Page 19 of Blood Hymn

We lie there afterward in the wreck of it for a long time. The moonlight has moved across the floor. Water drips somewhere at the far end of the room, slow and steady. I'm still inside her, going soft, and she's still under me, breathing hard. I can feel her heart against my chest the way I felt it through her back in the tree line, hammering and then slowing, slowing, until it's only a heart.

She doesn't push me off. That's the thing I'll remember. She doesn't step away. She lies there with a rotted hymnal under her head and my weight on her and one hand spread flat across the torn skin of my back, and she stays.

When she finally speaks, her voice is hoarse. "This doesn't change anything."

I lift my head. There's a page stuck to her cheek, gray and blank, the ink bled out of it long ago. I peel it off gently with two fingers and let it fall.

"Liar," I murmur.

CHAPTER 7

EVIE

By Monday noon, the whole parish knows Brother Nate Douglas is dead.

The news comes over the AM station out of Alexandria that Silas keeps tuned low for weather. The announcer slows down for it, the way people do when a story lands close to home.

The pastor of First Baptist of Harlowe was found in his study early this morning by the church secretary. The sheriff's office is withholding details, and state police have been asked to assist. The congregation will hold a prayer vigil at six.

A jingle for a tire shop in Pineville follows, bright and loud, and Silas reaches over and switches it off.

I'm perched on the end of the cot with his first-aid kit open beside me, trying to reach the raw places on my shoulders with a cotton ball soaked in peroxide. The concrete took the skin off in two long stripes. They burn whenever I lift my arms, and every time they burn, I'm back against that wall in the moonlight with his mouth on my throat. I have no idea what to do with that yet, so I keep dabbing.

He takes the cotton from my fingers without asking and sits down behind me.

"They'll call Marsh in for the body." He presses the cotton to the worst scrape, and I hiss through my teeth. "Every death in Harlowe crosses his table. He'll spend the day on Douglas and go home tonight scared out of his mind, because he signs the paper, and three men who worked that paper with him are gone in four days."

"Landry, Marcus, Douglas."

"Marcus is missing, as far as anybody knows. Nobody's going to find him." He tapes gauze over the scrapes and smooths the edges down with his thumb. When he's finished, his hand rests between my shoulder blades a beat too long before he takes it away and crosses to his wall.

Dr. Raymond Marsh has been coroner of Harlowe Parish for twenty-two years. His photograph hangs beside the empty space where Landry used to be, a heavyset man with a white beard leaving the morgue at the old hospital with a coffee cup in his fist. He lives alone on Magnolia Street in the two-story his mother left him, with a wraparound porch and a detached garage housing a Buick nobody ever sees him drive. His wife left in 2011. His son lives in Houston and doesn't call.

"He keeps his own records," Silas adds, tapping a line of notes. "The old man knew and allowed it, because it made Marsh feel safe. A man who believes he's holding insurance will sign whatever you slide in front of him."

"Where does he keep them?"

"That's the first thing we ask."

We move at dusk, while the rest of the parish files into the fellowship hall at First Baptist to hold hands and pray over the soul of a man who wrote girls' names on construction-paper pumpkins. The old side of town is deserted. We leave the truck in the alley behind the Methodist parsonage two blocks over and cut through backyards, over a chain-link fence and through a wall of overgrown ligustrum, until we come up on Marsh's house from the rear.

A lamp burns in a downstairs room at the back. Through the window, I can see him at a roll top desk in his undershirt, a glass of something brown at his elbow and a laptop open before him. A little silver automatic lies beside the glass, the kind of pistol men buy when they've never needed one.

Silas lifts a finger to his lips and slips around the side of the house. Half a minute later, the kitchen door gives with a soft crack of splintering wood. Marsh's head jerks up and his hand goes for the gun, but Silas is already in the doorway behind him with the shotgun leveled, and the coroner freezes with his fingers hovering over the desk like a man who's lost his place in a hymn.

I come in through the kitchen, scoop up the automatic, drop the magazine, and toss the pistol into an armchair across the room.

Marsh stares up at me, and the color drains out of his face.

"Delilah's sister." His voice comes out thin. "You've got her eyes."

"She'd want you to look at them."

Sweat soaks through his undershirt. The room smells of bourbon and old paper and mothballs. Three gray steel filing cabinets stand along one wall, the county-office kind. An LSU Medical diploma hangs over the desk beside a snapshot of a boy in a baseball uniform, maybe ten, grinning around a missing tooth.

"Sit," Silas orders, and Marsh drops back into the desk chair so hard it rolls.

I drag a kitchen chair around to face him and lay the Baton Rouge folder open on his blotter. One by one, I set out the photographs until they cover the desk. Delilah's throat. Delilah's torn palms. Delilah on a steel table with a sheet folded down to her collarbone.