fell asleep in his chair. On the following morning, Friday, Margo served him scrambled eggs and toast. The phone rang, and when Crane hung up, he said, “Brian Ledoux’s going to come get the venison. He’ll give you some money for it.”
Margo nodded.
“You keep the money. You earned it. You probably need it for ammunition. But I can’t have you killing any more deer, Margo. I’m taking the shotgun. I don’t have to take the rifle, too, do I? Nobody else is going to kill a deer with a single-shot .22, but I’m afraid you might.”
She shook her head no.
“Promise. Say it, or I’ll take the rifle.”
“I promise,” she whispered.
“I guess you need something to protect yourself if one of them Murrays comes over here,” he said. “But don’t you do anything unless you got no other choice. You think before you shoot. You consider the consequences.”
Margo nodded.
“And you know better than to go to that party. If you even set foot on that Murray property, I’ll drive over and drag you home by your ear.”
She nodded again, didn’t know how much longer she could stand her imprisonment here. Next summer she would swim, no matter what he said.
“I’ll be home at seven. We’ll have dinner together, Margo. We’ve got the leftover turkey, and I’ll try to get us an apple pie if they got one left in the grocery deli. That’s the best I can do. You know you’re the only reason I’m still alive on this earth. Don’t you?” He looked at her until she nodded, and then he slid the twenty-gauge into its case and folded down the truck seat to place it back there. Margo was glad for his affection, but maybe it was too much to be the only reason another person was alive.
After Crane went to work, Margo took his rifle out and shot at the auto-reset target he had welded together for her at his old job. It had four hanging targets along the bottom that flipped up when struck, and when she shot the fifth target on top, it reset all five. She repeated that cycle twenty times without missing, reloading for each shot. She even wore the spongy yellow earplugs that Mr. Peake had insisted on; he’d given her a big plastic bag of them, along with a stack of paper targets. Then she got the little shaving mirror out of the bathroom and held it against the butt of the rifle and shot over her shoulder, copying one of Annie Oakley’s tricks. After twenty-some rounds going awry into the side of the hill, she hit the paper bull’s-eye affixed to a piece of plywood, and then she hit it ten times in a row. The shooting warmed her enough that she could unzip her Carhartt jacket—one of her daddy’s that she had claimed.
At noon she sat on the riverbank and ate a fried egg sandwich on store-bought bread. Joanna would have baked at least a dozen loaves fresh for the party, plus a cinnamon loaf for breakfast tomorrow. Margo raised her rifle and aimed across the river at each person who showed up at the Murrays’. After a few hours, when the wind shifted, she smelled the meat roasting. She could hear the music coming out of the outdoor speakers. She aimed at Billy.
“You planning to take out some partygoers?”
The man’s voice startled her. He was in the driver’s seat of a pontoon boat, maybe sixteen feet long, that was drifting toward her. It said Playbuoy across the siderail. She had been focusing so intently that she hadn’t heard the boat approach. She lowered her rifle and moved down to the water’s edge and out onto the dock. When the boat drifted near enough, she reached out and grabbed the side. Two of the three men on board had beards and curly black hair; they were so similar that one might have been a copy of the other. The third man, thinner and blond, was sleeping across a bench seat on the port side. The black-haired man behind the wheel was Brian Ledoux, Grandpa’s friend, though he was Crane’s age. The man standing beside him had the same giant’s body, but his skin was pale, and that made his dark hair seem more striking. There was something strange about his eyes.
“You got a buck for me?” Brian said.
She pointed to the deer, gutted and skinned, laid out on a blue tarp under the swing set.
“I talked to your papa last