Page 17 of Blood Hymn

Evie turns back a page. Last year there was one line. The year before, one. The year before that, one. She turns back ten years, fifteen, flipping faster, and every year it's one girl, one number, one name. Kaylee Guidry. Tammy Fontenot. Sarah Beth Oubre. Every year one, going back until the pages yellow.

And then this year, eleven.

"They're not hunting," she whispers. "They're harvesting."

I don't answer. I'm looking at the margin beside Nellie's line, where a second hand, not Douglas's, has added a note in pencil. It's small and slanted, an old woman's hand, the loops closed tight. It reads 302 — and the Price girl, per C.

Charlotte's got a special one this year, Marcus told me with a knee in his back. She'll walk right in on her own.

I look at the back of Evie's neck, bent over the book, and I don't say anything. Four Charlottes at First Baptist. I've already been wrong about a woman once in my life.

She shuts the ledger and shoves it into the waistband at the small of her back, under the bloodied cardigan, and we go out the window the way I came in.

The truck is on a gravel turnaround behind the Methodist cemetery a quarter mile east. We make it there on foot through the pines without seeing anybody, and I have us on Parish 9 headed toward the boat launch in under ten minutes. She sits on the passenger side with her knees drawn up and her hands turned palm up on them, looking at her fingers in the glow of the dash. She's shaking. It isn't the fine wire tremor from Friday. It's bigger, her whole body going in waves like a dog come in out of the rain.

"You're all right," I tell her.

"I know I'm all right." Her teeth chatter on it. "That's not what this is."

I know it isn't.

Two miles from the launch, the sky ahead of us goes blue and red. It's around the curve, still out of sight, but the lights are painting the tops of the pines, and they aren't moving. A roadblock. They found Landry's cruiser yesterday morning, and tonight they've got people on the roads.

I brake hard and cut the headlights. We sit in the dark with the engine running and the lights pulsing against the trees.

"Back the other way's the highway," I mutter. "They'll have that too."

"Chapel Road." She's already pointing. "Left at the pump station. It's a dead end. Nobody's been down it in six years."

I know Chapel Road. Everybody in Harlowe knows Chapel Road, the same way everybody knows which bridge the Fontenot boy went off of. I turn left at the pump station with the lights still off and drive by the thin bit of moon until the shell gives out. The trees close over, and the chain across the drive comes up in the dark, sagging between two posts with a CONDEMNED sign hung in the middle.

I pull the truck in behind a stand of wax myrtle where it can't be seen from the road. When I kill the engine, the quiet comes down on us like a lid.

The church sits at the end of the drive with the kudzu up one side and the steeple leaning. The windows are boarded, all but one high on the east wall where the plywood has rotted loose and hangs from a single nail. The front doors are chained. She doesn't go to the front doors. She walks around the side through wet grass to her knees, to a basement door half-sunk in the ground with its padlock rusted open. She yanks it up and goes down the steps into the dark like she's done it a hundred times.

I follow her down.

The basement is one long room under the sanctuary, low-ceilinged, with water standing an inch deep at the far end where the foundation has cracked. It smells of mildew, river mud, and mice. There's moonlight coming through a slit window at ground level, enough to see by once my eyes adjust. Folding tables are stacked against one wall, and a warped piano sits under a tarp. Pews have been dragged down here and piled against the east end, and some of them have collapsed under their own weight, the wood split and furred with mold. Rotted hymnals lie scattered across the floor, swollen fat with water, their pages fused into bricks.

In the middle of the room, on the floor with four iron lag screws, stands the hymnal stand.

It's cast iron, black, taller than her waist. Scrollwork up the sides. A slanted top to hold the book open. It has stood in the same place for six years because nobody ever carried it back upstairs, and nobody ever came down to take it away.

She walks to it and stops. She puts one hand flat on the slanted top.

"There was a table here." She points at the floor to her left without looking. "I was painting. The youth group was doing a mural for the Easter pageant, and I'd gotten the Jordan wrong. I stayed late to fix it. It was a Thursday."

I don't move. I stand at the bottom of the steps with the moonlight on the side of her face and let her say it.

"He came down those stairs. He always came down quiet. He told me God had shown him something about me. He told me I was chosen." Her fingers flex on the iron. "Then his hand was on the back of my neck, and he walked me backward until I was against this. Right here." Her hip touches the stand. "I could feel the scrollwork through my smock."

She turns around. She's standing exactly where she stood at seventeen. Her face is empty and calm.

"I don't remember deciding. I remember I couldn't breathe, and then I had my hands on this. I lifted it. I'd have told you it was too heavy for me to lift, but I lifted it, and I brought it down, and I brought it down again." She looks at the floor between us. "He was lying right there where you're standing. My mother's cross came off my neck when he grabbed me, and it was on the floor by his head, and his blood was running toward it in the grooves between the boards."

I look down at my boots. The boards under them are stained darker than the rest.

"I've never told anybody all of it." She lets out a breath. "Not the way it really was. I told you in the barn to make you trust me. That was the short version."