Lane . . . you’re with the state?”

Virgil gave him his ID: “I’m Virgil Flowers with the BCA. I need to talk to Miz Gordon about her sister.”

“Hey, Virgil. I’ve heard of you.” He tipped the ID into the light from Virgil’s open truck door, looked at Virgil’s face, then passed the ID back. “Come on, I’ll introduce you.”

LOUISE GORDON DENIED knowing where her sister was, but she denied it with a relish that said she was lying. “When she disappeared, we were all shocked, but I said, ‘That’s Lucy. If she’s run away, there’s a good reason for it.’”

“What was the reason?” Virgil asked. “Her husband?”

“Of course it was her husband; what else would it be? Lucy and I are the first women in our family to be divorced. Ever. With me, it was because I got tired of putting up with my husband’s laziness. With Lucy, it was worse. Rollo beat her. And worse than that.”

“Rollo?”

“Roland. Her husband.”

“What’s worse than getting beaten? Did he sexually mistreat her?”

A moment of hesitation, then, “That’s what I understand, yes.”

They were sitting in Gordon’s living room and Virgil leaned forward and said, “Miz Gordon—I spend a lot of time interviewing people, and I know when they’re lying to me. You’re lying to me when you say you don’t know where she is, or how to get in touch. I need to talk to her, and we’re not fooling around. I don’t want to have to threaten you.”

“Wouldn’t make any difference if you did,” she said.

“It might, if you knew what the threats were. But I will tell you—and I don’t want you talking about this to anyone—we believe that her husband was part of a cult, or a sect, or whatever you’d call it, that sexually victimizes its own children. Its own daughters. We think Lucy, Birdy, can help us with this. We think she could provide testimony that would get us inside the houses of some of these people, to get them away from their children, and their children to a safe place, where we could find out what was going on. If you resist, in my opinion you’re as bad as the people doing these things. You’re making it possible for them to continue.”

“I don’t know anything about any children,” she said, but she was defensive, her eyes searching for a way out.

“You may not, but Lucy might,” Virgil said. “Has she ever told you explicitly what she . . . encountered . . . with her husband?”

“A bit. He wanted to . . . he wanted to do some wife-swapping, is what it sounded like. Or maybe she went along with that, and it was something worse.”

“How, worse?”

“I don’t know. We didn’t talk about details,” Gordon said.

“How long were they married?”

“Fifteen months. Not long. But, do you want to know why she didn’t just come home? Why she hid?”

“Yes. I do want to know that.”

Gordon said, “Because she was afraid Rollo might kill her. He beat her, and said that if she tried to run, he’d strangle her and bury her behind the barn. He told her that other women had gotten what they deserved, and she believed him.”

Virgil said nothing for a minute, then, “I gotta talk to her. We’re already looking at four dead people.”

Gordon said, “I’ll call her. You go away, and I’ll call her, and I’ll call you back tomorrow morning, and tell her what you’ve told me. Then, I’ll let her decide.”

“You better tell her that it’s not a matter for her to decide—it’s a matter of whether we track her down and put her in jail, and you along with her,” Virgil said, rolling out the threats. “If they’re doing what we think they’re doing, she’s acting as an accomplice by not telling us what she knows about criminal behavior, and you are an accomplice because you’re hiding her. Make sure she knows that, Miz Gordon. Make sure she knows what the stakes are.”

AFTER VIRGIL LEFT, Gordon thought about it and realized that if she called from her house, or with her cell phone, the police could check the phone calls and trace them to Lucy. So she got her book, a novel by Diana Gabaldon, and tried to read it for twenty minutes, and finally put it down with the sense that she was ruining the story for herself. Couldn’t stop thinking about Flowers; she hadn’t liked the man at all, she decided. He had long hair, like some kind of reformed