“I can feel him.”
“Who?”
Delilah gulped back the bile rising in her chest. “I don’t know.”
“Delilah, no one is—”
“He is, Lily. He watches me.” She repeated, “I can feel him.”
Again skimming the field, Lily craned her neck to peek between the rigid stalks. Nothing moved save the ruffle of leaves in a draft off the mountain, beginning to turn cool after a blistering late-summer day.
Impatient, Lily scowled at her younger sister. She wanted to put the little ones to bed, so she and Delilah could finish the checkers game they started before dinner. Lily felt pretty sure she had Delilah outmaneuvered.
“There’s no one out there,” Lily insisted. “Let’s just—”
“You sure?” Three inches shorter than her sister, Delilah looked up to Lily not just literally but figuratively. She was the closest to Delilah in age, and the sisters had consoled each other through their father’s death and shared the difficult days when they were evicted from their big house in town. In the past year, their lives had become increasingly difficult. Even with Father and Mother Constance gone, and the oldest of their siblings married off, that left nineteen living in a three-bedroom trailer without indoor plumbing. At night, every inch of floor became a bed.
“Yeah,” Lily said. “I’m sure no one’s out there.”
Delilah swallowed hard.
At the metal-sided outhouse, the children took turns entering through doors marked ‘MEN’ and ‘WOMEN’. They fidgeted and snickered in line, whispered in each other’s ears. A ten-year-old girl picked a nearly closed buttercup from the weeds at the edge of the path and held it under a younger girl’s chin. “If I see a reflection, you have a boyfriend.”
The other children clustered around.
Wide-eyed, the smaller girl asked, “Do you see one?”
The older girl nodded yes.
Clapping her hands, the little girl bounced up and down. “Who is it? Who is it? Who’s my boyfriend?”
The other children hooted, as the girl holding the buttercup giggled. “It’s too dark!” she teased. “Silly, silly. No reflections in the dark!”
The minutes ticked past until all but one straggler finished in the outhouse. Four-year-old Kaylynn habitually dawdled.
Growing impatient, weary and ready to end the day, the youngsters squabbled. Two boys shoved one another, and Lily ordered them to be still.
Watching her older sister, Delilah felt ashamed. For days, her mother had assured her no one hid in the corn. I’m not a little girl anymore. I need to be strong. I need to grow up.
“Sis, take the children into the house,” she told Lily. “I’ll wait for Kaylynn.”
“You sure?” Again Lily focused her big orange flashlight on the brittle stalks, heavy with ripening corn. In days, it would be ready for harvest. Then there would be canning for the girls to do and cornbread to bake for dinners. A pale moth fluttered lazily by, weaving through the beam.
“I’m sure,” Delilah said, pulling up her shoulders, standing up straighter.
“Good! Hurry up and we can get back to our game.” Lily waved at the children. “Let’s go. Pajamas and bed.” The little ones padded off toward the trailer, twittering and talking.
Moments later, Delilah stood alone in the night, regretting sending Lily away. In the moonlight, the shadows grew ever longer. The incessant hum of the insects swelled.
“Kaylynn, hurry up,” Delilah shouted through the outhouse door.
“I’m trying,” the little one called back.
Fighting a mounting disquiet, Delilah sought comfort by murmuring the verse of a familiar children’s song. “God watch over me…”
At the far side of the outhouse, a patch of stalks shimmered. Delilah stiffened. The flashlight beam searched. Nothing.
“When are you coming out?” she yelled at Kaylynn.
From inside the outhouse, the little one shouted, “In a minute.”
“Please hurry!” Holding the flashlight with both hands, Delilah scanned the hard dirt visible between the rows and continued her song. “God watch over me and keep me—”
Something moved. Something unseen disturbed a clump of stalks.
The flashlight held before her, Delilah crept toward the corn. Peering between the stiff green shoots and their long slender leaves, she searched. She heard a throaty purr. The flashlight’s beam skimmed low. From the darkness, two iridescent gold eyes emerged.
“Ebenezer?”
A scrawny gray tabby inched forward. Relief flooded through Delilah. “You’re the one watching me?” Holding the flashlight tight, she leaned into the corn. “Don’t tell anyone how scared I was, okay?”
Crouching to pet the cat, Delilah didn’t notice the stalks shiver a few feet to her right. She never saw the man shuffle out of the corn. By the time she looked up, he towered above her. In a single movement, he wrapped one thick arm around her waist and clamped his other hand over her mouth, muffling her screams.
One
I stared at the guy, not blinking. He said nothing, just squirmed off and on in the rickety metal chair, his handcuffed wrists resting on the battered gray metal table between us. I wished, not for the first time, that I had X-rays coming out of my eyes like the ones they show in comic books, the kind artists draw with pulsing heat rays. The truth? I wanted the guy to fry. Right there in the interrogation room.
While I watched.
The waste of DNA that held my attention was on camera at a local drinking establishment nine hours earlier, a cowboy bar on Dallas’s city limits. He’d liquored up and gotten into an argument with the bartender, who cut him off. The bartender picked up a phone and started to call someone, I figured a cab for his drunken customer. The guy stood up and shouted at him, something I couldn’t hear on the surveillance tape. In a final effort, the bartender made a move to grab the perp’s car keys off the bar. The drunk beat him to them. Shouting
