Page 51 of Blood Hymn

She drives with the Harlowe place blazing in the mirror behind us like a false dawn. Parish 12 turns into Main, and Main runs toward Front. On the way we pass the new First Baptist out on the highway, and she slows without meaning to.

The fellowship hall lights are on. Three cars and a church van sit in the lot, and behind the frosted windows I can make out sleeping bags in rows on the floor and a chaperone slumped asleep in a folding chair by the door. No one came for those girls tonight. No one ever will.

Evie watches them for a long moment with the engine idling, then drives on.

Front Street is deserted. Every deputy in the parish is manning a roadblock or racing toward one of the fires, and the sheriff's station stands across from the old jail with a single light burning in the dispatch window.

"Someone's inside," Evie warns.

"Go see."

She walks up to the glass door in her wet white dress with her hair wild and the empty Glock hanging at her side, and she knocks. A woman in her sixties with reading glasses on a chain cracks it open. Evie speaks to her low for a minute. The woman stares past her at the orange sky above the rooftops, disappears inside, and returns with her purse, her keys, and a thermos. She climbs into a Buick at the curb and drives off without a backward glance.

"What did you tell her?" I ask when Evie returns.

"That the Harlowe place is burning and Judah's dead and she ought to go home to her grandchildren." She drags the hose free. "She told me she's been meaning to retire."

The sheriff's station goes first. Then the courthouse beside it, with its clock tower and its records rooms and a century of deeds and death certificates, every false one Raymond Marsh ever signed. The side door is locked. I shoot out the glass, and she crawls through and opens it from inside.

We leave the old jail for last.

The tank is nearly dry when she drags the hose down past the dead boiler, through the steel door, and down the narrow steps into the red room. I follow because I need to see it once more.

It's exactly as we left it. Three men stiffening on the floor. The chains, the drain, the choir chair, the names glittering in the beam of her flashlight.

She stands in the center and turns slowly, the light moving across the stone. Delilah. Marianne. Rose. Hundreds more.

"It won't burn," she realizes. "It's stone."

"The chair will burn, and the table, and the men. The heat will crack the walls." I brace against the doorframe. "The names stay. Somebody ought to be able to come down here and read them. Nobody will ever bring another girl down these steps."

She looks at me a long moment in the dark, then nods and opens the nozzle over the chair and the table and the three dead men. We climb out, and I drop the match from the top of the stairs.

We don't stay to watch.

I make it across Front Street to the truck. I can recall the heat of three buildings burning at my back and the courthouse windows bursting one after another like firecrackers. My hand finds the truck door. My legs give out.

Then I'm on the ground with the asphalt warm beneath me. Evie kneels over me, speaking, but her voice has gone distant, like the roar of the basin with the words drained out of it.

Pressure on my side. Her palms, both of them, bearing down.

Her face close to mine. "Don't you dare."

The truck seat. Gasoline and blood. My head in her lap and then not. The engine turning over. One of her hands flat on my chest, holding me down, the other on the wheel.

Streetlights strobing across the windshield, and then darkness between them, and then only darkness.

I look up past her shoulder through the glass. The sky over Harlowe Parish burns orange from edge to edge, smoke rolling into it in black columns, sparks drifting like fireflies, as if the whole parish is rising into the night.

That's the last thing I see clearly: the orange sky, and her hand over my heart.

CHAPTER 19

EVIE

He stops talking somewhere on Parish 9.

For the first few miles out of town he mumbles, broken pieces I can't make sense of; the name Roy, something about rafters, and once a scrap of a Spanish lullaby, the kind he told me his mother used to sing to him. His head rolls against my thigh with every bump. Then, somewhere past the Nazarene church, the mumbling quits, and all I can hear is the engine, my own breath, and the wet sound his breathing makes: too fast and too shallow, like a dog panting in August.