he house had gone silent for a few beats after Runner sped away, finding someone else to bully for money. Peggy Bannion, she was his girlfriend now, Patty’d heard—why doesn’t he go harass her? Probably already had.

One beat, two beats, three beats. Then the girls had turned into a mess of questions and worries and small hands everywhere on her, as if they were trying to get warm by a really weak campfire. Runner was scary this time. He’d always had a bit of menace to him, he’d always been temperful when he didn’t get his own way, but this was the closest he’d come to attacking her. For the most part. When they’d been married, there’d been tussles, little slaps upside the head, designed more to infuriate, to remind you of your helplessness, than to really hurt.!!!Why is there no food in the fridge?!!! Smack.!!!Why is this place such a shithole?!!! Smack.!!!Where does all the money go, Patty?!!! Smack, smack, smack.!!!You listening to me, girl? What the hell you do with all the money?!!! The man was obsessed with cash. Even in a rare fatherly moment, grudgingly playing Monopoly with the kids, he’d spend most of his time sneaking money out from the Bank, clutching the bright orange and purple bills in his lap.!!!You calling me a cheat?!!! Smack.!!!You saying your old man’s a cheat, Ben?!!! Smack, smack, smack.!!!You think you’re smarter’n me?!!! Smack.

Now nearly an hour after Runner had left, the girls were still huddled on her, near her, behind her, all over the sofa asking her what was wrong, what was wrong with Ben, why was Dad so mad. Why’d she make Dad mad? Libby sat the farthest from her, tucked in a bundle, sucking a finger, her worried brain stuck on the visit to the Cates’s house, the cop. She looked feverish, and when Patty reached out to touch her cheek, she flinched.

“It’s OK, Libby.”

“No it’s not,” she said, unblinking eyes fixed on Patty. “I want Ben back.”

“He’ll come back,” Patty said.

“How do you knoooooww?” Libby whimpered.

Debby hopped on that. “Do you know where he is? Why can’t we find him? Is he in trouble because of his hair?”

“I know why he’s in trouble,” Michelle said in her most wheedling voice. “Because of sex.”

Patty turned on her, furious at that simpering, gossipy rhythm. A hair-in-curlers, whisper-in-the-supermarket tone. People were using that tone to discuss her family all over Kinnakee right now. She grabbed Michelle by the arm, harder than she meant to.

“What do you mean, Michelle, what do you think you know?”

“Nothing, Mom, nothing,” Michelle blurted. “I was just saying, I don’t know.” She started to blubber, as Michelle did when she got in trouble and knew she’d done wrong.

“Ben is your brother, you don’t talk hateful about your brother. Not inside this family and definitely not out of it. That means, church, school, whatever.”

“But Mom …” started Michelle, still crying. “I don’t like Ben.”

“Don’t say that.”

“He’s bad, he does bad things, everyone at school knows …”

“Knows what, Michelle?” She felt her forehead start burning, wished Diane were there. “I don’t understand what you’re saying. Has Ben, are you saying Ben has done anything … bad … to you?”

She had promised herself she would never ask this question, that it was a betrayal of Ben to even think it. When Ben had been younger, seven or eight, he’d taken to sliding into her bed at night, and she’d wake up with him running fingers through her hair, cupping a breast. Innocent but disturbing moments in which she woke up feeling sensual, excited, and then darted from the bed, pulling robes and nightgowns around her like a horrified maiden. No, no, no you don’t touch Mom like that. But she never suspected—until now— that Ben might have done anything to his sisters. So she let the question hang, while Michelle got more and more agitated, pushing her big glasses up and down her pointy nose, crying.

“Michelle, I’m sorry I yelled at you. Ben is in trouble. Now, has he done anything to you I need to know about?” Her nerves were jagged: she had moments of pure panic, followed by moods of complete remoteness. She could feel the fear rising now, that propulsion, like taking off in an airplane.

“Done what to me?”

“Has he touched you in a strange way. A not brotherly way?” A free-floating gap now, like the engines shutting off.

