“I don’t know,” she said. “But she ain’t here.”

“How long has she been staying with you?”

“Just for one night,” she said. “But she may be staying here a little while longer.”

“Why isn’t she at home with her family?”

“Because she says it ain’t safe there. She says Ben’s taken to drinking and blaming her for what’s happened.”

“Why doesn’t she feel safe? Has he threatened to hurt her?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “You’d have to ask her about it, but you saw for yourself what he did to those boys who came out from the church on Sunday night.”

“I did,” I said. “But there’s a lot of men who would’ve done them the same way.”

“Would you have?” she asked.

“I can’t say that I would have,” I told her. “Maybe at one time, yes. But a young man’s got more fire in him. An old man like me tends to think about things a little more deeply.” She looked away, and I sat and stared at the side of her face. I knew she could feel my eyes on her. “Has anybody told you not to talk to me about this?”

“Nobody tells me what to do,” she snapped. “Nobody ever has. I’ve been at that church since I was a young woman, and not once has anybody ever told me what to do.” I sat back in the chair and stared at her for a second, and then I looked away and noted the tidiness of her kitchen. The shiny utensils hanging over the stove. The clear glass above the sink through which the sunlight poured.

“I know you’ve got a mind of your own,” I said. “And I know it led you to take the children out of that church. And because of that, I know there has to be some good reason for Christopher being in there on Sunday night,” I said. “I believe they might’ve told you what it was.”

“Folks told me they were trying to heal him,” she said.

“And how were they doing that,” I asked, “by smothering him to death?”

“It was an accident,” she said. “And you well know it.”

“Do you think he needed healing?”

“No, I don’t,” she said. “But that’s not for me to say, and it’s not for you to judge either. You didn’t know that little boy. You don’t know what he went through with some of those kids picking on him. You don’t know what his family went through all these years.”

“I know he’s dead,” I said. “And I know his daddy wasn’t there and his mama won’t stay put long enough for me to ask her about it. I know that, but it ain’t enough to make sense of.”

“You can’t make sense of everything,” she said. “That ain’t the job of man.”

“It’s my job to make the best sense I can, and I’m more than willing to leave the rest to Him, if that’s what you mean. But sometimes I need a little help. That’s why I came out here to talk to you.”

“I wish I knew how to help you,” she said.

I leaned forward and put my elbows on the table. “Has Carson Chambliss told you not to talk to me?”

She stood up quick and pushed back her chair. It made an awful scraping sound as it slid over the hardwood. She walked to the sink and leaned her hips into the counter. Her back was to me, and I imagined her eyes flitting across the grass and scanning the yard while taking full measure of the way the tone of my voice had arched around my words.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I watched her shoulders drop. “I just want to be sure that folks know they can talk to me. I want them to feel safe because I need to find out what happened.”

“I’d tell you if I knew,” she said, turning to face me. “I can promise you that. I may be an old woman, but nobody tells me what to think or how to do, especially Carson Chambliss.” She folded her arms across her chest, and I watched as she appeared to pull herself inward. Her brief anger softened into a sadness that spread out across her face. Her eyes grew wet.

“I love those children,” she said. “All of them. I love every single one of them like they’re my own. And to lose one of them, especially Christopher…” Her voice trailed off.

I sat and listened to her and watched her eyes fill with tears, but I was somewhere else, listening to my own voice over hers. She doesn’t know what she’s saying. She’s an old woman and she’s never raised her own and she doesn’t know what it is to lose one. And she’s not a man and she doesn’t know what it is to watch a mother grieve. I stared straight ahead and watched as it all came back to me. The dappled snow on the rhododendron. The silence me and Owens suffered as we stood over Jeff’s body, smoke rising from his boots and catching in my nose and in my throat until I wanted to puke. I could tell her about dreams, I thought. About how at night I wake from white-hot sparks hissing from my son’s toes while the current holds him on the line. But those are dreams, and there ain’t no place for them in the daylight. Not now, anyway. Not here.

I looked past my own memories, and I tried to picture Adelaide Lyle’s face twenty years younger and wet with tears. I figured my arms would grow heavy with her just as they’d grown heavy with Sheila, and that her sadness would work itself into the core of my being and leave a hollowed-out place that couldn’t ever be filled. I knew that real loss isn’t something you feel after watching a child once a week while his mama sings hymns. It takes a lifetime to build equity in loss. There ain’t nothing before that.

“You talk to Pastor Chambliss yet?” she asked me.

“No,” I said. “You’re the first person I came to. But I can tell you that I plan to visit him as soon as I find out where he lives.”

“Well, I might can help you with that,” she said.

“I’d appreciate it,” I said. “But will you tell me something else?”

“Depends on what it is,” she said. “Depends on whether or not I know what it is you’re asking about.”

“After going to that church for all these years,” I said, “and after spending all that time with those folks, what was it that led you to take the children out of there?” It grew quiet inside the house, and I caught myself narrowing my eyes and turning my head like I was listening for something I might not be able to hear. “Was it Chambliss?” I asked. She looked at me, and then she nodded her head. “What was it exactly? I promise I’m not going to say anything to him. There’s no reason for him to know I’ve even been here.”

I could tell that she was thinking about the promise I’d just made, and I knew she was wondering whether or not I could keep it. And apparently she decided that I could.

“This ain’t the first time it’s happened,” she said.

“What do you mean ‘this ain’t the first time’?” I asked.

“This ain’t the first time somebody’s died from all that carrying on,” she said. “And as I sit here telling you this, it becomes clearer and clearer to me that I should’ve tried to keep them from taking Christopher into that church in the first place. I don’t know that I could’ve stopped them even if I’d wanted to, but I didn’t even try. And now, here we are.” And then she said a name I hadn’t thought about in years and years: Molly Jameson.

S

EVENTEEN

IT TOOK ME TWO DAYS OF LOOKING AND ASKING AROUND, BUT ON Thursday evening I headed out to Little Pine Creek in the South Marshall Township, where Chambliss was renting an old farmhouse from a deacon named Phil Ponder. The two-lane road ran along the creek, and the land opened up as I headed down into the cove. You could tell that autumn was bearing down on us because the leaves on the trees atop the ridge were just starting to get notions of color. I drove past the scarred, rocky outcrops until I got low enough to follow the creek on my right. I took a little one-lane bridge across it and headed down a gravel road until I drove into a clearing where a little house and a barn sat way back off the road.