Lourdes had taken off the apron and I saw tattoos of barbed wire across his arms and shoulders. He sported a strangely retro haircut, long in the back but parted in the middle, and had the fixed, unblinking eyes of the converted. He tapped his cigarette in the plastic tray and some of the ash bounced onto the recorder.

Tori sat beside me, smoking quietly and sipping Coke, as I asked him to tell me about the House of Brothers.

He’d established it in ’92, he said, after serving twelve years on a manslaughter charge. At the age of eighteen, “a messed-up little junkie,” he’d gotten into a gunfight with a hotel manager during an armed robbery. He thought he’d missed everything, but in fact he hit the guy, who’d bled to death on the office floor. When Lourdes heard on the news that the manager was dead, he turned himself in.

I adjusted in my chair uneasily, my leg still throbbing.

“In prison I got clean,” he said, “and when I was released, all I wanted was to give back to my fellow man, to help him along the path, so he wouldn’t suffer like I had, or inflict so much suffering. I worked seven days a week to make a payment on this beautiful house, and a few years later we became a registered charity. We usually have anywhere between ten and twenty brothers staying here, and it’s been that way for almost a decade.”

“What about now?”

“We’re at maximum capacity right now. Twenty-two, a new record.”

I looked at the little house. It seemed impossible.

“A lot of brothers are coming down the coast, looking for new beginnings, a place of retreat.”

“Actually,” I said, “that brings me to why I’m here. I’m seeking information about a particular resident of yours. His name is Zeke. He came down from Retreat a few months ago. You’d remember him, all leather, kind of paranoid.”

As I spoke, Lourdes let the cigarette burn without inhaling. Then he put his hands together as if in prayer and stared down at his lap. “Lord Jesus,” he muttered. When he looked back up, his eyes were wet, arrestingly bright. “I knew it was you,” he said, gazing at me as though I’d understand. “I knew someone would come for him.”

“So he stayed here?”

“He died here.”

I glanced at Tori, but like a good journalist in her own right, she remained impassive.

“What happened?” I asked.

Lourdes said, “I’m sorry, Whitney, Zeke took his own life. We loved him, we took care of him, but there was nothing we could do.”

Suddenly he got up from the table and hurried into the house. I thought he was going to get some tissues.

Tori exhaled in relief and said, “You do this all the time?”

“Not like this.”