hold the Bayou Boeuf bridge and every road out to 71. Sheriff's cars idle at the crossroads. The Harlowes have released a single statement through a lawyer in Alexandria asking for privacy in their grief, and not one of them has shown a face on camera.

At three o'clock a message drops into the church women's thread, and Evie reads it to me.

"'Ladies, Brother Judah asks me to let everyone know the Halloween gathering goes on Saturday as always, in Malcolm's memory. Bonfires and supper at six. Please have your families home by ten so the candle bearers' service can proceed in reverence.The candle bearers' weekend retreat still begins Friday at six at the fellowship hall, and the girls will stay through Sunday morning worship." She looks up. "Ardis Fontenot."

"Ardis thinks she's organizing a church supper," I tell her. "Most of Harlowe does. They eat, they sing, they go home at ten because they've always gone home at ten. Only the men in masks stay for the candles."

"And the parents think the retreat is an honor.”

"Nellie's mama cried when she was picked."

Evie turns the phone over in her hands. "Charlotte's been awake since Tuesday night. She knows I took the binder. Why is Judah still holding it the same way?"

"Because changing it would cost him more than keeping it. Cancel the retreat with troopers on every road and eleven mothers start asking questions. The gathering has always worked because it looks exactly like it did the year before. He'll keep it looking that way and bring more men."

She sets the phone down on the blanket. For a long moment she studies the binder open in her lap, the handler column with its initials beside every girl's name.

"Then we don't touch the girls," she decides.

I wait.

"We've been thinking about them as eleven people to rescue." She taps the column. "They aren't in danger from a building. They're in danger from these men. From Friday night on, every one of those girls will be sleeping on a fellowship hall floor. Nobody lays a hand on them until the masks come for them at ten-thirty Saturday night." She lifts her eyes to mine. "So the masks never come."

"Go on."

"Kill the men, and there's nobody left to walk the girls to the water. That's the whole plan. We don't save them one at a time. We take away everyone who would hurt them."

I pull Charlotte's map across the concrete toward us and turn it so we can both see.

The cemetery lies in a bowl. Two hundred years ago, the Harlowes buried their dead on the low ground by the old channel because nobody else wanted it. When the reservoir went in on the ridge in the sixties, they built the spillway to empty straight into that basin through a pair of iron sluice gates housed in a concrete gatehouse halfway up the slope. The parish has been told all its life that the gates are opened once a year to keep the reservoir from silting up. In Charlotte's slanted hand beside the gatehouse: Gates — B. Boudreaux.

"The ram," Evie murmurs.

"He opens them at eleven with a hand crank," I explain. "The water comes down the hill, and the men herd the girls into it. At twelve-thirty, he cranks the gates shut and the basin drains through the culverts under Parish 12 by three."

"And if he can't shut them?"

"Then it doesn't stop coming." I put my finger on the gatehouse. "A steel shaft runs through the crank housing. I drive a wedge behind the gear and weld a length of chain through the spokes of the wheel. He can open it. He can't close it. The whole reservoir comes into that bowl, and every man standing in the low ground goes under with it."

"Can you get up there?"

"Friday night. Nobody guards the gatehouse until the gathering."

She's quiet, working through it. I can see her walking the ground in her head.

"The men need to be in the basin before ten-thirty," she reasons. "If they go to the fellowship hall first, they'll find the girls and bring them down with them."

"They will."

"So something has to pull them to the water early." She holds my eyes. "Me."

I knew it was coming. I still feel it land.

"At ten o'clock, after the supper crowd goes home, I walk down into that basin with my face bare," she continues. "Judah's got my name in his binder under a ruled line. He's been told I'd walk in on my own. Every man in a mask will go to the water for me instead of to the fellowship hall for eleven girls who aren't going anywhere. At eleven, Boudreaux opens the gates. I lead them into the deep end and run for the church steps on the high side."

"And Judah?"

"Judah watches from the church steps. He always does, doesn't he? He won't go down into the water himself."