“Emmalyn,” I said, and was surprised to hear the forestthrow the word back at me. “You mean Emmalyn.”
“I suppose I do.” His face hardened. He took a step closer.
I wrapped both hands around the gun and stepped backwards.“What are we supposed to do, if we don’t kill them? What did anyone do beforethis?”
“You’re not supposed to do anything. A few of you get pickedoff, enough to—to keep them from getting too hungry, and they stay where theybelong.”
“You expected us to die?” My voice caught a little onthat word.
He took another step closer, slow, like he was trying toapproach a wild animal. I didn’t move. I said, “Why are you coming after me?”
“It’s my duty.” He gave me a level look. His eyes weren’tsee-through now, but dark and bottomless again. “I can’t let the demons gethunted.”
When I shot him, my aim was true. I got him between theeyes, then, for good measure, in the sternum. He dropped at once. This time,the worst part wasn’t burying the body. The worst part was going back to Pryor,past the wagon wheel of worn-out yellow houses, past the corner store and theschoolhouse with the broken bell, down to the police station, to drag ahundred-year-old corpse out of the ground.
◊
The vinyl chair in Sheriff Blanchard’s office stuck to mybare thighs, so I tugged my knees up to my chest and steadied myself by diggingthe muddy heels of my boots into the seat underneath me.
“This is just a formality, I promise,” Sheriff Blanchardsaid, and smiled that tired, coffee-stained smile which used to be moreconvincing before I knew how bad he beat Martha. Not that he was any threat tome; no one wants to believe a murder confession from a preacher’s daughter,especially when homecoming is around the corner and someone’s got to hangstreamers. But when I limped into the office, I laid my daddy’s shotgun on thecounter and said, “I’m not sorry,” so they couldn’t exactly tell me to go home.
When I didn’t say anything, he prompted, “Just tell thestory slowly, now.” I knew then that he was still banking on being able to slapmy wrist and pretend nothing happened. Or maybe he was even hopeful enough tothink I’d say that I was not guilty at all, but a victim to the same thing thatgot Emmalyn and that I knew where to find it. Peculiar thing about the fathersof dead little girls, they tend to want revenge.
But he would never get revenge on the thing that reallymurdered Emmalyn, so I folded my hands in my lap and looked at him with stingingeyes.
“I killed Emmalyn. It was an accident. We were playingaround by the river. Drinking, we were drinking. She fell into the water. Andshe drowned. And the purewater man found out. He was going to tell, so I killedhim too.”
I don’t know what I guessed he’d do when I made thatconfession. I thought he’d do something. Instead he only sat there, hisshoulders shaking a little, and pressed his pencil down hard into his pad ofpaper.
After a minute, he said, “Where is his body?”
“I buried it.”
Long as I could remember, people in Pryor dealt with anysort of unpleasantness by hightailing it back to where they feltcomfortable—they’d mention the weather, weddings, Christmas or IndependenceDay, whichever was closest. Folks are good at staying ignorant to whatever theydon’t want to know. And it turns out they mostly don’t want to know that a fewschoolgirls are the only thing standing between their town and the beasts ofHell. But I’d managed to hit the sheriff where it hurt.
Next thing he said bewildered me: “You know why thepurewater man comes here?”
“No, sir.”
“Pryor is a holy town, purified by the mouth of Hell itself.You break the seal, you put everything in danger—not just Pryor, everything.”
Far as I knew, the sheriff wasn’t supposed to have anynotion of the burnt line in White Throat Holler or the corruption that rose upand fed and slumbered inside our very own town. I could feel my heartbeat in mythroat. “A line, sir?”
“Don’t you smirk at me!” He shook his head. “You didn’t justthreaten yourself when you killed him, you threatened everything.”
“You’re not mad about Emmalyn?”
“Ain’t nothing could be done about Emmalyn,” he said, and Isaw how it destroyed him, how this loss was the only intolerable loss he couldhave imagined even in a town of three hundred wives and daughters.
“If I didn’t kill him, he’d have killed me.”
“Your daddy’s gonna be so disappointed in you,” he told me,like I hadn’t said anything.
“Yes, sir.”
“You couldn’t at least have blamed it on Martha? You stillcould—” How much he must have hated her to even think those words.
“Not Martha,” I said. “Just me. Just me and Emmalyn in thewoods.”
◊
Apart from my daddy, Martha Blanchard was the only one tocome see me in jail. I snuck a letter to her that was full of all the secretswe weren’t supposed to know, and at the end I told her not to visit me, so ofcourse that’s precisely what she did. When my cell door creaked open, I rolledover on the century-old cot and knew already who was there before I opened myeyes.
“Your little murder confession left a casserole-shaped holein the last church potluck,” Martha said.
“Sorry.”
She sat down on the end of the cot and blew her bangs out ofher face so she could aim a skeptical look at me. “What good does it do, youbeing in here?”
“I’m supposed to be an explanation. Of Emmalyn’s murder. Ofthe purewater man’s too. So no one goes looking for what really killed thepurewater man. I didn’t want them to know what he was really for. Or about thedemons.”
“But?”
“Well, they already