“The only time he touches me is when he’s pushing me or pulling my hair or shoving me,” Michelle droned, her usual litany.

Relief, oh, relief.

“So what do people say about him at school?”

“He’s a freak, it’s embarrassing. No one likes him. I mean, just look in his room, Mom. He’s got all sorts of weird stuff.”

She was about to lecture Michelle on not going into Ben’s room without his permission, and wanted to slap herself. She thought about what Det. Collins had said, the organs of animals, in Tupper-ware containers. She imagined them. Some dried in tight, wooden balls, others fresh and assaulting when you opened the lid, let the smell hit you.

Patty stood up. “What’s in his room?”

She started walking down the hall, Ben’s goddang phone cord tripping her up, as always. She marched past his padlocked door, down the hall, turned the corner left, past the girls’ room and into her own. Socks and shoes and jeans lay everywhere, each day’s flotsam abandoned in piles.

She opened her bedside table and found an envelope, In Case of Emergency scrawled on the front in Diane’s elongated cursive that looked just like their mother’s. Inside was $520, cash. She had no idea when Diane had sneaked that in her room, and she was glad she hadn’t known, because Runner would have sensed her holding out. She lifted the money to her nose and smelled it. Then she tucked the envelope back inside and pulled out a bolt-cutter she’d bought weeks ago, just to have on hand, just if she ever needed to get into Ben’s lair. She’d been ashamed. She started back down the hallway, the girls’ room looking like a flophouse, beds against each wall except the doorway. She could picture the police wrinkling their noses— they all sleep in here?—and then the aroma of urine hit her and she realized one of them must have wet the bed last night. Or the night before?

She debated switching out the sheets right then, but made herself walk straight back to Ben’s, stood eye-level with an old Fender Guitar sticker he’d partly scraped off. She had a quick moment of nausea when she almost decided she couldn’t look. What if she found incriminating photos, sickening Polaroids?

Snap. The lock fell to the carpet. She yelled at the girls, peeking out from the living room like startled deer, to go watch TV. She had to say it three times—gowatchTVgowatchTVgowatchTV-—before Michelle finally went away.

Ben’s bed was unmade, rumpled under a pile of jackets and jeans and sweaters, but the rest of the room wasn’t a pit. His desk was piled with notebooks and cassette tapes and an outdated globe that had been Diane’s. Patty spun it, her finger leaving a mark in the dust near Rhodesia, then began flipping through the notebooks. They were covered in band logos: AC/DC with the lightning slash, Venom, Iron Maiden. On the notebook paper, Ben had drawn pentagrams and poems about murder and Satan.!!!The child is mine

But really not

Cuz Satan has a darker plot

Kill the baby and its mother

Then look for more

And kill another!!!

She felt a ripple of illness, as if a vein running from her throat to her pelvis had gone sour. She riffled through more notebooks, and as she shook the last one, it flipped naturally to the middle. For pages and pages, Ben had drawn ballpoint pictures of vaginas with hands going into them, uteruses with creatures inside, grinning demonically, pregnant ladies sliced in two, their babies half falling out.

Patty sat down on Ben’s chair, feeling giddy, but she kept flipping until she came to a page with several girls’ names written in pancake-stack rows: Heather, Amanda, Brianne, Danielle, Nicole, and then over and over, in progressively embellished gothic cursive: Krissi, Chrissy, Krissi, Krissie, Krissi, Krissi Day, Krissi Day, Krissi Dee Day Krissi D. Day, Krissi D-Day!

Krissi Day inside a heart.

Patty rested her head on the cool desktop. Krissi Day. Like he was going to marry little Krissi Cates. Ben and Krissi Day. Is that what he thought? Did that make what he did to her seem OK? Did he picture himself bringing that little girl home for dinner, letting Mom meet his girlfriend? And Heather. That was the name of the Hinkel girl who was at the Cates’s. Were the rest of these names even more girls he’d hurt?

