“Call in and wait,” she muttered. She leaned against a tree, caught the bottled water that Trey tossed to her and drank it down.

Recalling:

Jesse Corn, shyly showing off a glistening silver pistol he was planning on using in his NRA competition matches. Jesse Corn, accompanying his parents to First Baptist Church on Locust Street.

The images kept looping through her mind. They were painful for her to picture and stoked her anger. But Lucy made no effort to force them away; when she found Amelia Sachs she wanted her fury to be unrelenting.

With a squeak, the door to the cabin eased open a few inches.

“Mary Beth,” Tom sang. “You come on out now, come out and play.”

He and the Missionary whispered to each other. Then Tom spoke again. “Come on, come on, honey. Make it easy on yourself. We won’t hurt you. We were just pulling your leg yesterday.”

She stood upright, against the wall, behind the front door. Didn’t say a word. Gripped the coup stick in both hands.

The door eased open farther, the hinges giving another squeal. A shadow fell onto the floor. Tom stepped inside, cautious.

“Where is she?” the Missionary whispered from the porch.

“There’s a cellar,” Tom said. “She’s down there, I’ll bet.”

“Well, get her and let’s go. I don’t like it here.”

Tom took another step inside. He was holding a long skinning knife.

Mary Beth knew about the philosophy of Indian warfare and one of the rules is that if the parlays fail and war is inevitable you don’t banter or threaten; you attack with all your force. The point of battle isn’t to talk your enemy into submission or explain or chide; it’s to annihilate them.

And so she stepped calmly out from behind the door, screamed like a Manitou spirit and swung the club with both hands as Tom spun around, eyes wide in terror. The Missionary cried, “Look out!”

But Tom didn’t have a chance. The coup stick caught him solidly in front of his ear, shattering his jaw and closing down half his throat. He dropped the knife and grabbed his neck, falling to his knees, choking. He crawled back outside.

“Hehf… hehf meh,” he gasped.

But there was no help forthcoming—the Missionary simply reached down and pulled him off the porch by his collar, letting him fall to the ground, holding his shattered face, as Mary Beth watched from the window. “You asshole,” the Missionary muttered to his friend and then drew a pistol from his back pocket. Mary Beth swung the door shut, took her place behind it again, wiping her sweating hands and getting a better grip on the stick. She heard the double click of a gun cocking.