“It's your story, Henri. Tell it however you want.”

Henri leaned back in his canvas chair, folded his hands over his tight gut, and began at the beginning.

“I grew up in the sticks, a little farming town on the edge of nothing. My parents had a chicken farm, and I was their only child. They had a crappy marriage. My father drank. He beat my mother. He beat me. She beat me, and she also took some shots at him.”

Henri described the creaking four-room farmhouse, his room in the attic over his parents' bedroom.

“There was a crack between two floorboards,” he told me. “I couldn't actually see their bed, but I could see shadows, and I could hear what they were doing. Sex and violence. Every night. I slept over that.”

Henri described the three long chicken houses – and how at the age of six, his father put him in charge of killing chickens the old-fashioned way, decapitation with an axe on a wooden block.

“I did my chores like a good boy. I went to school. I went to church. I did what I was told and tried to duck the blows. My father not only clocked me regularly, but he also humiliated me.

“My mom. I forgive her. But for years I had a recurring dream about killing them both. In the dream, I pinned their heads to that old stump in the chicken yard, swung the axe, and watched their headless bodies run.

“For a while after I woke up from that dream, I'd think it was true. That I'd really done it.”

Henri turned to me.

“Life went on. Can you picture me, Ben? Cute little kid with an axe in my hand, my overalls soaked with blood?”

“I can see you. It's a sad story, Henri. But it sounds like a good place to start the book.”

Henri shook his head. “I've got a better place.”

“Okay. Shoot.”

Henri hunched over his knees and clasped his hands. He said, “I would start the movie of my life at the summer fair. The scene would center on me and a beautiful blond girl named Lorna.”

Chapter 81

I constantly checked the recorder, saw that the wheels were slowly turning.

A dry breeze blew across the sands, and a lizard ran across my shoe. Henri raked both hands through his hair, and he seemed nervous, agitated. I hadn't seen this kind of fidgety behavior in him before. It made me nervous, too.

“Please set the scene, Henri. This was a county fair?”

“You could call it that. Agriculture and animals were on one side of the main path. Carnival rides and food were on the other. No breadcrumbs, Ben. This could have happened outside Wengen or Chipping Camden or Cowpat, Arkansas.

“Don't worry about where it was. Just see the bright lights on the fairgrounds, the happy people, and the serious animal competitions. Business deals were at stake here, people's farms and their futures.

“I was fourteen,” he continued. “My parents were showing exotic chickens in the fowl tent. It was getting late, and my father told me to get the truck from the private lot for exhibitor's vehicles, upfield from the fairgrounds.

“On the way, I cut through one of the food pavilions and I saw Lorna selling baked goods,” he said.

“Lorna was my age and was in my class at school. She was blond, a little shy. She carried her books in front of her chest, so you couldn't see her breasts. But you could see them anyway. There was nothing about Lorna I didn't want.”

I nodded, and Henri went on with his story.

“That day I remember she was wearing a lot of blue. Made her hair look even more blond, and when I said hi to her, she seemed glad to see me. Asked me if I wanted to get something to eat at the fairgrounds.

“I knew my father would kill me when I didn't come back with the truck, but I was willing to take the beating, that's how crazy I was about that beautiful girl.”

Henri described buying Lorna a cookie and said that they'd gone on a ride together, that she'd grabbed his hand when the roller coaster made its swooping descent.

“All the while I felt a wild kind of tenderness toward this girl. After the ride,” Henri said, “another boy came over, Craig somebody. He was a couple of years older. He looked right past me and told Lorna that he had tickets to the Ferris wheel, that it was unreal how the fairgrounds looked with the stars coming out and everything lit up down below.

“Lorna said, 'Oh, I'd love to do that,' and she turned to me, and said, 'You don't mind, do you?' and she took off with this guy.

“Well, I did mind, Ben.

“I watched them go, and then I went to get the truck and my beating. It was dark up in that lot, but I found my dad's truck next to a livestock trailer.

“Standing outside the trailer was another girl I knew from school, Molly, and she had a couple of calves with show ribbons on their halters. She was trying to load them into the trailer, but they wouldn't go.

“I offered to help her,” Henri told me. “Molly said, 'No, thanks. I've got it,' something like that, and tried to shove those calves up the ramp by herself.

“I didn't like the way she said that, Ben. I felt she had crossed a line.

“I grabbed a shovel that was leaning against the trailer, and as Molly turned her back to me, I swung the shovel against the back of her head. There was the one loud smack, a sound that thrilled me, and she went down.”

Henri stopped speaking. A long moment dragged on, but I waited him out.

Then he said, “I dragged her into the trailer, shut the tailgate. By now she'd started to wail. I told her no one would hear her, but she wouldn't stop.

“My hands went around her neck, and I choked her as naturally as if I was reenacting something I'd done before. Maybe I had, in my dreams.”

Henri twisted his watchband and looked away into the desert. When he turned back, his eyes were flat.

“As I was choking her, I heard two men walking by, talking. Laughing. I was squeezing her neck so hard that my hands hurt, so I adjusted my grip and choked her again until Molly stopped breathing.

“I let go of her throat, and she took another breath, but she wasn't wailing anymore. I slapped her – and I got hard. I stripped off her clothes, turned her over, and did her, my hands around her throat the whole time, and when I was done, I strangled her for good.”

“What went through your mind as you were doing this?”

“I just wanted it to keep going. I didn't want the feeling to stop. Imagine what it was like, Ben, to climax with the power of life and death in your hands. I felt I had earned the right to do this. Do you want to know how I felt? I felt like God.”

Chapter 82

I was awoken the next morning when the trailer door rolled open, and light, almost white sunlight, poured in. Henri was saying, “I've got coffee and rolls, for you, bud. Eggs, too. Breakfast for my partner.”

I sat up on the foldaway bed, and Henri lit the stove, beat the eggs in a bowl, made the frying pan sizzle. After I'd eaten, we began work under the awning. I kept turning it over in my mind: Henri had confessed to a murder. Somewhere, a fourteen-year-old girl had been strangled at a county fair. A record of her death would still exist.

Would Henri really let me live knowing about that girl?

Henri went back to the story of Molly, picked up where he'd left off the night before.

He was animated, using his hands to show me how he'd dragged Molly's body into the woods, buried it under piles of leaves, said that he was imagining the fear that would spread from the fairgrounds to the surrounding towns when Molly was reported missing.

Henri said that he'd joined the search for Molly, put up posters, went to the candlelight vigil, all the while cherishing his secret, that he'd killed Molly and had gotten away with it.

He described the girl's funeral, the white coffin under the blanket of flowers, how he'd watched the people crying, but especially Molly's family, her mother and father, the siblings.