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"No." It comes out slowly. "She didn't go to church much. But she asked me about it back in August. She asked about the candles and the special prayer and made me repeat everything he'd told me, and then she…" Nellie falters.

"What did she tell you?"

"If I ever got picked, to come find her." Her voice has gone very small. "To come find her and not tell anybody. And then she was dead."

Behind the dumpster, the truck door opens.

Silas comes no closer than the corner of the building. He stands in the shadow of the eave with his hands where she can see them, and Nellie takes one look at him and goes white to the lips. I cover her hand on the bucket before she can bolt.

"He's with me. He won't hurt you. Nobody's going to hurt you. Listen to me, Nellie. Listen. What they told you about that prayer isn't true."

Her eyes go from me to him and back again, and I watch it happen. I watch a seventeen-year-old girl take a thing she's been told her whole life and hold it up to the light and find the crack running through it. She doesn't cry. Some part of her had already started to know. She just hadn't let herself look.

"The ones before me." She wets her lips. "The girls who led. There was Kaylee Guidry two years ago. She moved to Shreveport, Brother Nate told us." She swallows hard. "Nobody ever heard from her."

"No. Nobody did."

I want to take her. I want to put her in the truck right now, drive her to Baton Rouge, and buy her a bus ticket to anywhere. I look at Silas, and he shakes his head once, and I already know why. I worked it out myself on the drive over.

If Nellie Roach vanishes today, they'll know somebody talked. They'll pick another girl, and we won't know which one or when, and all we'll have done is trade her for somebody else's daughter.

"I need you to go back inside." I keep my voice level. "Finish your shift. Go home. Go to school tomorrow and act like nothing's changed. Can you do that?"

"I don't know." Her hand trembles under mine. "I don't know."

"Dee could have. You're stronger than she was."

It isn't true. But it's the right thing to tell her, and she needs it, and she sits up straighter on the bucket.

"My stepdaddy's on the council." It spills out of her all at once. "Wendell. He's the treasurer. He keeps all the church papers in a safe in his office at the feed store, and Wednesday nights after council meetings, he brings home a folder and locks it in there. He doesn't let anybody near it. Not even Mama." She wipes her nose on the back of her wrist. "I know the combination. I watched him once. It's Mama's birthday."

Silas moves for the first time, only his head, turning toward her.

"When does the council meet next?"

"Wednesday." It's barely a whisper. "They always meet the Wednesday before the gathering."

I write my number on her napkin and fold it into her palm and make her swear to call if anything changes, anything at all. She goes back inside with her apron over her arm. She glances back at me once from the doorway, and I nod, and she's gone.

Silas returns to the truck. I stay on the step a minute longer with my mother's Bible in my lap and the wind turning the paper cup in circles across the gravel.

A woman marks the hymnal. Douglas finds the number and writes the girl's name on a pumpkin and on a paper that goes to Landry. Except Landry is dead and Marcus is dead, and whatever's in that folder is locked in a safe that won't hold anything new until Wednesday, and there are eleven pumpkins on a board in a hallway.

Douglas is the only one I can reach before Wednesday. Douglas knows where the paper goes. Douglas is next.

I brush off my skirt and walk around the front of the building toward the corner of the lot where Silas has the truck idling, and as I pass the big front window of the Pecan House, I see the man sitting alone at the two-top by the door with a cup of coffee and a slice of pecan pie.

Brother Nate Douglas lifts his hand to me through the glass.

He's up and holding the door by the time I reach it. He's shed his suit jacket and rolled his sleeves, and up close he smells like expensive soap and something underneath it I can't name.

"Miss Price. I hoped I'd catch you."

"Brother Douglas."

"Nate. Please." He smiles, and it's a good smile, and I understand exactly how he makes girls stand still. "I saw you in the back this morning, and I couldn't stop thinking about you through the whole sermon. I know that's not very pastoral of me." He drops his voice. "Grief like yours is a heavy thing to carry alone. And I believe there are some things about your sister you'd want to hear from somebody who knew her heart."

"You knew Dee?"