“Mrs. Knauer—”

“Fuck Mrs. Knauer,” Marya’s mother said.

She wasn’t angry; she didn’t even raise her voice. Her words were short, flat, calm, hard with satisfaction.

“THEY REALLY WORKED him over, didn’t they?” Marya’s mother said afterward, to anyone who would listen: the woman with the bright lipstick, clerks in the sheriff’s office, people outside on the street who had never seen her before and didn’t know what she was talking about. “They really worked him over, didn’t they?” Marya’s mother said, marveling. “Shit, I wouldn’t even know who it was.”

She wiped at her nose, her eyes. When her big-knuckled hand came away from her face you could see she was smiling—one side of her mouth twisted up.

While she was in the sheriff’s office Marya and Davy ate chocolate peanut sticks from a vending machine in the foyer. A woman came over to Marya and gave her two dimes—Marya hadn’t glanced up to see who it was, her fist had simply closed on the coins—and now she and Davy had a treat, and it was still morning, not even ten o’clock. Marya was so hungry her hand trembled holding the peanut stick; she felt a tiny trickle of saliva run down the side of her chin.

Davy didn’t ask about anything and Marya didn’t tell him: there was nothing to tell. She’d seen a man lying stretched out on a table—a table that was also a kind of sink, but tilted, and badly stained—she’d seen a man who must have been naked, covered with a coarse white cloth that hung down unevenly—but she hadn’t had time to see his face because her eyes had filmed over: or maybe because he hadn’t had any face that you could recognize. The skin was swollen and discolored, the left eye wasn’t right, something had sliced and sheared into the cheek, the jaw must have been out of line because the mouth couldn’t close. . . . Marya thought of a skinned rabbit her father had dropped into the sink at home, she thought of squirming rock bass the boys caught in the creek and tossed onto the hard-packed ground, stunning them with the heels of their boots. Once, her cousin Lee Knauer, who was maybe four, five, years older than Marya, slammed a carp—a garbage fish—against a rock, again and again, until most of its head was gone: Lee was madder than hell, he’d wasted a worm on a fish he didn’t want.

Why hadn’t there been any blood on that table, Marya wondered, licking chocolate off her fingers. And there hadn’t been any smell except a faint trace of lye soap—maybe because the room was so cold, like the inside of a refrigerator.

“So that’s it,” Marya’s mother had said, her hands on her hips, rocking slightly from side to side, “so that’s it.”

She didn’t say anything else. There wasn’t anything to say. Her voice was hard, jeering, but not very loud.

“So that’s it. . . .”