De l'Epée scoots forward. Their knees meet. He touches her arm. "What else?"

"We left town, got onto the highway. We were in Danny's little Toyota. He rebuilt it himself. Everything. He's so good with mechanical things. He's amazing, really. We were going pretty fast."

She pauses for a moment to let the tide of sadness subside. It never does but she takes a deep breath – remembering when she had to take a breath before saying something – and finds herself able to continue. "We were talking in the car."

De l'Epée nods.

"But that means we were signing. And that means we had to look at each other. He kept asking me what I was sad about, that the hearing aids didn't work, was I discouraged, had Dad been hassling me about the farm again?… He…"

She must breathe deeply again.

"Danny was looking at me, not at the road. Oh, God… it was just there, in front of us. I never saw where it came from."

"What?"

"A truck. A big one, carrying a load of metal pipes. I think it changed lanes when Danny wasn't looking and… oh, Jesus, there was nothing he could do. All these pipes coming at us at a thousand miles an hour…"

The blood. All the blood.

"I know he braked, I know he tried to turn. But it was too late. No… Oh, Danny."

Spraying, spraying. Like the blood from the throat of a calf.

"He managed to steer mostly out of the way but one pipe smashed through the windshield. It…"

De l'Epée kneads her hand. "Tell me," he whispers.

"It…" The words are almost impossible to say. "It took his arm off."

Like the blood running down the gutters into the horrible well in the center of the killing room.

"Right at the shoulder." She sobs at the memory. Of the blood. Of the stunned look on her brother's face as he turned to her and spoke for a long moment, saying words she couldn't figure out then and never had the heart to ask him to repeat.

The blood sprayed to the roof of the car and pooled in his lap, while Melanie struggled to get a tourniquet around the stump and screamed and screamed. She, the vocal one. While Danny, still conscious, nodding madly, sat completely mute.

Melanie says to De l'Epée, "The medics got there just a few minutes later and stopped most of the bleeding. They saved his life. They got him to a hospital and the doctors got his arm reattached within a couple of hours. For the past year he's had all sorts of operations. He's having one tomorrow – that's where my parents are. In St. Louis, visiting him. They think he'll get back maybe fifty percent use of his arm eventually. If he's lucky. But he lost all interest in the farm after that. He's pretty much stayed in bed. He reads, watches TV. That's about all. It's like his life is over with…"

"It wasn't your fault," he says. "You're taking the blame, aren't you?"

"A few days after it happened my father called me out on the porch. There's something about him that's funny – I can lip-read him perfectly."

(Like Brutus, she thinks, and wishes she hadn't.)

"He sat on the porch swing and looked up at me and he said, 'I guess you understand what you've done now. You had no business talking Danny into doing something as foolish as that. And for a selfish reason all your own. What happened was your fault, there's no two ways about it. You might just as well've turned the engine over on a corn picker when Danny was working on a jam inside.

" 'God made you damaged and nobody wants it. It's a shame but it's not a sin – as long as you understand what you have to do. Come home now and make up for what you done. Get that teaching of yours over with, get that last year done. You owe your brother that. And you owe me especially.

" 'This is your home and you'll be welcome here. See, it's a question of belonging and what God does to make sure those that oughta stay someplace do. Well, your place is here, working at what you can do, where your, you know, problem doesn't get you into trouble. God's will.' And then he went to spray ammonia, saying, 'So you'll be home then.' It wasn't a question. It was an order. All decided. No debate. He wanted me to come home this last May. But I held off a few months. I knew I'd give in eventually. I always give in. But I just wanted a few more months on my own." She shrugs. "Stalling."

"You don't want the farm?"

"No! I want my music. I want to hear it, not just feel vibrations… I want to hear my lover whisper things to me when I'm in bed with him." She can't believe she's saying these things to him, intimate things – far more intimate than she's ever told anyone. "I don't want to be a virgin anymore."

Now that she's started it's all pouring out. "I hate the poetry, I don't care about it! I never have. It's stupid. Do you know what I was going to do in Topeka? After my recital at the Theater of the Deaf? I had that appointment afterwards." Then his arms are around her and she is pressing against his body, her head on his shoulder. It's an odd experience, doubly so: being close to a man, and communicating without looking at him. "There's something called a cochlear implant." She must pause for a moment before she can continue. "They put a chip in your inner ear. It's connected by wire to this thing, this speech processor that converts the sounds to impulses in the brain… I could never tell Susan. A dozen times I was going to. But she would've hated me. The idea of trying to cure deafness – she hated that."

"Do they work, these implants?"

"They can. I have a ninety percent hearing loss in both ears but that's an average. In some registers I can make out sounds and the implants can boost those. But even if they don't work there are other things to try. There's a lot of new technology that in the next five or six years'll help people like me – grass-roots deaf and peddlers and just ordinary people who want to hear."

She thinks: And I do. I want to hear… I want to hear you whisper things in my ear while we make love.

"I…" He's speaking, his mouth is moving, but the sound dwindles to nothing.

Fading, fading.

No! Talk to me, keep talking to me. What's wrong?

But now it's Brutus who is standing in the doorway of her music room. What are you doing here? Leave! Get out! It's my room. I don't want you here!

He smiles, looks at her ears. "Freak of nature," he says.

Then they were back in the killing room and Brutus wasn't talking to her at all but to Bear, who stood with his arms crossed defensively. The tension between them was like thick smoke.

"You give us up?" Brutus asked Bear.

Bear shook his head and said something she didn't catch.

"They picked them up outside, those little girls."

The twins! They were safe! Melanie relayed this to Beverly and Emily. The younger girl burst into a smile and her fingers stuttered out a spontaneous prayer of thanks.

"You let them go, didn't you?" Brutus asked Bear. "Your plan all along."

Bear shook his head. Said something she didn't catch.

"I talked to…" Brutus snarled.

"Who?" Bear seemed to ask.

'The U.S. attorney you cut a deal with."

Bear's face grew dark. "No way, man. No fucking way."

Wilcox came up behind him and said something. Bear stabbed a finger at Melanie. "She's the one…"

Brutus turned toward her. She gazed back coldly at him then rose and walked slowly over the wet tiles, almost choking on the smell of gasoline. She stopped and stood directly over Donna Harstrawn. With her finger she gestured Brutus forward. Her eyes locked into Bear's, Melanie lifted the woman's skirt a foot or two, revealing bloody thighs. She nodded at Bear.

"You little bitch!" Bear took a step toward her but Brutus caught his arm, pulled Bear's gun from his belt, tossed it to Stoat.

"You stupid asshole!"

"So? I fucked her, so what?"

Brutus lifted an eyebrow and then pulled a gun from his pocket. He pulled the slide and let it snap forward then pushed a button and took out the little metal tube that held the rest of the bullets. He put the pistol in Melanie's hand. It was cold as a rock, it gave her power like raw electrical current and it terrified her.