up the Floods’ driveway, and as he got to the top of the rise, a short, square man came out of the barn with a dead chicken in his hands. He’d been plucking it, Virgil realized when he got out of the truck: he could smell the hot, wet feathers.

The man said, “Who’re you?”

“Virgil Flowers, Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Virgil said. “I’m here to talk to Mrs. Flood. Is she in?”

“This is not a good time,” the man said. He lifted the chicken: “I’m tied up.”

“Who’re you?”

“Wally Rooney. . . . I’m helping Alma with her chores,” the man said.

“Nice of you,” Virgil said. “But my interview with Mrs. Flood will be confidential, anyway, so—”

“She’s got the right to a lawyer, don’t she?” Rooney asked.

“Well, yeah,” Virgil said. “Though to tell you the truth, I didn’t know she needed one. If we have to go through all that, we’d have to take her down to the sheriff’s office. . . . I just thought it’d be easier to have a chat.”

Rooney gestured with the chicken again, and Virgil took that as assent. “If she doesn’t want to talk to me, I’ll certainly be happy to arrange for a lawyer to sit with her while I do,” he said. “Because I am going to talk to her.”

HELEN MET VIRGIL at the door, said, “You again,” but she said it with a smile, and then a wink, and the wink actually startled him, coming from a twelve-year-old. Maybe she’d picked it up from an old-timey movie, he thought, and in an old-timey movie, it would have been called a come-on.

Interesting.

He followed her into the house, and Helen called ahead, “Mr. Flowers is here again,” and she used his name with a familiarity that suggested that he’d been talked about.

Alma Flood was sitting on a platform rocker, as morose as she’d been during the first visit, with the Bible still at her arm. She said, “My father isn’t here—”

“I actually wanted to talk to you,” he said. He looked at the girl. “Privately.”

Flood said to her daughter, “Go on and watch TV with your sister.”

The girl nodded and headed up the stairs and out of sight, and Virgil said, “I hope the Bible’s providing you with some comfort. It certainly does provide me with some, in hard times.”

“You’re a Bible reader?” A rime of skepticism curled through her question.

“All my life,” Virgil said. “My father’s a Lutheran minister over in Marshall. But, when there’s trouble, you’ve got to pick your chapters. Stick with Psalms, stay away from Ecclesiastes. Probably stay away from the Prophets, too.”

She nodded. “I have read the twenty-third Psalm a hundred times over, and I have to say, it doesn’t really bring me that much comfort.”

“The problem with that one is, it’s been attached to too many funerals, so it makes you feel a little sad, just hearing it,” Virgil said.

“Maybe,” she said, but she picked up the Bible and leaned sideways and put it on the floor next to her chair. “You’re not here to talk about the Bible, minister’s son or not.”

“No, I’m not. I have to ask you something, and I’m happy that the girls aren’t around. I’m wondering if you have any knowledge . . . Is it possible that your late husband had some kind of relationship with Kelly Baker? We’re getting some pretty substantial hints in that direction.”

She didn’t jump in to say, “No,” or cut him off, or sputter in disbelief, or any of the other things that she might have done. She sat stock-still for a moment, then said, lawyer-like, “I really have no knowledge of anything like that.”

“When she died, he didn’t seem distraught or anything? He didn’t talk about her?”

“I don’t believe he ever mentioned her name, in my hearing,” she said.

“Could you tell me, does your church introduce young men and women to each other . . . ?”

She was shaking her head. “We don’t have to. We grow up in the church, in the World of Spirit, and the children know each other from the time they are babies.”

“And the adults know the children,” Virgil said.

“Of course. The Bakers are not our close friends, but we knew Kelly Baker. My father may have left you with the impression that we really didn’t, but he was just trying to . . . avoid involvement in this dirty case.”

“Ah. So to put it another way, it’s possible that your husband knew Kelly Baker quite well, and that you wouldn’t know