He nodded and his jowls flopped. “Oh yes, you are. You’ve come back to me. You know you’re mine. You’ve always known. That’s why you’re here.” He returned his attention to my poor cousin, wiggling and whimpering. He tightened one last knot.

“I’m here because you’re trying to kill Lulu. And I mean to stop you.” A slim, pale ray of light squeezed in past the gauzy burlap curtains. I had just a little time. A few minutes, maybe. I reached for the gun; I pulled it out from my pants but let it hang down at my side.

“There ain’t no stopping what’s already done.”

“I’ve got until sundown.”

“Maybe.” He rose to his feet and faced me for the first time. He still stood with that aggressive confidence I’d seen in the visions. He stood like a man who knows something that you don’t, and it’s something that can make the difference between living and dying. “Maybe you do, and maybe you don’t. But I do know you’ll not kill me. I’ve lived too long to be taken by my own child.”

My fingers went numb, and then weak. The gun slid loose and clattered to the wood floor. I did not hear or feel it fall. “I’m not—I’m not yours. I’m not.”

He cocked his head and smiled without showing any teeth. “Come now. You know better than that. Say my name, girl.” A pair of drawstring pants were pulled tight around his narrow waist, and the shirt that was tucked into them was gray and threadbare with age. His feet were naked except for grime, and his once smooth skin had gone ashy and dull. I remembered, someplace in the back of my mind, the letters from this place—one to Pine Breeze. Eliza must have been here to visit, at least once or twice, though it was hard to imagine her in such a place.

“It’s not possible,” I breathed.

“Say my name. He’s awake now.” He pointed down at the body, now quivering with fright and straining halfheartedly against the ropes. “Say it, and let him see that you were right all along. Won’t that feel good, now? Won’t it be right to show him he was wrong? After all he’s put you through, I wonder why you aren’t throwing it in his face.”

He stepped aside and I saw Malachi’s face, gagged by a dirty rag, eyes bugging out of his skull as he stared up at the man who’d bound him. I looked back and forth between them, unable to move or act or think straight.