“May I join you?”

“Sure.” She patted the ground next to her. “How in God’s name did you find me?”

McCrea sat and leaned against the tree. “I cheated. I saw you when you left the church. I saw your silhouette coming this way. And will I ever get you to call me Joe?”

Victoria smiled. “Some habits are hard to break.”

“I owe you an apology,” McCrea said. “That’s why I’m here.”

“What did you do?”

“I had no right to speak with you the way I did when we discussed the sentence for the May boy. You did the right thing. You had to do something, and you did the right thing.”

Victoria closed her eyes and rested the back of her head against the rough bark. “Thanks for that,” she said. “I’m not sure I agree. I had no idea how . . . violent it would be. You used the word barbarous, I believe. That’s exactly what it was.”

“Incarceration is a privilege for communities that have jails,” McCrea said. “I think that’s why society built them in the first place. It’s hard to watch that kind of thing.”

“Only for you and me, apparently,” Victoria said. “I didn’t anticipate the bloodthirstiness of the crowd. It was like a gladiator match.”

“Having the blows delivered by the community was a stroke of genius, by the way. Pardon the pun.”

“Even Caleb,” Victoria said. Her voice caught when she said his name.

McCrea didn’t respond.

“How did it go, escorting him to the town line?”

McCrea inhaled noisily. “That kid’s a piece of work. Bad news.”

“No remorse?”

“Not that he showed. All that crying and begging during the punishment? That’s all gone. And I’ll tell you, his back looks like hamburger. He didn’t try to put a shirt back on. What did he say to you right after he stood up?”

The segue took Victoria by surprise. “Um . . .”

“You seemed shaken.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I was,” Victoria said. “He threatened to kill me and my entire family and burn the town to the ground.”

McCrea chuckled. “Is that all? He ran his mouth a lot with me, too.”

“Same message?”

“More or less. There was one detail about copulating the eye sockets of severed skulls that I’m not sure is even possible. The general message was that he’s unhappy. How are you doing?”

“He impressed me as being serious,” Victoria said.

“I don’t know,” McCrea said. “I think he thinks he’s serious. But he’s also humiliated and in a lot of pain. He’ll take a while to heal. When that’s done, I don’t imagine he’ll be anxious to go through it all over again.”

“Where was he when you saw him last?”

“We walked him back, about halfway to where we found him. Town line plus another couple hundred yards till he was out of sight.”