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"Better than most." Two fingers touch my elbow, very lightly. "I keep my study open after evening service. Seven o'clock. Just you and me and the Lord, and whatever you need to lay down." His eyes hold mine. "Come tonight, Evie. I think you've been called home for a reason."

CHAPTER 6

SILAS

The window to Nate Douglas's study faces the back lot, where the church keeps its riding mower and a dumpster and a row of crepe myrtles nobody has pruned since the building went up. I've been in the crepe myrtles since six-thirty, crouched in the wet mulch with my back to the brick, listening to two hundred people sing "Just As I Am" through the wall.

The latch on the window is a cheap brass thumb-turn. I worked it open during the second verse with the tip of a putty knife, and it didn't make a sound.

We settled the word in the truck on the way over. She'd wanted something ordinary, something that wouldn't look strange on a phone screen if he glanced down. I'd suggested amen, and she'd shaken her head.

"He'll hear amen forty times tonight. Pick something he'd never think twice about seeing."

"Such as?"

She'd thought about it with her cheek against the window. "Rock."

For “Rock of Ages”. For 302. For the number somebody wrote in the hymnal they put in front of her. I didn't argue.

At seven-oh-four, a lamp comes on in the study. I shift so I can see through the gap in the blinds. It's a big room for a small man's ego, with bookshelves floor to ceiling, a leather couch under a painting of Jesus in the garden, and a desk the size of a door with nothing on it but a green-shaded lamp and a crystal decanter. Douglas comes in first, still in his shirtsleeves, and she comes in behind him with that white Bible against her chest. He shuts the door. He doesn't lock it. A man like him never thinks he needs to.

He pours two glasses of bourbon without asking her. She takes hers and holds it without drinking. He sits beside her on the couch instead of across the desk, close enough that their knees are almost touching, and he begins to talk.

I can't hear the words through the glass. I don't need them. I've watched men do this in kitchens and truck cabs and church basements my whole life. I know what the body does before the hand moves. He leans in. He lowers his head so he's looking up at her, humble, a shepherd bending to a lamb. He touches her wrist, then her shoulder. He lets his fingers stay on the shoulder a second longer than a pastor's would.

At three minutes by my watch, his hand is on her knee.

She lets it rest there. She looks down at it and then up at him with her eyes wet, and she nods at whatever he's telling her. Then she reaches into the pocket of her cardigan for a tissue. What comes out is her phone. She dabs her eyes with her other hand, and her thumb moves once across the screen.

My pocket buzzes against my thigh.

I'm through the window before the vibration stops. The blinds rattle, the sill catches my hip, and I'm on my feet on his carpet with the blade already open in my hand. He turns on the couch with his mouth coming open for the scream, or the question, or the prayer. He never gets to decide which, because she's already moving.

She throws the bourbon in his eyes. He jerks back, blinded, clawing at his face, and she comes up off the couch and grabs him by the hair with both hands. She drives his head down into the edge of the desk. The sound is flat and ugly. He sags.

She hauls him back up, and he's bleeding from the brow into both eyes. Evie turns him toward me like she's handing me something she's been carrying too long.

I don't have to be told. I step in, put the point of the blade under his sternum, angle it up and push. Her hands are still knotted in his hair, holding his face where I can see it. We don't look at each other. We don't need to. It's the same thing that happened in the barn doorway and in the tree line on Friday, that sense of two people moving on a count neither of them spoke out loud.

Nate Douglas looks at me. The recognition comes into his face slowly, behind the blood, and then all at once.

"Silas Cain," he breathes.

“Brother Douglas."

He sags against her. She lets him go, and he folds onto the carpet under the painting of Jesus in the garden, and he's still trying to talk when he stops being able to.

She stands over him with her chest heaving and his blood across the front of her cardigan. There's a bright spray of it on her throat and more on her jaw. She wipes her mouth with the back of her wrist and smears it worse.

"Desk," I tell her.

She's already there.

The top drawer holds nothing but pens, breath mints, and a leather daily planner full of hospital visits. The second holds sermon notes. The bottom drawer is locked, and she yanks at it twice before I set my knife in the seam and pop it. Under a stack of offering envelopes lies a ledger, green cloth, the kind accountants used before computers. She opens it on the blotter under the lamp, and I lean over her shoulder to see.

It's a list. Each line carries a hymn number, a name, an age, a date, and the name of the man who'll handle her. This year's page is headed with the gathering's date in Douglas's neat hand, October 31, and beneath it run eleven lines.

Eleven numbers. Eleven girls. Seventeen, sixteen, nineteen, fifteen. Nellie Roach is the fourth line down, and the number beside her is 302, and under Handler somebody has written Marcus S. and crossed it out.