Page 12 of Blood Hymn

I bring the front sight up to the middle of Cole Landry's forehead and hold it there. He stops talking. He looks at the gun and then at her face and then at mine above her shoulder, and whatever he sees there makes him close his eyes.

"Together," I say against her hair.

She breathes in. I feel it all the way down her spine.

We fire.

The sound goes out across the ditch and into the dead cypress and comes back to us twice. Landry goes over sideways into the leaves and lies still.

Neither of us moves.

Her back is against my chest, and I can feel her heart through her shoulder blades going hard and fast, like something trying to get out. My arm is still around her and my hand is still over hers on the gun. There's powder smoke hanging in the flashlight beam. The cruiser's headlights are still burning up through the trees down in the ditch. Somewhere out on the water, a bullfrog starts up again, like nothing happened, because to the bullfrog nothing did.

She leans back into me.

It's not much. An inch, maybe less. Her weight shifts off her heels and comes to rest against me, and her head drops back until it's just touching my collarbone, and she stays there. She breathes. I breathe. I don't know how long.

Then she steps away.

She does it cleanly, out from under my arm and out of my hand. She thumbs the hammer down, turns the pistol around, and starts wiping the grip with the sleeve of my coat, careful and thorough, the way I told her this morning. She doesn't look at me. She looks at the gun.

I stand there in the dark with my hands empty.

I've stood behind a lot of people while they killed. The old man put me there the first time when I was fifteen, behind a cousin who couldn't stop shaking, and he said a steady hand is a gift you give your family. I stood behind grown men and boys younger than me and once, in this parish, behind a woman who'd been told it was the Lord's will. I steadied every one of them. I felt every one of them go rigid under my hand, and then go loose, and then pull away from me like I was the thing that did it.

Not one of them ever leaned back.

I don't know what to do with that. So I go down the bank to the cruiser to turn off the lights.

CHAPTER 5

EVIE

The new First Baptist of Harlowe sits out on the highway where the soybean field used to be, and it looks like somebody built it from a kit. White siding. A steeple made of something that isn't wood. A marquee sign by the road with black plastic letters that reads HALLOWEEN GATHERING SAT OCT 31 ALL ARE CALLED, and under that, smaller, PRAYERS FOR THE LANDRY FAMILY.

The parking lot is full by ten-forty. I park Silas's truck at the far end by the drainage ditch, facing out, and sit with my hands on the wheel and watch the families go in. Men in pressed khakis. Women in dresses the color of sherbet. Little boys with their hair wet-combed flat and their collars already coming loose.

"You don't have to do this."

Silas is on the floorboard behind the seat with a blanket over him and a rifle under the blanket, and it's the third time he's told me so this morning. The first time was at the shelter while I pinned my hair up in a piece of mirror nailed to his wall. The second was on the boat, halfway back to the launch.

"Landry told us she picks them on Sunday."

"Landry told us a lot of things with my boot on his knee."

"And every one of them was true." I check my face in the rearview. I look like a woman who hasn't slept, because I haven't. I look like a woman who lost her sister three weeks ago, because I did. It's the best disguise I own. "They won't touch me in there. Not in front of two hundred people. Not the Sunday after a deputy died."

"They'll watch you."

"Let them."

The wind comes across the lot with the smell of the paper mill in it. I pull my cardigan closed and walk toward the doors with my Bible against my chest. It's my mother's, white leather gone gray at the edges. It was the only thing I grabbed off the dresser the night Charlotte drove me out of the parish with the headlights off, and it has ridden in the bottom of every bag I've owned since. I haven't opened it in six years, and I'm not going to open it today. It's a prop, like everything else I'm wearing.

Nobody stops me at the door. The usher is a boy I went to school with, Tyler Guidry, heavier now and going bald young. When he sees me, his face goes through three different things before it settles on a smile that doesn't reach anywhere. He hands me a bulletin. His palm is damp.

"Evie. We were really sorry about Dee."

"I know you were, Tyler."