Paul.

Now all the missing pieces fell into place. The puzzle was complete. The weight of memory lay as heavily on her as the weight of Paul's adolescent body had lain. Her mind turned to Paul and would not be moved. More than anything in the world, she wanted to run to Paul and tell him it was all right-he could lay down the burden of his guilt and she would pick it up.

It was too late. Now Paul was as dead as the man he had shot. Was that man a substitute for Pa? Had he kept on trying to kill Pa even after his actual death, to be free of him at last? Or had he seen himself reflected in the unknowing eyes of another man and tried to end this horrid reminder with a bullet?

She would never know.

It was her fault, the fault of that scared and shaking little girl, that Paul had drawn a gun. Why had he been carrying a gun in the first place? For rats and weasels, maybe, as any farmer might whose chickens had been raided. But Paul wasn't farming then—he was living alone in a shack like some crazy old hermit, even though he was still a young man in his twenties. Was he crazy? Did he have a deep idea that he might someday be called on to kill another man and so blast out of existence something that he hated in himself? And how had he recognized his victim?

Was it her fault?

There was no way to find out now, and nothing to do about it even if she knew. The hollow gray man behind prison bars was not the little brother who had slipped into her bed so long ago. Nor was he the growing-up Paul who had searched for and found in her growing child's body his first answer to the dark adult riddle of sex. That boy was gone.

I wish to heaven I’d died coming down from that haymow, she thought in a burst of futile anger. It would have saved everybody a lot of bother.

She began to walk back and forth, faster and faster, detouring around chairs without seeing them. Cross the floor, turn... cross the floor again, turn, like the lion in his cage, captive but not resigned to the bars.

Oh God, why can’t I die? The old answer clamored to be let in.

She went to the kitchen and threw the cupboard door open, knowing there was no bottle but hoping one might have appeared. There was no bottle. Clean plates looked down at her with bland faces.

The scraps and leavings of the meal Doug Martin had provided still littered the kitchen table. Automatically, without knowing what she was doing, she stacked the unused dishes and carried them to the sink, put the cold meat and cheese and all the rest in the refrigerator, knowing she would never be able to eat any of it. A paring knife lay on the drainboard. She picked it up and stood with it in her hand, looking at it.