Page 9 of Blood Hymn

"He has to be there. It's his. He gives the signal, he opens the gates, he stands on the church steps and watches. He can't send a proxy, because the whole point is that it's him. That's the tradition." He looks at me. "I've had that night circled on that map since the first year. I was going to do it alone. I'd made my peace with not walking out."

"And now?"

He doesn't answer. He goes to the wall, takes down the photograph of Landry, and holds it out to me.

"He drives them," he says. "Picks the girl up, brings her to Marcus, brings her from Marcus to the church. He's the road between every part of it. You take the road, the parts stop touching." He waits until I take the picture. "He's also the one who said your name on Main Street this afternoon. I watched him do it. He'll say it again to Judah by morning if he hasn't already."

I look at Cole Landry. Mustache. Wedding ring. Sunglasses he doesn't need.

"When?" I ask.

"Tomorrow night. He drinks at the Cypress on Fridays, drives home on Parish 12, and there's a stretch with no houses on it for four miles."

"And after him?"

"After him, we see what's still standing."

I stand up. I put the photograph in my back pocket next to my sister's notebook, and I look at the wall, all of it, six years of a man teaching himself to wait, and I think about what Delilah wrote. Every one.

"When it's done," he says behind me, "we burn it. The church, the house, all of it. I'm not leaving anything standing that they can put a girl in."

I turn around.

"Promise," I say.

He looks at me the way he looked at me in the barn, like he's still deciding what I am. Then something in his face closes, or maybe opens. I can't tell yet. I'll learn.

"I promise," he says.

CHAPTER 4

SILAS

She doesn't sleep.

I give her the cot, take the floor by the door with a shotgun across my knees, and close my eyes around three because a man who doesn't sleep makes mistakes. When I open them again at first light, she's sitting cross-legged in front of my wall with the lantern turned low and a spiral notebook open on her knee. She has my map of Parish 12 in her lap. She has my three weeks of notes on Cole Landry spread out on the floorboards around her in a half circle, and she's writing.

"You took those down," I say.

"I put them back in order." She doesn't look up. "You had his Tuesdays mixed in with his Thursdays."

I get up and look. She's right. I stand there with the shotgun hanging off my hand and look at a thing I've looked at every day for three weeks, and she's right. I didn't see it.

By the time the coffee's boiled, she has four pages. She hands them to me without asking if I want them. Landry's shifts for the last month, pulled from my notes and cross-checked against something on her phone. His route home from the Cypress on Friday nights, mile by mile, with the curve past the old Thibodeaux place marked in a box because the shoulder drops off into the ditch there and the ditch is six feet deep. His truck, his cruiser, his wife's minivan. His kids' school. Times, distances, two ways in and three ways out, and at the bottom of the last page, underlined, the words TONIGHT, 11:40, THIBODEAUX CURVE.

It's good. It's better than good. It's what I would have written, and she wrote it overnight by lantern light out of a stranger's notes.

I don't like that as much as I should.

"Who taught you this?" I wonder.

"Nobody. I've been reading about men like him for three weeks." She takes her coffee. "It's just a schedule. Men like that live on schedules. They think it makes them safe."

"It's good work." I set the pages on the bench. "Now I'm going to tell you what's wrong with it, and you're going to listen, because every one of these things gets you killed."

She sets the cup down, folds her hands in her lap like a girl in Sunday school, and waits.

I tell her. Her name is on the front of that notebook in ballpoint, and Landry's name is on page one, and if she drops it in a parking lot there's nobody in Harlowe who can't read it. Her truck is the only red Ford in the parish with Orleans plates, and Landry has already seen it, so it stays under the tarp at the boat launch until this is over. She wants to take him in the Cypress lot because it's lit and she can see him, and I tell her the Cypress has a camera over the back door that the owner's nephew put in last spring and nobody talks about. She wants to watch his house from the road. I tell her a car on the road gets noticed. A woman standing in a tree line with binoculars gets noticed too, if the sun's behind the house, because the glass flashes. So we go in from the east after two o'clock, and we stay downwind of the dog.