Page 21 of Blood Hymn

Sanctified per family. Witnessed.

"The river came after." I set the folder on the desk over my sister's photographs. "Where was she before?"

"I never went there. As God is my witness, I never set foot in it. They brought them to me afterward."

Silas crosses the room and fits the shotgun's muzzle into the soft hollow beneath Marsh's jaw, gently, like lifting a child's chin to look at a scraped face.

"The old jail." It tears out of the coroner in a sob. "Front Street. They shut it down when the justice center went up in '04, but the family used it for years before. There's a boiler room in the basement and a door behind the boiler, and it goes down further. They call it the red room. I only did the paperwork. Just the paperwork."

Over Marsh's head, Silas has gone utterly still, and under that stillness something moves that I haven't seen in him before. Six years he's hunted the place where they do it, and he never found it.

"They made me," Marsh whimpers.

"No." I draw the .38 from the pocket of Silas's coat. "They paid you."

The first round goes into his stomach, for my sister's torn hands and for the ten o'clock news my mother never got home to watch. He slams back against the filing cabinet and sinks to the floor, clutching his belly, mouth open. I stand over him and count to thirty while he makes that sound. At thirty, I put the second round through his heart.

Silas empties the bottom drawer into a pillowcase stripped off Marsh's bed while I gather Delilah's photographs back into the Baton Rouge folder. I take my mother's file as well. I don't open it again. I hold it against my chest down the alley and across town to Front Street.

The old parish jail stands across from the shuttered bank, three stories of red brick with bars still on the windows and a FOR LEASE sign in the ground-floor glass, its phone number bleached to nothing. The back door opens onto an alley choked with broken pallets. Silas has the lock picked inside a minute, and we descend a flight of concrete steps by flashlight into a basement that smells of rust and wet stone and something older underneath.

The boiler fills most of the room, a black iron hulk the size of a pickup, dead for twenty years. Behind it, exactly where Marsh swore, sits a steel door painted the same gray as the wall, invisible to anyone not hunting for it. It isn't even locked. The family never needed a lock. The whole parish is the lock.

Past it, narrower steps are cut into the earth beneath the foundation. The air thins and chills with each one until my breath clouds in the flashlight beam.

The red room isn't red.

It's a low square chamber, perhaps twenty feet across, walled in gray stone older than the jail above. The concrete floor slopes toward a drain in the center, and grooves half an inch deep run from each corner to that drain. I tell myself they're for washing down. I know better.

Four sets of chains are bolted to iron rings sunk in the floor, each ending in a leather-lined cuff sized for a wrist, the leather black and cracked. A single high-backed wooden chair stands against the far wall, the choir-loft kind, and beside it a small table holds a hurricane lamp and a Bible.

And then there are the walls.

My beam hits the nearest one, and the air leaves my chest.

Names. Hundreds, scratched into the stone from the floor to as high as a grown man could reach. Some are chiseled deep and neat. Others were gouged with a nail or a knife point, shallow and wandering. Each has a year beside it. The oldest, near the floor, are softened by damp into ghosts I can barely make out. 1805. 1843. 1892. 1906. 1024. 1948. 1987. 1991. 1994. 2003. 2009. 2013. 2019. 2021. 2024. They climb the wall and spill onto the next. Hazel Wilde. Doris Kemp. Crystal Goode. April Lester. Tammy Fontenot. Sarah Beth Oubre. Kaylee Guidry.

Silas hasn't moved from the center of the room. His flashlight points at the floor, and I don't think he realizes it.

Delilah is on the east wall.

Hers is the newest cut here. The stone around the letters is still pale and raw, with a small heap of grit at the base of the wall nobody bothered to sweep away. DELILAH PRICE, and this year.

I lay my hand over her name. The stone bites at my skin like ice.

I expected to cry. My sister's ashes sit in a box on the floor of a shack in the swamp, her name is carved into the wall of the room where they killed her, and my eyes stay dry. No sound. No tears. Only that ache crawling up my arm.

I lower the beam and begin to read backward through the years. I'm not hunting for anything. Somebody ought to say these names, so I murmur them one at a time, year after year, while the stone darkens and the letters blur.

MARIANNE PRICE.

It sits low on the wall, and I have to crouch to see it. Sixteen years of seep have worn the edges smooth, and green mold furs the bottoms of the letters. The year beside it is the year I turned seven.

I kneel in front of it and I can hear her. That's the worst part. Not the chains or the drain or the grooves in the floor. It's the alto line of "Rock of Ages" drifting over the kitchen sink, and the crack of Juicy Fruit, and her mouth on my forehead telling me she'd be home before the news. While Delilah and I sat up on the couch in our nightgowns waiting for headlights, she was down here in the dark with these chains, and Charlotte was sitting in our kitchen telling us to go on to bed.

The circle of light trembles around the letters. I stay on my knees until they ache.

Behind me a metal lid scrapes. Silas has found a steel ammunition can on the little table by the chair, and he lifts a book out of it. It's larger and older than the one we took from Douglas's desk, bound in black leather gone brown and flaking at the corners. He opens it under his flashlight, and I rise and go to his shoulder.