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The columns are ruled in faded red ink. Year. Name. Offense. Handled. Witnessed. The earliest pages run back into the sixties in handwriting I don't recognize.

"I saw one of these once," he tells me quietly. "In my grandfather's desk. I thought it was the only copy. I never knew they kept the original down here."

He turns the pages without another word. His hands are steady and his jaw isn't. He pauses on one leaf, and I catch a woman's name and the words Cleansed. Witnessed. Sanctified. before he moves on. I don't need to ask whose name that was.

I take the book from him and find my mother's year.

Marianne Price. Age thirty-one. Offense, Threatened to speak. Handled, R. Harlowe. The final column holds the signature of whoever stood in this room among the chains and the grooves and the choir chair and watched it done.

I know that handwriting. It wrote For my sweet girl on every birthday card I got until I was seventeen. It addressed the envelope with four hundred dollars inside that I carried onto a Greyhound in Alexandria with my hands still smelling of utility-sink soap.

I flip forward, faster. It fills that last column year after year, unmistakable. On the final written page, on this year's line, beside my sister's name and Offense, Asked questions and Handled, M. Harlowe, it appears one more time.

C. Price.

My aunt Charlotte. The woman who picked my mother's cross up off a basement floor and slipped it into her pocket, who scrubbed a dead man's blood from my hands and burned my smock and swore she did it all for love.

CHAPTER 8

SILAS

She holds together on the stairs, in the alley, and in the truck.

She holds together while I pole us across the black water with the ledger zipped inside my coat against my ribs and her mother's file flat on her knees. She sits in the bow with her back straight and her hands folded over the folder, looking straight ahead into the dark, and she doesn't make a sound the whole way. Frogs go quiet as we pass and start up again behind us. A gator's eyes shine red in my flashlight and sink. She doesn't turn her head for any of it.

She holds together up the ladder and across the dock and through my door, and she sets the folder down on the workbench beside her sister's box, square to the edge, the way you'd set down something that might go off.

Then she picks up my coffee can full of ash and throws it at the wall.

It hits the photographs and bursts. Gray ash blows across the room and settles on the cot and in her hair. She pulls the pushpins out of Landry's corner of the wall and rips the pictures down in handfuls, and when those are gone she goes for the map, and I let her. I stand by the door and let her tear six years of my work off the plywood in strips because it's the only thing in the room that won't bleed. She sweeps the lantern off the bench. I catch it before it hits the floor and set it on the stove. She kicks the chair over. She puts both fists into the wall hard enough to crack the paneling, and she does it again, and on the third swing I take her wrists.

She fights me. She's strong for her size and she's got no sense left in her at all, and she twists and gets an elbow into my mouth and a knee into my thigh and I take both. I don't hit back. I don't pin her. I just keep hold of her wrists and let her pull against me until she runs out of pull.

When it goes out of her, it goes all at once. Her legs quit. I get my arm around her before she lands and I go down with her, onto the floor in the ash and the torn photographs, my back against the cot frame and her folded against my chest.

The sound she makes then isn't crying. I've heard crying. This is the noise a trapped animal makes when it finally understands the trap isn't going to open. It comes up out of her from somewhere below her lungs and it doesn't stop. She shakes with it. She grabs fistfuls of my shirt and presses her face into my collarbone and howls into me, and her whole body jerks with every breath.

I don't know how to do this.

I know how to hold a man still while he dies. I know how to keep a girl quiet in the back of a truck. Nobody ever taught me what to do when somebody comes apart and wants to be held while they do it, because in the house where I grew up nobody came apart where anyone could see. The old man would have called it weakness. He'd have been wrong about that too.

So I do what my body tells me. I put my hand on the back of her head and hold it against me. I wrap the other arm all the way around her so she can feel it at her back. I don't shush her. I don't rock her. I keep still and let her break against me like water against a piling, and I stay put, because the one thing I know how to be is something that doesn't move.

It goes on for a long time. The lantern burns down a quarter inch. My shirt soaks through. Somewhere in it she starts saying things, broken bits I can only half hear. Mama. The ten o'clock news. Dee on the couch in her nightgown, falling asleep on my shoulder waiting for headlights. Charlotte telling us to go to bed.

Charlotte.

When she finally goes quiet, she goes quiet the way a fever breaks, all at once and wet and shivering. She lies against me breathing in long shuddering pulls. My hand is still in her hair.

"I have to tell you something," I tell her.

She doesn't lift her head. "Tell me."

"Marcus gave me a name. In the barn, before you walked in. He said Charlotte had a special girl this year, one who'd walk right in on her own." I make myself go on. "And in Douglas's book, beside Nellie's line, somebody wrote in the margin in pencil. It said 302, and the Price girl, per C."

She goes very still against me.

"I knew four Charlottes at First Baptist," I go on. "When I was nineteen, I put a woman in the ground on a name with no face attached, and she was the wrong woman. I wasn't going to hand you a name that might do the same. That's the reason. It isn't a good one. I should have told you last night."