I spent three years ministering in prisons, I’ve seen bad people up close, psychopaths with no conscience whatsoever, but still, in all my life I think I’ve only met three people with a completely unsubmitted will, three people whom I consider evil. One was the mother of a childhood friend, whose evil I recognized only upon reflection long after the friend had killed himself. One was in the clergy, believe it or not. And one was Lawrence Cutlip. It took me a while to see it, they all cleverly hide it behind a veneer of good intentions, but see it I did, and it sent shivers. Nothing existed to temper his desire. Whatever he wanted was right, whoever opposed him was wrong, everything he did was justified and proper, everything in this universe existed for the purpose of serving him. You could see it in the way he dealt with people, the way he dealt with problems, the way, finally, he dealt the cards. It was subtle, but not too subtle for someone trained to see the flip of the finger and the distinct sound of cards slipped from the bottom of the deck at crucial points in the game.

Before the father of the twins died, Cutlip had been a worthless drunk, surviving out of garbage cans and by petty thefts. Suddenly, in one tragic accident, he gained a house, a family, a certain amount of money, and still he talked about how he sacrificed his life to raise his sister’s family, how he suffered to raise them right. What he did on the surface seemed righteous, but there is always, in evil people, a desperate attempt to portray themselves as the souls of righteousness. And just as inevitably, whenever a portion of the evil slips from that false cover of propriety, they are quick to angrily blame someone else for the evil deed.

So I spent part of my time examining the inner demons of Lawrence Cutlip and being frightened by what I found. And I spent another part of my time reading a volume of the complete poems of a certain female author with whom at least one of the twins had identified. “The world is blood-hot and personal,” she wrote, and in every line there were expressions of anger, madness, despair. I am no scholar, and much of the poetry, I must admit, was indecipherable to me, but other of it was crystal clear. “Dying is an art, like everything else,” she wrote. “I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell.” And still other of it caused in me a deep alarm. “The child’s cry melts in the wall.” I couldn’t stop myself from imagining the stifled cries of another young girl. There was one poem in particular that struck me. It was called “Daddy,” and knowing of the similar timing of the father’s death in the lives of Sylvia Plath and the Prouix twins, I seized on it immediately. The poem told of the author’s attempt to come to grips with the choices she made in the wake of her father’s absence, and when I read it as a clue into the mind of a fifteen-year-old girl, one line in particular seized me with terror. “Every woman adores a fascist,” wrote the poet, “the boot in the face, the brute brute heart of a brute like you.”

HAILEY WOULDN’T much talk to me after my visit to her house. Oh, she still stopped by now and then, and we chatted, and she gave me updates on Roylynn’s condition at the home and of the fine things Roylynn had written about it, but there seemed to be something diminished about her. Everything about Hailey seemed smaller, her energy, her smile, even her size, everything but her sadness. Whenever I tried to steer the conversation to God or love or any difficulties in her own life, she turned our discussion in some innocuous direction. And whenever I tried to bring up her uncle, she said something bland and then quickly left. She had shut me out, whether because of what had happened to Roylynn or because of my new seeming friendship with her uncle, I couldn’t tell, but I could see that she still was troubled, and I understood that now more than ever she needed my help.

Then, suddenly, almost overnight, she changed completely. There was joy where there had been only sadness, and the dazzling smile was back. I commented on the transformation, and she smiled as young lovers smile, and I can’t tell you how happy I was to see it. Yes, me, a man of God, happy to see a lover’s smile on a young girl’s face.

“Tell me about him,” I said one afternoon.

“Who?” she said, though she knew whom I meant.

“The boy.”

“Oh, Reverend, I eat boys like…”

“Just cut out the act and tell me about him,” I said.

Her smile grew. “He plays baseball,” she said, “and he’s gorgeous, and I feel like, I don’t know, like I can actually talk to him.”

I had heard the rumors, and I assumed she was talking about Grady Pritchett. I didn’t like Grady, thought there was nothing to him except arrogance and entitlement, but I welcomed anything that got her out of that house, away from that evil. I was still worried about Roylynn, of course, but suddenly I felt hope for Hailey, as if she had finally escaped from a nightmare.

And then they found the body of the Sterrett boy in the lake at the belly of the quarry.

I WASN’T a part of the official probe. I know you’ve already talked to the chief, and so I’ll let stand whatever it was he says about what they found and how they investigated. That wing of the Sterrett family were buried in our cemetery, but they were not members of our congregation, and so, beyond the normal sadness I have upon learning of the death of any promising youth, I didn’t think this much affected the Prouixs or me. But then I heard that maybe it was Grady Pritchett they were looking at as the killer. And then I heard that this Jesse Sterrett, whom I knew to be a good-looking boy, had been the best baseball prospect to come out of the county in fifty years. I knew then that Hailey was somehow at the heart of this tragedy, and I sought her out.

I looked for her at the house, the school, I asked her friends. No one knew where she was, no one had seen her. Up and down the valley I drove, searching to no avail while the bitter lines of the poetry I had been reading tied themselves into knots in my mind. “And I am the arrow,” wrote the poet, “the dew that flies suicidal.” On the spur of the moment I thought to check the quarry.

There was yellow tape around the fence, but I ducked under it and through the rip in the fencing and clambered down the steep slope to the narrow ledge above the water. There, behind a large outcropping, curled like a lizard in hiding, I found her.

I stooped beside her on the ledge and said nothing for a long moment and waited for her to acknowledge my presence, which she failed to do.

“He was the one,” I said finally.

She gave no answer.

“He was the one, Hailey, the one who brought a smile to your lips and a flush to your cheeks.”

“Stop,” she said quietly.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. I don’t, don’t know.”

“No? They say it was Grady Pritchett that did it. The police are centering their investigation on him.”

“It wasn’t Grady.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Because Grady is a coward.”

“Maybe he is, but he’s the one they’re looking at. He’s the one who will shoulder the blame even if it was someone else that did the deed.”

“Maybe it was an accident.”

“Yes, maybe. Wonderful athletes often are the clumsiest in their footing. But tell me, Hailey, who knew about you and the Sterrett boy?”

“No one, kids at school maybe.”

“Did your uncle?”

She looked at me, her red-rimmed eyes.

“’To do justice and judgment is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice.’ Don’t hide it, Hailey, tell me. Who did this to young Jesse? Who did this to you?”

“Stop. Please.”

“I think I know.”

“You don’t know anything.”