The other woman fumbled with a collection of keys, trying to free the blonde from the manacle that connected her to the chain. She was gaunt, disheveled, her thin arms mottled with bruises, her right eye swollen shut. When she turned to me, terror and timidity were written large across her paper-pale face, but the tight corners of her mouth suggested determination, and in her green eyes I thought I read a wild scrawl of triumph.

In spite of the rolling pin that I carried and Stormy’s martial-arts baton, the older woman’s initial fright gave way to a kind of frantic but inconstant gladness. One moment, she seemed relieved and rejoicing, as if she had just disarmed a bomb, but an instant later, her face clouded and a frown briefly replaced her grin, as though she heard the bomb clock ticking again.

She scowled. “Who’re you? What’re you doin’ in my house?”

“There’s a dead man—” I began.

“Yeah, Kurt. He moved in on me, moved in smooth as butter. I didn’t see the snake he was till too late. Bastard Kurt, stone dead now, sick bastard, stone dead.” She grinned as though I had told her that she’d won the lottery. “I chopped on him real good, damn if I didn’t. Me, useless old Roberta, I finally done it.” She appeared to be amazed that she had been capable of killing Kurt. “I chopped him like he weren’t but a rack of ribs. Wish I’d chopped him a couple hundred times, chopped him up and down, ’fore I killed him. Wish I’d had the nerve years ago.”

Apparently Stormy decided no threat existed here, or maybe she thought I looked ridiculous as I brandished the rolling pin, because she handed me the stainless-steel baton. The emotionally fragile Roberta, struggling with the manacle lock, had begun to cry. Stormy went to her, put a hand on her shoulder as though to console her, and relieved her of the keys.

Voice trembling more with anger than with fear, the blonde said, “I was on my way to work. It wasn’t even dawn yet. He came up behind me. It happened so fast.”

As Stormy examined the keys, Roberta explained herself through a veil of tears: “He brung this one other girl last year, just like he brung Kristen this mornin’. He beat me near to death ’cause I said just please let Hannah go. Hannah was her name. He kept her in this here same room. Treated her like she weren’t nothin’ but a thing. He broke that girl, just like he broke me, broke her bad.”

Stormy was having trouble finding the key to the manacle.

Trembling, alert for some sudden attack, Kristen said, “Where are the cops? Why didn’t you call the cops?”

“No cell-phone service out here,” I said.

“Use the house line.”

“There ain’t none,” Roberta declared, wiping away tears, still an unstable brew of emotions, phasing now from sorrow to anger in an instant. “The mean sonofabitch never let me have no phone. When he’d go out, he locked me down in the cellar, like you wouldn’t even lock up some dog.”