The girl’s mother had killed someone, a boy. That’s what the detective had told her. The detective’s name was Dupree, a young fellow with a prickly little beard, and he spoke to her courteously, a bit of old New Orleans in his voice, which meant he was probably Catholic, calling her dawlin’ and cher; but wasn’t that what Sister Arnette had thought of the other two when they’d appeared at the door? Wolgast and the younger, good-looking one? Whose faces she had seen again on the grainy video Dupree showed her, from someplace in Mississippi, taken when—she guessed—they thought no one was looking? That they were nice men because they looked nice? And the mother, Detective Dupree told her, the mother was a prostitute. “A prostitute is a deep pit; she hides and waits like a robber, looking for another victim who will be unfaithful to his wife.” Proverbs, chapter 23. “For the lips of an immoral woman drip honey, and her mouth is smoother than oil; but in the end she is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death, her steps lay hold of hell.”

Hold of hell. The very words made Sister Arnette shudder in her bed. Because hell was real, that was a fact; it was a real place, where souls in torment writhed in agony forever and ever. That’s the kind of woman Lacey had let into their kitchen, who had stood in their very house not more than thirty-six hours ago: a woman who had hold of hell. The woman had ensnared this boy somehow—Arnette didn’t want to imagine that part—and then shot him, shot him with a gun in the head, and then given her girl to Lacey while she made her escape, a girl who had who-knew-what inside her. For it was true: there had been something … unearthly about her. It wasn’t nice to think it, but there it was. How else to explain what had happened at the zoo, all the animals running and making a ruckus?

The whole situation was awful. Awful awful awful.