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My initials are at the end of it. Her daddy bet on my fights and lost more than a preacher makes in a year. I wanted that debt off my books, and Whitlock buys up debts nobody else can collect, then collects them himself. I sold him the preacher's marker and initialed the sale without a second thought. I never once asked what a deacon wanted with his own preacher's debt.

Back then it was a dirty piece of ring business, no worse than plenty of others in Ozzie's books. When she disappeared, it turned into a question I asked myself every day for a year. I couldn't prove that sale had anything to do with her, so I never told a soul. When she turned up in my hay, I quit wanting to know the answer, because I was afraid of it.

"He's your daddy's deacon," I say. "I went to every man who sat in that church."

It's true. It isn't why I went to Whitlock.

She looks at me a long time, with the same narrow look she gave me across my porch rail the other night. She's trying to see what I'm not saying.

The suspicion goes out of her face, and her chin starts to shake.

"You kept looking," she says. "You told me you sat at Daddy's table. You never told me you kept looking."

"Every honky-tonk lot from here to Kerrville, starting with the Cattle Guard. Every truck stop. Every back road out of town, at night, with a spotlight." My jaw tightens. "I shoved a drunk roughneck against his own tailgate after closing time, because he bragged that he knew where the preacher's girl went. He didn't know a damn thing. Nobody did."

She blinks hard, fighting the tears.

"All year I thought nobody looked past Daddy's word," she says.

"I looked."

She reaches out of the quilt and lays her palm on my forearm, right beside the ink. Her hand has gone warm again. She leaves it there.

"Tell me about the cellar," I say. "You stop when you want to stop."

She's quiet so long I figure that's my answer. When she does talk, she gives it to me in pieces, and she watches my face after each one to see what I'll do with it.

"There's a door at the back of the barrel room," she says. "It opens on stone stairs that go down into the hill. One step near the bottom groans when you put weight on it. At the bottom there's a hallway with cells along one side. Poured concrete, barred doors. The back wall of my cell was raw limestone where they quit pouring."

I don't move. Under the quilt my arm stays around her, below her ribs.

"The hallway runs to a tunnel," she says. "The tunnel comes out on a service road below the building. On transfer nights I'd hear a truck back into the tunnel and idle there until the exhaust came down the hall. The cells would empty out. A while later they'd fill up again with girls I'd never seen."

"He kept you there the whole time?"

"Only the last few weeks. Before that, they had me somewhere else. He kept me back from every truck. I thought he was keeping me to make Daddy pay. Daddy never paid a dime. I was the one paying it off, every transfer night." She looks away from me. "Then I cost him more than the debt was worth."

Her daddy owed Whitlock money. She hasn't said which debt, but the only paper of the preacher's I know Whitlock holds is the marker I sold him. If that's the debt she was made to pay off on those transfer nights, then the sale I initialed in Ozzie's book is how she ended up in that cellar. I've suspected it for a year, and I still can't prove it.

I keep the guilt off my face. She's still watching me after every word.

She just told me about that cellar for the first time, with her ribs cracked and her hand on my arm. If I tell her about the sale now, this stops being about what was done to her and turns into what I did. I want that page in my hand before I say a word about it, so I can show her exactly what I sold and to whom.

Those are good reasons. They're also convenient ones, and I know it. Every night I keep this from her will cost me more when she finds out. And she will find out. I keep my mouth shut anyway.

"On transfer nights the men came down," she says. "They wore rubber masks and sat in leather chairs in a smoke-filled room. They made me kneel on the stone floor and keep my eyes down." Her voice stays level, but her fingers press into my arm. "So I kept my eyes on the floor and learned their voices instead. I couldn't swear to a single face, but I'd know every one of those voices if I heard it again."

She doesn't say what else they did to her in that room. I've seen the bruises on her ribs, and I watched her freeze in my bed and stare straight through me.

I don't make her say it.

"Who held the keys?"

"One of his men." She opens her mouth again, then shuts it and looks at the window. She knows more about him, and she's keeping it.

If I asked again in the voice I use to stop a fight in my ring, I'd have his name out of her. I don't ask it. She'd hand it over, and she'd hate me for the voice I used to get it.

"Promise me you won't go out there," she says.