Patty’s head was heavy, she willed herself not to move. She would just keep her head right here, on the desk, until someone told her what to do. She was good at this, she sometimes sat for hours without leaving a chair, her head bobbing like a nursing-home inmate, thinking about her childhood, when her parents had their list of chores for her, and told her when to go to bed and when to get up and what to do during the day, and no one ever asked her to decide things. But as she was staring at the rumpled sheets on Ben’s bed, with the airplane pattern, and remembering him asking for new sheets—plain sheets—about a year ago, she notice a wadded plastic bag jutting out from underneath the bed frame.

She got down on her hands and knees, pulled out an old plastic shopping bag. It had a weight to it, swung out like a pendulum. She peered in and saw only clothing, and then she realized she was looking at girly patterns: flowers and hearts, mushrooms and rainbows. She dumped them out in a pile on the floor, afraid even as she was doing it that that those Polaroids she feared would tumble out with them. But it was just clothes: underwear, undershirts, bloomers. They were all different sizes, from Krissi’s age to toddler. They were used. As in, they had been worn by little girls. Just like the detective had said. Patty put them back in the bag.

Her son. Her son. He would go to prison. The farm would be gone, Ben would be in jail, and the girls … She realized, as she too often did, that she didn’t know how to function properly. Ben needed a good lawyer, and she didn’t know how to do that.

She walked into the living room, thinking about a trial and how she couldn’t bear it. She scattered the girls back to their bedroom in a fierce voice, them staring back at her with open mouths, hurt and scared, and she thought about how she made things even worse for Ben, a single mother who was incompetent, overwhelmed, how much worse it made him look, and she put some kindling and newspapers in the fireplace, and just a few logs on top, and she set fire to the clothes. A pair of underpants with daisies on them was just catching at the waistband when the phone rang.

IT WAS LEN the Lender. She started to make her excuses, explain that there was too much going on to talk about the foreclosure. There was a problem with her son—

“That’s why I phoned,” he interrupted. “I heard about Ben. I hadn’t been going to phone. Before. But. I think I can help. I don’t know if you’ll want it. But I have an option.”

“An option for Ben?”

“A way to help Ben. With legal costs. What you’re facing, you’re going to need a bundle.”

“I thought we were out of options,” Patty said.

“Not entirely.”

LEN WOULDN’T COME out to the farm, he wouldn’t meet her in town. He got all clandestine on her, insisting she drive out to the Rural Route 5 picnic station and park. They haggled and bickered, Len finally breathing a big huff into the phone that made her lips twist. “If you want some help, come out there, now. Don’t bring no one else. Don’t tell no one. I’m doing this because I think I can trust you, Patty, and I like you. I really want to help you.” A pause came on, so deep Patty looked at the phone receiver, and whispered Len? into the phone, already thinking he was gone, that she was about to hang up.

“Patty, I really don’t know how to help you but this. I think, well, you’ll see. I’m praying for you.”

She turned back to the fireplace, sifted through the flames, saw only half the clothes were burned. No logs left, so she hurried into the garage, grabbed her dad’s old axe with its heavy head and razor-sharp blade—back when they made tools right—and chopped up a bundle of wood, carried it all back in.

She was feeding it to the fire when she felt Michelle’s swaying presence at her side. “Mom!”

“What, Michelle.”

She looked up and Michelle was in her nightgown pointing at the fire. “You were about to throw the axe in with the wood.” Michelle smiled. “Scatterbrain.” There was the axe laid across Patty’s arms like kindling. Michelle took it from her, holding the blade away from her, as she’d been taught, and set it beside the door.

She watched Michelle walk hesitantly back to her room, as if she were picking through grass, and Patty followed in her daughter’s footsteps. The girls were all piled on the floor, murmuring to their dolls. There was that joke people told, that they loved their children most when they were sleeping, hah-hah, and Patty felt a small stab. She really did like them best when they were sleeping, not asking any questions, not needing food or amusement, and she liked them second best when they were like this: tired, calm, disinterested in their mother. She put Michelle in charge and left them there, too worn out to do anything but take direction from Len the Lender.

