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"You drew me his barrel instead."

"I drew you a place to start looking." Her chin comes up. "In case I go missing again."

Under the quilt, my left hand spreads across her bare hip and pulls her tight against my side. She isn't going missing again. Not from my bed, and not from this county.

My right hand closes into a fist in her lap. The ink stretches across the tendons of my forearm.

"This morning he turned around in that pew and held his hand out to you," I say. "You went white and walked out in the middle of a hymn. Why?"

She takes a long time to answer.

"I know his voice," she says. "Down there, he sat in the corner where the lamp didn't reach. He never touched anybody. He watched, and when he told them to stop, they stopped." She swallows. "The night I got out, he's the one who ordered them to put me on the truck."

The rage hits me so hard and fast that everything in me goes still. The fist in her lap goes steady. My breathing slows down and evens out.

I've only gone this still one other time, in a parking lot outside San Angelo. That night I put a man in the dirt and didn't quit hitting him until the stock handlers dragged me off. The rodeo association banned me indefinitely.

This morning I left Coleman Whitlock's hand hanging in the air in front of God and the whole church. If I'd known, I'd have broken it.

Delilah studies me. She's waiting for the moment I decide to kill him, and I don't hide it from her.

"Now you know why I didn't tell you," she says.

"Because you think I'll drive out there."

"I know you will. And they'll kill you." She pushes herself up straighter against the headboard, careful of her ribs, with the quilt clamped under her arms. "If they don't, he'll know exactly who talked. And everything down there will be gone before anybody with a badge gets near his gate."

"You think I'm that stupid?"

"I think you're a Hollister."

I don't have an answer for that one.

"How do you know him?" she asks. "Besides the beef."

I could stop at the beef. It's true, and it would end this.

I don't want it to end, because for the first time since Hector found her, she's telling me where they kept her.

"The week after you didn't come home," I say, " I drove out to that winery and sat across his desk and asked him where you were."

She doesn't move.

"He gave me coffee in a china cup," I tell her. "He said the whole congregation was praying for you. He said girls who run off usually come home once the money's gone, and the Lord would bring you back when you were ready. He smiled at me the whole time. It was the same smile he gave you this morning."

"And you left."

"I left. I kept after Harlan to open a file on you, and every time he shut his door on me. When I wouldn't quit, he came up my drive in his county truck and sat down on my porch steps. He told me to stay away from Coleman Whitlock. He said if I bothered a deacon again, he'd raid my fights and haul me to county lockup."

"A sheriff doesn't drive out to your porch to protect a deacon's feelings," she says. "Harlan was protecting Whitlock."

"That's how I read it."

"You'd already been to Daddy's kitchen table," she says slowly. "Out of every man in that church, you went to Whitlock next. Why him?"

The ledger page comes back to me so clear I can see the coffee stain on its corner. Ozzie keeps the ring's books, and that line is in his handwriting.

E. King. Marker sold to C. Whitlock. K.H.