The outside door opened again and two young women came in brushing off their coats.

“It’s snowing, Irene,” one of them called as they headed down the hall.

Irene waved in their direction. “Snow. Just what we need.”

I thought of the hairpin curves on Chandler Mountain. Surely the policemen would let Sister leave before the roads got too icy.

“Things ice up around here in a second,” Irene said as if she were reading my mind. “Causes all kinds of problems.”

Guilt. I had left my sister on top of a booger-occupied mountain in a snowstorm in a snake-handling church with a dead body.

“What happened to your cousin?” Irene asked.

“I’m not sure. We were at this church up on Chandler Mountain, and he went in to look for his wife, and when he didn’t come back we went in to look for him and he was unconscious and bleeding and there was a dead woman on the bench across from him. A dead woman with a lot of red hair and a broken neck.” I paused for breath.

“Is that right?” Irene pushed some papers toward me. “Here, sign these.”

“Her head was on backward.”

“Have mercy.” Irene handed me a ballpoint pen. “Sign right here and,” she lifted the top sheet of paper, “here.”

I signed.

“Okay,” she glanced at my signature, “Mrs. Hollowell. Somebody will be out in a little while when they find out what’s what with your cousin.”

Backward heads didn’t seem to make much of an impression on Irene. They sure as hell did on me, though. I sat in the waiting room with my teeth chattering. Fortunately Death had left with his pretty young wife, who had fussed at him for not wearing a jacket.

I wondered how Luke was doing. I wondered what had happened to him. The most reasonable scenario I could come up with was that he had seen the dead girl, fainted, and hit his head on the corner of the bench. That made sense. And he had been talking out of his head when he said he had seen Virginia. We had been sitting in front in the car and hadn’t seen anyone come out of the church.

But there was a back door. I closed my eyes and tried to remember the details. On the right-hand side was a door and if anyone had left that way, we wouldn’t have been able to see them. I remembered thinking that the door should have been on the other side, the side that the house was on so the preacher wouldn’t have to walk around the back.

Holden Crawford. Monk Crawford. Lord, how had Virginia Nelson who played golf at the country club in Columbus and who had a son in the House of Representatives gotten mixed up with a snake-handling preacher?