Page 89

Under that, in darker ink, are two initials in heavy block capitals, put there the way a man signs the back of a check to hand it over.

K.H.

My throat goes hot where his knuckles rested this morning. I can still feel them there, warm and still, and my stomach rolls over. I grab the top of the stall door with my free hand to keep my feet.

I've watched those capitals go onto paper. At his kitchen table, Knox wrote NEVER IN ANGER under my list of limits in the feed store's carbon receipt book, and then he signed it K. HOLLISTER. The K has the same long, hard slash. The H has the same crossbar driven out past both legs.

Earlier this morning, I watched him print STRACKBEIN on his map in the same hand.

"Rusk keeps copies of the paper Whitlock buys," Audrey says. "Whitlock holds the original card. Rusk put this copy in the file next to Hollister's name on the associates line. He wanted me thinking you ran from your daddy's debt straight to the man who sold it. He wanted me looking hard at Hollister and nowhere near Whitlock."

My father bet on Knox's fights. That's what he wouldn't tell me on the church walk, bent over his broken coffee cup. 'It doesn't matter now.'

The fights were Knox's, and the house was Knox's. The initials on the back of the marker that put me on my knees in Coleman Whitlock's cellar are his.

Torres sat at his kitchen table and asked who sold Whitlock the marker. Knox's hand went flat on the table, and he didn't say a word in front of a federal agent.

Every time I asked Knox about my father, he told me not yet.

Knox knew it the day I told him Coleman bought Daddy's marker. He knew it this morning with his knuckles at my throat, and he asked me for someday anyway.

I look up at Beckett in the doorway. He isn't surprised. He looks at the page in my hand, and then he looks at the floor.

"You knew," I say.

Beckett's jaw tightens. "I told him to tell you, or I would." He makes himself look at me. "I should have done it myself."

I turn to Audrey. "You had this page when you sat at his north fence with your binoculars."

"I did." She meets my eyes. "I didn't know what kind of man he was. I'm not sure I know now."

"Does Hollister know you have it?"

"Not yet," Audrey says. "He knows what he initialed."

I fold the page in half, then in half again. My hands won't hold still, so I press the creases down hard with my thumb.

Audrey's phone buzzes in her jacket pocket. She takes it out and looks at the screen, and her face goes white.

"I don't know this number," she says. She turns the phone around and holds it out to me.

It's a photograph. Hector sits on a concrete floor with his back against pale rock. One side of his face is swollen, and that eye is shut. Blood has dried in his gray mustache. His wrists are bound in front of him with a zip tie.

His other eye is open. He's looking right into the lens, and he's alive.

The plastic is black, pulled tight into his skin. For a second my own wrists burn under my cuffs, the way they did on that concrete floor when the plastic bit in. I make myself look at Hector's face instead.

The floor under him is poured concrete, and the wall behind him is raw limestone where the pouring stopped. The back wall of my cell looked just like that. I can't swear it's the same cellar.

Under the photo there's a text.

Rusk paid you to bring her in. Finish the job. Hollister's gate man came running when he heard a girl crying in the ditch. The preacher's girl walks up Whitlock's front drive by sundown Monday. By herself. Anybody comes with her, the old man goes in the ground next to Royce. Tell her Dutch is still asking after her.

Hector sat on a bale with me in the barn until Knox came, and he never switched on his flashlight. Of course he went out to a girl crying in the dark. Daddy preached the Good Samaritan every summer. He never once mentioned that the man who needed help might be bait.

I don't know who was crying. If there was a girl in Coleman's cellar last night, Dutch could have hauled her down to that ditch and made her cry.

"Rusk had my number," Audrey says. "Rusk works for Whitlock. And it showed up while I'm standing on Hollister's place."