Page 3

The stairs creak the same way they did when I came up. Main Street is empty. Four o'clock on a Thursday in Harlowe, and the whole town is holding its breath.

The cruiser is already there.

It's parked across the street with the engine running, tan and brown, HARLOWE PARISH SHERIFF on the door in letters that need repainting. The window's down. The man behind the wheel has a mustache and a wedding ring and sunglasses he doesn't need with the sun where it is, and he doesn't get out. He just lets the car roll, four miles an hour, until it's even with me on the sidewalk.

"Evie Price," he says.

Like he's been saying it to himself. Like he's been practicing.

I don't stop walking. I don't look at him. I put the notebook in the waistband of my jeans at the small of my back where my shirt covers it, keep my hands loose, and get in my truck.

He sits there while I start the engine. He sits there while I pull out. When I check the mirror at the end of the block, he's still sitting there, window down, watching the space where I was.

Deputy Cole Landry. Second name on the list.

I find that I'm smiling, and I stop.

I don't go to the old house. I want to. I want to check the crawlspace under the back porch where we hid things before we had the vent. I want to sit at the kitchen table where Dee used to braid my hair before school. But Landry knows where the house is, and I've got one truck, and it's memorable.

I drive out Old River Road instead, and I take it slow, and I let the dark come.

It comes fast this deep in. The trees eat the sunset before it happens. By six-thirty, the road is a tunnel. By seven, there's nothing but my low beams, moths, and the sound of the bayou breathing off to the right.

The Sawyer place is a mile past the last mailbox. I know it because everybody knows it. Old man Sawyer ran hogs there until the '09 flood took the pens, and after that it was just the barn and the house and Marcus, who inherited both and did nothing with either that anyone could see. The kind of place you drive past and don't look at.

I kill my lights a quarter mile out and pull into the ditch under a stand of pine.

There's a light in the barn.

One window, high up, yellow. And a truck parked in the yard with the tailgate down.

I sit in the dark with my hand on the folder and the box and the gun, in that order, and I think about what Delilah wrote.

Somebody's there. On a Tuesday. In October. Nine days before Halloween.

Somebody's getting ready.

I take the .38 out of the glovebox. I check the cylinder because I always check the cylinder. Six. I put the notebook under the seat, put my sister's box on the floor where it won't slide, and touch the lid once, the way you'd touch a shoulder.

Then I get out.

The ground is soft and the air smells like rot and cut hay and something under both of them, coppery, that I tell myself is the river. The light in the barn doesn't move. Nothing moves. Just the moths and my own breath and my boots on wet ground, one in front of the other, toward the only lit window for a mile in any direction.

I don't know what I'm walking into.

I find that I don't care.

CHAPTER 2

SILAS

Marcus Sawyer whistles when he works. I'd forgotten that.

He's been at it twenty minutes, and he's on his third hymn. Something from the Broadman, one of the slow ones, the kind they sing at the end when the altar's open. He's flat. He's always been flat. When we were boys and they had us in the choir loft on Sundays, Judah used to stand him at the back so the congregation wouldn't hear it.

I'm forty feet above him in the rafters with my back against a crossbeam that's held my weight since I was eleven years old, and I'm listening to Marcus Sawyer whistle hymns while he lays out the things he's going to use to kill a girl.

Rope first. Half-inch nylon, blue, the kind you buy off the spool at the co-op. He measures it with his arms, elbow to fingertip, six lengths, and cuts each one with a knife he wipes on his jeans. He coils them neatly and sets them on the tailgate in a row. Then the tarp. Blue too. He unfolds it on the dirt floor, smooths it with his boot, and stands on it a second like he's testing a mattress. Then the tape. Duct, gray. He tears off a strip, looks at it, tears it in half, and sets both halves on the tailgate next to the rope, sticky side up, ready.