Charles walked down the stairs behind the sheriff. They had emerged in the hallway at the back of the first floor before Charles thought to ask, “And what brought you out here, Sheriff?”

“The prisoner broke jail this morning.” Jessop walked down the hall, heading toward the front door.

Charles kept his silence, reasoning that if he did grab the sheriff by the lapels of his blazer, if he demanded to know if Mallory had been hurt, it might indicate something more than a passing interest in the erstwhile prisoner. “You were looking for her here?”

The sheriff seemed almost sheepish when he turned around to face Charles. “Maybe you saw that old black Lab outside?”

Charles nodded.

“That was Kathy’s dog. I had this silly-ass idea that she might come back for him.” He shrugged and smiled. “Well, I’m that kind of a fool.”

Charles suspected the sheriff was many things, but not that. However, he had never suspected Mallory of harboring any sentimental feelings for dogs. She was compulsively neat, and dogs left hair on the furniture, didn’t they? But now he toyed with the ludicrous idea that the dog had also been expecting Mallory to come back.

“She’s armed and dangerous, Mr. Butler. So I’d rather you stayed out of her way if she does show up. And the jailbreak is one more thing I wish you’d keep to yourself. I don’t need these woods full of vigilante Lauries and guns. Wouldn’t be so bad, but half of ‘em can’t shoot straight, and they might wipe out an innocent tree.”

“Why can’t you just let her go? You really had no right to hold her.”

“Like I said before, she’s a material witness to her mother’s murder. It’s all legal.”

“So it was the mother’s murder, not Babe’s. I rather doubt that she could have been here when her mother died. Why would the mob let her go if she was a witness to the stoning?”

“I know she was here that day. She was supposed to be on a riverboat trip with every other kid in her school. But they crossed her off the boarding list as a no-show. Her teacher said she’d had the sniffles on Friday. So Cass probably kept her home with a cold.”

“Mallory could have been truant and elsewhere. You can’t know that she was in the house when the murder occurred.”

“Oh, yes I can. You need a guided tour, Mr. Butler. You can’t really appreciate what happened here, not looking at the house the way it is now.”

The sheriff opened the double doors to the drawing room and pointed to the side window. “The stoning happened outside the house on that side of the yard. That’s where the bastards left her for dead. But she wasn’t dead – not yet.”

He opened the front door and pointed down at the floorboards. “Seventeen years ago, Cass’s blood was all over those front stairs and the porch.” The sheriff looked down at the floor of the foyer now. “Where the old carpet used to be, there was a blood trail. You could make out her handprints as she dragged her body into the house.”

The sheriff moved over to the banister. “The blood trail led up the stairs – handprints and smears. She was mortally wounded, but she managed a flight of stairs. And do you know why? She was trying to get to her little girl.”

He climbed the stairs, and Charles followed him. “I followed the blood up to Kathy’s bedroom.” Jessop turned into the second door off the hallway. He walked to the center of the room and looked down at the floor. “And this is where the trail just disappeared in a lake of blood. This is where Cass died. So this is the way I see it. When she came into the room, Kathy was locked behind that closet door over there. But Cass just couldn’t make it that far.”

The sheriff moved over to the closet and opened the door. A shaft of sun streamed down from a high window, a common light source in the closets of old houses predating electricity. “Well, you should have seen the job that little kid did on this door, fighting her way out to get to her mother. Kathy demolished that bottom panel, and it was real solid construction. I figure she had to throw her body into the wood a hundred times to break it. And she cut up her hands pulling the wood out so she could crawl through. That was the worst of it for me, finding those tiny bloody prints inside the closet, and the track of Kathy’s own blood to the place where her mother fell. Can you picture that?”

Charles shook his head. “If she was locked in there, she couldn’t have seen the stoning or identified the killers.” He pointed to the square of light near the top of the closet’s rear wall. “That window is too high for a full-grown adult to see anything but blue sky.”

“Maybe so. But she knows something. She might know who took Cass’s body away. Or maybe her mother was able to tell her something before she died.”

“So you’re going to hunt Mallory down like an animal. She’s the victim, the innocent.”

“It’s my call. The mob that killed her mother is still out there. And who do you suppose they’d most like to see dead? Unless you give Ira away, the only witness is your good friend, Mallory.”

The two men stared at one another in an uneasy silence.

“This is very personal to you, isn’t it, Sheriff?”

“You got that one right, Mr. Butler. It’s just real damn personal. Let me tell you the other little detail that keeps me awake at night. Cass locked Kathy in the closet and probably told her to keep quiet. Maybe she made a game of it. I figure Cass saw them coming from the bedroom window, and there was just time to save Kathy. The mob figured on Cass being alone in the house. Damn near every kid in town was supposed to be on that riverboat. Now if Kathy had heard her mother screaming, you think she would have kept quiet? Not that kid. So it’s a safe bet she didn’t hear anything at all.”

“What about the noise from the mob?”

“I told you it was a quiet kill. They never made any noise – no yelling – nothing like what you’d expect. Maybe there was some conversation. She might have overheard that. And later there might have been words between Kathy and her mother – I’m hoping for words, but Kathy never heard screams. I figure Cass kept quiet all the time those bastards were taking turns at her with rocks. She didn’t want them to know the kid was in the house. Can you picture it? I can. I see it every damn day of my life. I see a woman standing up to a mob, terrified, in pain, and never letting out a sound. I couldn’t have done that. Could you?”

The sheriff stepped into the hall. “One of them came back for the body.” He pointed toward the back stairs. “She must have been carried out that way. By the time I got here, those steps had been wiped clean, and the hall carpet was damp between this room and the back stairs, like somebody’d scrubbed it. Odd thing, isn’t it? One staircase full of blood, and the other one tidied up.”

In silence, they walked down the main staircase and left the house. The sheriff was standing by the open door of his car when the dog came back to the front yard.

“I couldn’t stop what was done to the mother, but no one will get to the kid. I guarantee that. I’ll get her back and she’ll stay in jail until she talks to me. And remember, Mr. Butler, word about the jailbreak will be out soon enough. Don’t speed it up, all right?”

The dog came slow and growling. His teeth were bared, and they seemed longer. He looked larger, too, as he headed for the sheriff, eyes glowing red in a trick of the light. He snarled and snapped at the air, biting a path to the man. The old dog was possessed by a completely different animal, younger, with purpose and teeth. There was a deadly occupation in the stalking stride.

Jessop never moved. He showed no fear of the dog, as though he and the animal had been through this before. The sheriff only waited patiently until the growling subsided.

The dog stopped ten feet from the man. He raised his muzzle and sniffed at the air. Then the old Lab lost his footing in a sorry confusion of missteps and nearly fell. In that moment, he was made old again, gray and slow. He turned and walked away, moving with a pitiful drag of the hind leg.