Page 8 of Blood Hymn

And the other wall. The long one.

Photographs. Dozens. Pinned edge to edge with pushpins, men in cruisers and men on porches and men coming out of the diner on 8 with toothpicks in their mouths, and under each one a scrap of paper in a small hard hand: name, vehicle, schedule, route. Red string running between some of them. A map of the parish in the middle, torn out of a plat book, with the cemetery circled and a line drawn from the cemetery to the reservoir on the ridge above it.

I walk the wall and find Landry. I find Marsh coming out of the parish morgue with a coffee. I find Malcolm Harlowe on a stage somewhere in a suit, waving. I find Douglas at a pulpit with his hands raised and his eyes shut.

I find a photograph of my sister.

It's from a distance. She's crossing the street in front of the diner, sunglasses on, hair up. She doesn't know it's being taken. There's a date in the corner, and the date is nine weeks ago.

"You were watching her," I say.

"I was watching them watch her."

"And you didn't⁠—"

"No."

I turn around. He's standing by the stove with his arms crossed. The lantern light is under his face, and he's not sorry. That's the second thing I learn about him. He doesn't do sorry.

"I don't save people," he says. "It's not what I'm for."

"Then what are you for?"

He looks at the wall. He looks at it the way I've caught myself looking at the folder in my truck, like it's the only thing holding him up.

"Six years ago I found something in a book," he says. "A ledger. The family keeps one. Every girl, every year, going back before I was born. Who chose her, who held her, who signed off." A muscle in his jaw tics. "My mother was in it."

He tells me the rest standing up, in the same voice he'd use to give directions. He was the family’s. He doesn't say enforcer, he doesn't say anything, he just says he was theirs. He belonged to the family

He was raised in the guest house on the Harlowe place. Sent out when they needed something gone. He found the ledger, and he found her name and the three words next to it, and that night he went up to the big house with a knife. He didn't come out until there were nine of them on the floor.

"Nine?" I repeat.

"There was one I left." He's looking past me now, at the map on the wall, at the circle around the cemetery. "The youngest son. Forty years old, and he'd never once stood in that room without throwing up after. He wasn't a killer. He was a soft man who'd spent his whole life doing what his daddy said. I had him on the floor with the knife at his throat, and I let him up."

His mouth does something that isn't a smile. "I told him to run. I told him if he ever rebuilt what his family had built, I'd come back and finish it. And then I walked into the swamp and let them think the gators had me."

"Judah Harlowe," I say.

"He rebuilt it in three years."

I sit down on the edge of the cot because my legs want me to. My sister's box is still in my hands. I set it beside me, carefully, lid up.

"So kill him."

"I can't get to him."

"You got to nine of them in one night."

"I was inside then. I had a key. I ate at their table." He uncrosses his arms. "Judah hasn't been off his own ground alone since the night I let him up. Not once. Not to church, not to court. He's got twelve men around that house, dogs in the yard, cameras on the road, and he knows exactly who taught the twelve men how to shoot, because it was me. I could get in. I could probably get to him. I couldn’t get out, and I'm not interested in dying for him."

"So you've spent six years killing his men."

"I've spent six years taking his hands off, one finger at a time." He steps to the map and puts his own finger on the cemetery. "And waiting for the one night a year he has to come out and stand in the open."

The gathering.

"Halloween," I say.