What they’re saying about you in town. In a way, that’s why I came here.”

She folded up the shirt and set it very firmly on the table. Then she spoke to it. “My children aren’t at a boardinghouse. They’re at a…one of Sarla Moggam’s girls is watching them for me. She can’t work right now because, well, because she can’t. But no one knows I came here. See this?”

She reached down the front of her dress. While I regarded her, dumbstruck, she fished up a brass whistle on a chain. “The girls at the house, they give this to me when I first got there yesterday. They told me some officer’s wife in town, she started this thing where all the women wear them, and if they feel they’re in danger, all they have to do is blow the whistle, and every woman what’s wearing a whistle has to promise that no matter what, if she hears a whistle blow, she’ll run toward the sound and help whoever is in danger. That’s the deal. And when I said, ‘Well, what kind of danger?’ they told me about not just whores but decent women getting beaten up and raped, and that a girl from Sarla’s own house had just vanished and everyone thought she was murdered and even though most people knew who did it, no one was stepping forward to protect the whores, so they’d decided they’d join the whistlers and protect each other.

And when I asked who killed the girl, one of them said a big fat sonofabitch named Never that guarded the cemetery.”

She stopped and took a deep breath. The words had spilled out of her like pus squirting out of an infected boil, and I felt much the same way about what she had told me. I wanted to cry. It wasn’t a manly reaction, but it was my overwhelming response to what she’d said. Even after what had happened to me in town today, it was still shocking to hear that people were talking of me as a rapist and murderer, naming me as the man who had killed Fala. I wondered why they were so sure she was dead and why they blamed me. I had no way to clear myself of their suspicions. Unless Fala showed up somewhere, alive and well, I could not prove she hadn’t been murdered and that I hadn’t done it. I muttered as much to Amzil.

“Then you didn’t do it.” She spoke it as a statement but I heard it as a question.

I replied bluntly. “Good god, no. No! I had no reason to, and every reason not to. Why would a man kill the only whore in town who would service him willingly?” Anger and fear made my heart race. I got up and left the table and went to the door to stare out across the graveyard toward the forest. “They said—” I heard her swallow, and then she went on, “They said that maybe she wasn’t willing, that you kept her in the room a lot longer than any man ever had before. And that maybe you caught her alone, and maybe she said no, not for any money, and that maybe then you raped her anyway and killed her in anger.”