Page 28 of Blood Hymn

"Mine," she breathes.

"Never."

Within ten minutes she's out cold, head tipped against the wing of the recliner, breath long and slow. I check her pulse twice and find it steady.

I work through the house quickly. Her cell sits charging on the kitchen counter, and it goes in my pocket. Her car keys hang from a rooster-shaped hook by the back door; I take those and the spare ring from the junk drawer. I yank the kitchen phone jack from the wall as well.

Her sewing room is at the back. The machine in it used to live in our house, in my mother's sewing room, before Charlotte hauled it home. In the top drawer of the roll top desk, under a stack of prayer cards, I find a green binder labeled FIRST BAPTIST OF HARLOWE — HALLOWEEN GATHERING.

All of it is here. Saturday night laid out by the minute: bonfires lit at six, candle procession at ten-thirty, gates at eleven. The men assigned to masks and which mask each wears; the Guidry brothers as wolves, a deacon named Boudreaux as a ram. A hand-drawn map of the cemetery basin with arrows showing where the girls get walked and where the men wait. Eleven names in that slanted script, each with a hymn number and a handler. Below them, set apart by a ruled line, a twelfth.

302, with N. Roach. E. Price. Handled, J. Harlowe.

Judah means to do me himself.

I close the binder, tuck it under my arm, and cut back through the living room. At the recliner, I pause. Her jaw has dropped open, and one hand has slid from the armrest to dangle over the carpet.

There's a girl inside me in a flannel nightgown who wants to lay her head in that lap and have her hair smoothed back the way Charlotte used to smooth it. I let her want it for the length of one breath, and then I walk out.

The day has turned bright and cold. I climb into Silas's truck, set the binder on the seat with the cross on top of it, and start the engine.

"She's under," I report to the tape. “She drugged the tea, and I made her drink it. I have the whole gathering plan. Headed your way."

I roll up Pecan past the Esso without stopping and lift two fingers off the wheel, because that was our arrangement: if I came out clean I'd keep driving, and he'd trail a mile back so nobody could put the two trucks together. In the mirror, the other pickup noses out from beside the ice machine and drops in far behind.

I take Parish 9 south toward the river road, patched blacktop cutting through cane so tall it walls the road in green on both shoulders. Tuesday traffic is nothing. A tractor. An empty school bus rattling back to the bus barn. A log truck going the other direction with bark peeling off its load.

Six miles out, just past the Nazarene church, a pickup noses out of a field road between Silas and me and swings in on my bumper.

Dark green Chevy, late model, light bar on the cab, tinted glass, no front plate. I've never laid eyes on it. It closes hard, then backs off and settles at a hundred yards, pacing me exactly. I brake for a curve, and it brakes. I push it on the straightaway, and it pushes. Through the tint I can make out two heads in the cab and nothing more.

Far back, past both of us, Silas's headlights flick on.

My mouth has gone to paper. I press my palm over the tape.

"Green Chevy. Two men. Came out of a field road by the Nazarene church and they've held a mile on me."

He can't answer, but I can picture him leaning over the wheel doing the same arithmetic I am. Charlotte never touched a phone. Nobody saw me walk up those steps but a concrete goose in a witch's hat.

So somebody was sitting on that house before I ever got there. They've been waiting since Sunday, since the morning she slid into my pew and marked me for them, for me to come knocking.

The cane blurs past. The Chevy hangs in my mirror, patient. Ahead, the road pinches down to a single lane where it crosses Bayou Boeuf on the old iron bridge.

They know.

CHAPTER 10

SILAS

The green Chevy peels off at the Bayou Boeuf bridge.

It doesn't chase her across. It doesn't block the road or run her into the cane. It slows at the foot of the iron span, signals like a churchgoer, and turns east onto the levee road, and I watch its taillights shrink along the crest until the trees swallow them. By the time I rattle over the bridge in the flatbed I keep behind the pump station, the road ahead holds nothing but Evie's brake lights and a heron lifting off the ditch.

I don't like it. Men who trail you for six miles and then wave goodbye aren't finished with you. They've gotten what they came for.

We leave both trucks at the launch under the willows and pole in. She sits in the bow with the green binder in her lap and her mother's cross wound through her fingers, and she reads me the whole plan across the water in a low, level voice while I steer. Bonfires at six. Candles at ten-thirty. Gates at eleven. The Guidry brothers in wolf masks. Boudreaux the ram. Eleven names, and a twelfth under a ruled line.

"J. Harlowe," she finishes. "He wants me himself."