“Who can know the amount of despair someone feels that they take their life? It’s as much to ask what it’s like to be dead. All I can imagine is you come to some understanding of having failed in some fashion that is so much a part of you that it is not endurable. That all other things grow small and pale by comparison. The people around us, the ones we depend on, and those that depend on us. Whatever sense you have of God, whatever idea you have of Him. That also has to fail. I’m not talking about a crisis of faith. I’m talking about all your life you hold what you think is a rock in your hand, even though you can’t see it. But it is there, you know it’s there. Then one day you look down and right there, clear as daylight in the palm of your hand is only a pile of dust. And maybe even as you look at it some breeze comes across and blows it away. And you’re left with nothing. Just an old open hand. But that’s not really what you asked, is it? You think there might be a code or a key that will help you understand.”

“No.” Foster said. “I think you might be right.”

As if she had not heard him she said, “This is what we know. What she learned when she went back to Carolina all those years later. The old man, Peter, who helped her get away. She learned he was taken out by a group of men and killed. Tortured and killed. Abby heard her talking about it. Talking to herself. He was put up on a block with a rope around his neck and then soaked down with kerosene and set afire while the men stood around and watched him dance himself burning up right off that block so he died by the rope. But all the time burning he didn’t kick away from the block until the last moment, until he couldn’t stand it. Because a man will endure most anything to stay alive. And those other men, watching, waiting for that moment when he gave up hope.”

“By Christ,” Foster breathed out.

“That’s what we know. What we can be sure of. But there’s other things. More questions than anything. But they’re still there. Some ways, they’re bigger even than what we know.”

“Did she find her mother?”

“No. Not that we know. The thing is, the time Abby overheard her talking—” Prudence stopped, gazing at the rough stone foundation, a soft jumble of surfaces in the lantern light. Then she looked at Foster. “I’m making her sound like a crazy person. But she was not. Even though she hanged herself, I do not think she was crazy. I think she was horribly sane, as if she’d seen something beneath the surface of the everyday. Now, I’m likely the one sounds crazy to you.”