Don’t hope for too much, she told herself. Don’t hope.

It was a half-hour drive through bright snow, the flakes turning to stars in her headlights. It was a “good snow,” as Patty’s mom, the winter lover, would say, and Patty thought how the girls would be playing in it all day tomorrow and then thought: Would they? What happens tomorrow? Where will Ben be?

Where is Ben?

She pulled up to the abandoned picnic area, the shelter a big slab of concrete and metal built in the ’70s with communal tables and a roof that was angled like some failed attempt at origami. Two swingsets sat beneath four inches of snow, their old black-rubber seats not swaying at all, as Patty thought they should. There was a breeze, why were they so still?

Len’s car wasn’t there. In fact, no car was there, and she started to fidget with the zipper of her coat, running a fingernail on each metal tooth so it made a clicking noise. What might happen: She would go up to the picnic bench and find Len had left her an envelope with a stack of money, a gentlemanly gesture she would repay. Or maybe Len had organized a bunch of folks who felt pity on her, and they were about to arrive and Wonderful Life her with cash handouts, Patty realizing everyone did love her after all.

A rap came on her window, bright pink knuckles and a man’s thick torso. It wasn’t Len. She rolled her window partway down and peered out, ready for him to tell her to move along, lady. It was that kind of rap.

“Come on,” he said instead. He didn’t lean down, she still couldn’t see his face. “Come on, we’ll talk up on the benches.”

She shut off the car, and pulled herself out, the man already walking up ahead, bundled under a thick ranch coat and a Stetson. She was wearing a wool hat that had never fit right, her ears always popped out, so she was already rubbing at the tips when she reached the man.

He seemed nice, was what she thought. She needed him to be nice. He had dark eyes and a handlebar mustache, the tips drooping off his chin. He was probably forty, looked like he might come from around here. He looked nice, she thought again. They settled down on the picnic benches, pretending they weren’t covered in snow. Maybe he was a lawyer? she thought. A lawyer Len had talked into representing Ben. But then why would they be meeting out—

“Hear you got yourself some trouble,” he said in a rumbly voice that matched his eyes. Patty just nodded.

“About to foreclose on your farm, and your boy’s about to be arrested.”

“The police just want to talk to him about an incident that—”

“Your son is about to be arrested, and I know what for. In this next year, you will need money to fend off your creditors, so you can keep your children at home—in their own goddam home—and you will need money for a lawyer for your son, because you do not want your son to go to prison labeled a child molester.”

“Of course not but Ben—”

“No, I mean: You do not want your son to go to prison labeled a child molester. There is nothing worse you can be in prison than a child molester. I seen it. What they do to those men, a nightmare. So you need a very good lawyer, which costs a lot of money. You need one right now, not weeks from now, not days from now. Right now. These things get out of control fast.”

Patty nodded, waiting. The man’s speech reminded her of being with a car salesman: you had to do it now, and this model and at this price. She always lost these conversations, always took what the salesman insisted she take.

The man pressed his Stetson down, breathed out like a bull.

“Now I myself was once a farmer, and my daddy before me and his daddy before him. Eight hundred acres, cattle, corn, wheat, outside Robnett, Missouri. Fair amount, like your operation.”

“We never had eight hundred acres.”

“But you had a family farm, you had your goddam land. It’s your goddam land. We been swindled, farmers. They say ‘plant fencepost to fencepost!’ and we goddam well did. Buy more land—they say— cause they ain’t making more of it! Then whoops, sorry, we gave you some bad advice. We’ll just take your farm, this place been in your family for generations, we’ll just take this, no hard feelings. You’re the jackass believed us, not really our fault.”

Patty had heard this before, thought it before. It was a raw deal. Let’s get back to my son. She leaned on one haunch and shivered, tried to seem patient.

“Now I’m no businessman, I’m no accountant, I’m no politician. But I can help, if you’re interested.”

“Yes, yes I’d like that,” she said. “Please.”

And in her head she told herself, Don’t hope, don’t hope for too much.