August froze, his mind unable to grasp what was taking place. What if the boy isn’t joking? How could she know what was going on? He kept eye contact with her. “Charlie, listen to me. I want you to hang up and call 9-1-1 right now.”

Xandria pushed up the armrests, slid into the middle seat, and grabbed the phone. August could smell her perfume. “Charlie, don’t hang up. Don’t move a single muscle, or we’ll have to hurt your grandmother,” she said, as calmly as if she were reading him a bedtime story. She handed the phone back to August and put her lips near his ear. “We’ll kill her, actually. And him too, if you don’t cooperate.”

August recoiled. “Cooperate?” he mouthed. He heard Charlie calling to him and placed the receiver back against his ear.

“Dad?” Charlie’s voice shook. “What do I do?”

“Stay where you are,” August said. “Everything’s going to be okay. Just sit tight.” Across the aisle, he saw a teenager, eyes closed, bobbing his head to the beat of whatever was blaring through his headphones. Next to him was someone August guessed to be his younger sister, thoroughly engaged in a book. To her right was a man, asleep, mouth wide open, wearing a T-shirt that acknowledged his status as the world’s biggest windbag. And none of them had noticed a single thing that had just transpired. He put his hand over the receiver. “What do you want?”

She took the phone and ended the transmission with the touch of a button. “Once, when I was a child, I stole a cookie from the jar that sat in the middle of our dining room table. After supper that night, my father took out a Bible, excused everyone else from the room, and read to me from Proverbs 23. Are you familiar with it?”

August knew most of the proverbs, having studied them extensively with the Bible’s other wisdom literature, but he sensed she didn’t care to know that. He shook his head.

“It says: ‘When thou sittest to eat with a ruler, consider diligently what is before thee: And put a knife to thy throat, if thou be a man given to appetite. Be not desirous of his dainties: for they are deceitful meat.’” Xandria pushed up the right sleeve of her pink silk blouse. “Do you know what he did to me after he read that?”

Silence. August didn’t want to know.

“He took a knife, and he did this,” Xandria said, showing August a long, jagged cross-shaped scar on the inside of her forearm. “I never stole from the table again,” she said.

“Don’t hurt my son. He hasn’t done anything,” August said, the voice of his frightened little boy echoing in his ears. “Please, just tell me what you want.”