Page 31 of Blood Hymn

"You didn't even blink," she whispers.

"No."

"How old were you the first time?"

"Twelve. Dog bite on my calf. He handed me the needle and walked out of the room."

She doesn't say anything else. She looks at me the way she looked at the names under Front Street, like she's reading something she won't be able to forget. After a while she rises from the cot, takes the roll of gauze from my hand, and wraps my arm herself, around and around, her fingers cool on my wrist. When she's done she tapes the end and holds my forearm in both hands and doesn't let go.

"I see it now," she murmurs. "What they made."

"It's what I am."

"It's what they did." She finally releases me. "Those aren't the same thing."

I have no answer for that, so I reach for the dry bag.

She spreads its contents across the blanket between us in the lantern light: Douglas's green ledger with its eleven hymn numbers, the black book from under Front Street, and Charlotte's binder. We work through them page by page. Her finger runs down Douglas's list while mine runs down Charlotte's, name by name, number by number, matching.

It's Charlotte's binder that gives it up. Not the schedule itself, but the revisions. Every page of the plan has been rewritten more than once, the old version struck through with a single neat line and the new one written beneath in that slanted hand, and each revision carries a date in the corner.

The original first page is dated in August. One girl. One number. 302. N. Roach. Handled, M. Sawyer. Nellie alone, the way it's been done every year for forty years.

The next revision is dated October 23, the morning after Marcus vanished. Handlers reassigned. Nellie moved from Marcus to one of the Guidry brothers. Three more names added below hers.

October 24, the morning after Landry went into the ditch. Four more names. A note in the margin: Per J.H., no delay.

October 26, the morning after Douglas. Three more names, eleven in all, and at the bottom of the page, underlined twice, a new section headed After.

Gates close 12:30. Basin drained by 3. Burn the low ground: chapel, sheds, brush. Nothing standing for daylight.

Evie reads it twice, lips moving without sound. She sets the binder down on the blanket with great care.

"Every time we killed one," she breathes, "they added more."

"Every time." My jaw has locked tight enough to ache. "He thinks it's closing in on him. He's spent six years waiting for me to come back like I swore I would, and now every man who knows anything is dying. So he's cleaning house. One night, every girl who ever looked at him wrong or so much as asked a question, all eleven at once. Then he floods the ground and burns it bare so nobody ever finds a thing."

"A harvest."

"A purge."

We sit on the concrete floor of the gauge house in the middle of the marsh with the lantern hissing between us, my arm stitched and throbbing, her eye already swelling shut. Beyond the steel door, a long way off, the dogs have gone quiet. The frogs are starting up again, one by one.

Four days.

CHAPTER 11

EVIE

My left eye won't open all the way when I wake up. I lie on the cot in the gauge house and look at the tin roof through the slit of it, and the stitches in my brow pull every time I blink. Somewhere under the cot, Silas is breathing slow and even on the concrete with a pistol on his chest.

We have nothing. I make myself say it in my head while the light comes gray through the gap under the steel door. No real shelter. No wall of photographs. No boat. Two trucks sitting under the willows at a launch that someone watched from the levee. Three books, one binder, a manila folder, my sister's ashes, and the guns on a shelf of cinder blocks.

And eleven names.

I've been thinking about the names since the lantern went out. I've been thinking about Nellie Roach with her scrunchie and her biscuit, walking down to the water on Saturday night with a candle in her hand, and ten other girls behind her, and I've been thinking about how many men it takes to hold eleven girls in rising water. Every one of them has a mask assigned in Charlotte's binder. Every one of them has a name.

When Silas sits up, I'm already at the shelf with the binder open on my knees.