“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “I know Margery ain’t a murderer but . . . there was something off, something she wasn’t saying.” She looked up at him. “I do know one thing, though. If Van Cleve has any say in this, he’s going to make her chances of getting out of it a whole lot smaller.”

* * *

• • •

Sven sat that night in Margery’s kitchen and told Alice and Fred the whole story. The incident on the mountain ridge, how she had believed McCullough would come after her in revenge, how he had sat out on the porch for two long, cold nights with the rifle across his knees and Bluey at his feet until both were reassured that McCullough had surely slunk back to his falling-down cabin, probably with a sore head and too drunk to remember what the hell he had even done.

“But you have to tell the sheriff!” Alice said. “That means it was self-defense!”

“You think that’s going to help her?” said Fred. “The moment she says she slammed that book into him, they’ll treat it as a confession. She’ll get manslaughter at best. The smartest thing she can do just now is sit tight and hope they don’t have enough evidence to keep her in jail.”

Bail had been set at $25,000—a sum nobody around there could get close to. “It’s the same sum they posted for Henry H. Denhardt, and he point-blank shot his own fiancée.”

“Yup, except being a man, he had friends in high places who could post it for him.”

Nancy Stone had apparently wept when she heard what the sheriff’s men had done with her testimony. She had made her way down the mountain that evening—the first time she had done so in two years—banged on the door of the sheriff’s office and demanded that they let her retell her story. “I said it all wrong!” she said, and cursed, through her missing teeth. “I didn’t know you was gonna arrest Margery! Why, that girl has done nothing but good for me and my sister—for this town, hang you, and that’s how you’re going to repay her?”

There had indeed been a murmur of unease around town at the news of the arrest. But murder was murder, and the McCulloughs and the O’Hares had been the death of each other for generations so far back that nobody could even remember how it all started, just like the Cahills and the Rogersons, and the two branches of the Campbell family. No, Margery O’Hare had always been an odd one, contrary since she could walk, and that was just the way these things went sometimes. She could certainly be cold-hearted too—why, didn’t she sit stone-faced at her own daddy’s funeral without shedding a tear? It didn’t take long for the endless seesaw of public opinion to begin to wonder whether maybe there was something of the devil in her after all.

* * *

• • •

Down in the low-lying little town of Baileyville, deep in the southeastern reaches of Kentucky, the light disappeared slowly behind the hills and not long after, in little houses along Main Street and dotted among the mountains and hollers, the oil lamps flickered and went out, one by one. Dogs called to each other, their howls bouncing off the hillsides, to be scolded by exhausted owners. Babies cried and were, sometimes, comforted. Old people lost themselves in memories of better times and younger ones in the comforts of each other’s bodies, hummed along to the wireless or the distant playing of somebody else’s fiddle.

Kathleen Bligh, high in her cabin, pulled her sleeping children close, their soft, yeasty heads like bookmarks on each side of her, and thought of a husband with shoulders like a bison and a touch so tender it could make her weep happy tears.

Three miles northwest in a big house on a manicured lawn, Mrs. Brady tried to read another chapter of her book while her daughter sang muffled scales in her bedroom. She put the book down with a sigh, saddened by the way life never quite turned out how you hoped it would, and wondered how she was going to explain this one to Mrs. Nofcier.

Across from the church, Beth Pinker sat reading an atlas on her family’s back porch and smoking her grandmother’s pipe, thinking about all the people she would like to hurt, Geoffrey Van Cleve being high on that particular list.

In a cabin that should have had Margery O’Hare in the heart of it, two people sat sleepless on each side of a rough-hewn door, trying to work out a route to a different outcome, their thoughts like a Chinese puzzle, and a solid knot of anxiety too huge and weighty pressing down upon each of them.

And a few miles away, Margery sat on the floor with her back against the wall of the cell and tried to fight the rising panic that kept pushing up from her chest, like a choking tide. Across the hall two men—a drunk from out of state and a habitual thief whose face she could recall but not name—called obscenities at her, and the deputy, a fair man who was troubled that there were no segregated facilities for women (he could barely remember the last time a woman was kept overnight in Baileyville Jail, let alone a pregnant one), had strung up a sheet across half the bars to shield her a little. But she could still hear them, and smell the sour scents of urine and sweat, and all the while they knew she was there, and this lent the confines of the little jail an intimacy that was disturbing and discomfiting to the point where, exhausted as she was, she knew no sleep would come.

She would have been more comfortable on the mattress, especially as the baby was now of a size where it seemed to press down on unexpected parts of her, but the mattress was stained and full of chiggers and she had sat there for a full five minutes before she had started to itch.

You want to peel back that curtain there, girl? I’ll show you something that will get you to sleep.

You cut it out, Dwayne Froggatt.

Just having a little fun, Deputy. You know she likes it. Written all over her waistline, ain’t it?

McCullough had come for her after all, his loaded weapon his own bloodied body, her library book a written confession on his chest. He had followed her back down that mountain as surely as if he’d done it with a loaded gun in his hand.

She tried to think of what she could say in mitigation; she hadn’t known she had hurt him. She had been afraid. She had simply been trying to do her job. She was a woman, just minding her business. But she wasn’t stupid. She knew how it looked. Nancy, without knowing it, had sealed her fate by placing her up there, library book in hand.

Margery O’Hare pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes and let out a long, shuddering breath, feeling the panic begin to rise again. Through the bars she could see the blue-mauve of encroaching night, hear the distant birdcall that marked the dying embers of the day. And as the dark fell she felt the walls press in on her, the ceiling lowering, and she screwed her eyes shut.

“I can’t stay here. I can’t,” she said softly. “I can’t be in here.”

You whispering to me, girl? Want me to sing you a lullaby?

Pull back that curtain. Go on. Just for Daddy.