“Settlement Five, Iverson here.”

So the fifth Deputy had finally arrived. Deputy Daniels had announced only three days before that a new Deputy was on his way. Got some changes in store, he’d said. The residents, afraid and uncertain, had spent the time since making preparations. They’d went to their lots early in the morning and stayed late into the night, and if they were like Lady Mae, had made sure that nothing under their roofs could be seen as blasphemous. They dusted the framed bylaws, hung straight their own certificate of inheritance, made sure their porches were tidy. They shined their boots and ironed their best clothes so that when they met whomever had been sent to Settlement Five, they’d appear no different from anyone else.

Lady Mae had stopped hoping any new Deputies would be the same as the one that took her mother. Deputies changed now and again—perhaps a handful had come and went in the last five years, but it was never him. Even still, she was wary of them all—had been since she could remember. Her revulsion had grown over the years, though—after her mother, after the burning of Arbuckle’s shack and his father along with it, after what they’d done to Edith so long ago. That last one stayed with Lady Mae more than she’d thought it would; the girl had just been a child, terrified and unable to control the hatred that her parents had poured into her. And when the settlement had descended on the square to watch the torching, Lady Mae had looked at the ground, at the residents’ tired feet in their worn boots. She hadn’t looked up, not even when she heard the girl scream her name as the flames consumed her toes; not even then. Had she been there, Lady Mae’s mother would have pressed her close, would have held her hand over her daughter’s exposed ear. But she wasn’t there, and so Lady Mae had heard everything, had seen it all even though she hadn’t raised her head once.

“This here’s the butcher,” she said into the receiver. She was facing the room, her eyes on Ruby’s file.

“What is this regarding?”

“There’s a patient here. She’s early. Says she wants to get it over and done with. Says her name is Ruby Swanson.”

The clock ticked, and Lady Mae heard the woman on the porch, the planks creaking as she paced outside of the door.

“Yes, and?”

“And she just seems suspicious is all.”

“How you mean?”

Lady Mae licked her dry lips and tasted salty sweat on her tongue, felt the slow drip down the back of her neck. It was hot—hot like it hadn’t been in years.

“Wanted to see if there’s anything I ought to know,” Lady Mae said into the receiver. “Anything I should’ve been warned about. There ain’t nothing in her file.”

She heard the rifling of papers and the sucking of teeth, and as Lady Mae waited for a response, she leaned up against the bare wooden wall and wrapped the telephone cord around her fingers.