Page 32 of Blood Hymn

"We can't pull eleven girls out of that parish in three days," I tell him. "We can't even find some of them. Four of the names I've never heard of, and they'll have been told the same thing Nellie was told. Keep quiet. Don't tell your mama. The minute one goes missing, Judah moves the rest."

He rubs his face with his good hand. The gauze on his forearm has bled through in a line overnight. "So."

"So we stop trying to save them one at a time." I turn the binder around so he can see the handler column. "We take the men who do the taking. Every man we put down before Saturday is a pair of hands that can't hold a girl under."

He reads down the column. I watch his eyes stop where mine stopped last night.

M. Harlowe. Three times. Beside a sixteen-year-old named Brianna Sonnier, a nineteen-year-old named Tasha Guidry, and a fifteen-year-old named Lacey Broussard.

"He's the one who did Dee," I tell him. "Marcus said it and Charlotte said it. It took a long time because he didn't know what he was doing. And now they've given him three more to practice on."

"Malcolm doesn't go anywhere alone."

"He goes somewhere tonight." I hold up Charlotte's cell phone. I charged it off the solar battery pack under the cot, and the first thing that came through when it woke up was a group text from the First Baptist Women's Missionary Union, forty-one unread. "Don't forget Malcolm's dinner at the Bentley Wednesday seven p.m.! Wear your pearls, ladies! $250 a plate and every penny for the Lord's work in Baton Rouge."

Silas takes the phone and scrolls, frowning. "The Bentley. That's Alexandria."

"That's Rapides Parish. That's not his ground. He'll have a couple of his own people and whatever the hotel puts on the doors, and three hundred Baptists in pearls, and a campaign photographer. He can't bring the dogs to a fundraiser."

"They know your face."

"They know a face with two good eyes and no stitches." I touch the swollen side gingerly. "Nobody looks at the help."

We walk out of the marsh at noon and come up on a gravel lease road where a cane contractor has left a flatbed Ram parked beside a pile of irrigation pipe. Silas has the steering column cracked and the wires stripped before I've finished looking both ways. At a Dollar General in Glenmora, I buy black slacks, a white button-down, a black vest, flat black shoes, a tube of heavy concealer, a compact of powder two shades darker than my skin, hair gel, and a pair of reading glasses with thick black frames. I change in the stall of the bathroom at the Exxon next door. I slick my hair straight back into a tight knot and put the concealer on thick over the bruise and the stitches and powder it down, and I put the glasses on. The lenses make the world swim a little. They also hide the eye.

When I come out, Silas looks at me across the cab for a long moment.

"Well?"

"You look like somebody who carries a tray."

"Good."

The last thing I put on is in my fist. The funeral home in Baton Rouge gave it to me in a manila envelope with PERSONAL EFFECTS stamped on it the day I picked up her ashes: a gold locket the size of a thumbnail on a thin gold chain. There's a picture of our mother in one half and a picture of the two of us as girls in the other. The chain is kinked in the middle, bent into a sharp little angle where something pulled it tight against her throat and didn't let go. I've carried it against the box for a month. I fasten it now at the back of my neck and tuck it inside my collar, and I feel the kink sit against my skin, cold, right in the hollow of my throat.

The Hotel Bentley rises over downtown Alexandria like a wedding cake left out in the rain, six stories of limestone and columns that somebody spent a lot of money restoring. We come in the back way, off the alley where the delivery trucks unload. The catering company is Cajun Celebrations out of Pineville, and their white van is parked by the loading dock with the back doors open and a teenage boy in a vest just like mine unloading chafing dishes onto a cart. I pick up a stack of linen napkins from the van as I pass it and walk through the kitchen door with my arms full, and nobody stops me. A woman with a headset glances at me and back at her clipboard. A cook yells about a missing ladle. I set the napkins down on a steel table and pick up a tray of champagne flutes and walk out through the swinging doors into the lobby.

It's gold. That's my first thought. Gold everywhere, gilt on the ceiling and the column capitals and the frames of the mirrors, a chandelier the size of a pickup hanging over a marble floor so polished I can see the whole room upside down in it. A grand staircase sweeps up one side to a mezzanine that runs around three walls, with a wrought-iron railing waist high. Up there, a string quartet plays something I half recognize. Down here, three hundred people in suits and cocktail dresses stand in knots, laughing, drinking, eating shrimp off toothpicks. A banner hangs off the mezzanine rail: HARLOWE FOR STATE SENATE — FAITH, FAMILY, LOUISIANA.

I move through them with my tray and my head down. Nobody looks at me. A man takes a flute without breaking his sentence. A woman in pearls takes two.

I find Malcolm in the middle of the room.

I thought he’d look like the photograph on Silas's wall, the one on a stage in a suit, waving, and yet he doesn't. The photograph didn't show his hands. They're big hands, soft, a banker's hands, with a college ring on one and a wedding ring on the other, and one of them is resting on the shoulder of a gray-haired man while he laughs at something the man said. He's taller than I expected. He's got his father's jaw and a good haircut and teeth that cost money, and he's working the room the way Nate Douglas worked his aisle, touching, leaning in, remembering names.

Two men stand a few steps behind him who aren't here for the shrimp. Big, neckless, in suits that don't fit through the shoulders, with the curly wires of earpieces running down into their collars. One of them is Tyler Guidry's older brother. I remember him from high school. He broke a boy's arm behind the gym for looking at his truck.

I don't go to Malcolm. I let him come to me.

I work my way up the grand staircase with a fresh tray and stand near the top of it, at the mezzanine, by the rail where the banner hangs. From here, I can see the whole room. I can see Malcolm glance up toward the quartet. I can see his handlers lose interest in the staircase once they've clocked one more girl in a vest.

At seven forty, Malcolm excuses himself from a cluster of women by the bar and heads toward the stairs with his phone to his ear, frowning. He climbs. Behind him, Guidry's brother starts to follow, and a heavyset woman with a campaign button on her bosom catches his arm and says something that makes him stop and nod and turn back.

Malcolm reaches the mezzanine. He walks past me without looking and goes to the rail at the far corner, away from the quartet, where it's quiet and dim, and he leans his elbows on the iron and talks low into the phone.

"I don't care what she said," he mutters. "I told you, Daddy wants it Saturday, not⁠—"

I set my tray down on a side table.