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"About what?"

"Ring business." He puts the phone away and looks past me at the pasture while he says the rest. "When there's something to tell, I'll tell you."

Ozzie is the bookie who works his gate on fight nights, but there aren't any fight nights right now. Knox called them off the morning after Hector found me. This morning's deal covers where he goes, not what he knows. That's twice today he's looked somewhere else rather than at me, once over my father and once over Ozzie. I don't push him now, but I'm not letting either one go.

"Tonight Beckett's in the cedar on that ranch road till first light," he says. "If anybody walks up on him, he backs out and calls me. Hector's on my gate, and I'm in the house."

I bring the soaked cubes out from the wash rack and hold the bucket on my hip while Sadie eats. There's a name I've never explained to him, but I'm ready to now.

"That first morning, you heard me through the door," I say. "You heard me say a name."

"Sandy."

He doesn't push. He leans on the rail beside me and waits me out.

"Before the cellar, they kept me in a barn a long way from here, out on the Thornton routes," I say. "The floor was plywood laid over concrete, and the whole place stank of cattle. At night they zip-tied us along the walls with our wrists in front of us. Sandy was one of us."

"Tell me about her."

"She stole water off the truck when the men weren't watching. She made every girl in that barn say her own real name out loud every night, so none of us forgot who we were." My hand tightens on the bucket's rim. "The new girls would cry and refuse, and Sandy would sit with them until they said it. Some of them only kept eating because of her."

"One night they took her out, and she never came back." I don't let my voice break. "I still say my name every night because of her. I say hers, too, so somebody does."

Knox doesn't say anything. He takes the empty bucket from me and sets it down, and he stays close enough that I could touch him.

"She gave us lines to learn," I say. "Once, when they moved some of us, Sandy had to ride up front in the truck, because there wasn't room in the back. They sat idling at a gate, and the driver got a call. There was a paper on the dash with S.H. in the corner. Afterward, Sandy made every one of us learn what the driver said on that phone, word for word."

I look Knox straight in the face and say it the way she made us say it.

"It was a director's exception. S.H. signed it himself. Nobody at the gate opens a director's exception."

"Who's S.H.?"

"Sandy didn't know. None of us did."

"A loaded truck that needs a piece of paper to get through a gate." Knox says it slowly. "I've hauled cattle through every kind of gate there is. Sale barns, rest yards, state inspection stations. There's always a man at the gate who wants to see your paper. If nobody at that gate opens a director's exception, my guess is nobody looks in the back."

"Sandy said if any of us ever got out, somebody had to say it to a cop. I haven't said it to a cop. I taught it to a girl named Penny the night before they moved me, so somebody else would still have it. You're the first person outside that barn who's heard it."

He takes his hat off, shoves a hand through his hair, and jams the hat back on hard enough to crease the brim.

"We'll find you a cop Harlan didn't own," he says. "Jesse's woman is a federal agent. Harlan grabbed her the night Hector found you. She was never his."

"Not yet."

"Delilah."

"I said not yet." I hold his eyes. "That line is the only proof I carried out of there. I'm not handing it to anybody until I've got something to put next to it besides my word and the word of a girl who never came back."

Knox looks at me a long time. When he speaks, he says her name quietly, the way I said it.

"Sandy," he says. "We'll get you something to put next to it."

At dusk a plate of chicken-fried steak shows up on my step with a fork stabbed upright in the gravy, so Knox is up and cooking again. After I eat, I write a note and stick it to the guest house door, the way his rule says, so he'll know where I am if he comes looking.

Main house.

At his back door, I punch in the code, and the light on the keypad turns from red to green.