Maggie? It’s over.” Jenner stood. “Put the gun down, now.”

She looked down at the pistol.

“I had to, Jenner. He wouldn’t have left her alone.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s all I’ve got, Jenner.”

He wanted to reach out to her, to touch her. To somehow make it easier for her.

Maggie stood in front of him, staring down at her dead father.

She turned to him. “I found her journal this evening. He was calling her, talking to her—he’d given her a cell phone, I didn’t know, I swear, or I’d have stopped it.” A big tear welled up in her left eye and spilled down her face.

“He was calling her most nights, Jenner. Daddy was making her…do things. To herself.”

She sat on the bed, looking up at him. “He was making her sick, you know? He told her she was fat, even when she weighed eighty-seven pounds, Jenner. When my little girl was just a crumpled paper bag of tiny bones, he told her she was fat. He gave her a kind of anorexia prayer list, sick little prayers, horrible things to make her hurt herself.”

Maggie held the gun loosely in her lap. “He was calling her most nights, calling while I was painting shitty paintings, or out at the Polo Grounds with shitty men.”

Jenner said, “It’s finished, now. Give me the gun, okay? Let me take it…”

She shook her head. “There’s one thing left, one more step to get rid of everything that man polluted.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, Jenner, don’t even! I know you know. You figured it out pretty quickly; I could tell you knew when you came to my house this afternoon.”

He was silent.

“Say it. I know you know. Say it!”

He knew. “He said he just wanted to go away with his daughter, but he took her, not you.”

She sneered. “Oh, I’m his daughter all right! One hundred percent Craine DNA…Can’t you tell?”

“And Lucy?”

She smiled, her face suddenly calm. “You’re getting warm…”

“Lucy was his daughter too?”

She crumbled, put her face into her hands, the pistol nuzzling her thick hair, her shoulders curving and sagging as the sobs rocked her body.

“It was the worst thing that ever happened to me, and the only good thing I ever did with my life.” Behind her hands, her face was red and wet.

“Tell me what happened.”

She sat up, wiping her eyes. “Well, it wasn’t a stork!”

Jenner sat next to her.

“What happened, Maggie?”

She was crying hard again, her knuckles white around the gun, her fingers wet with tears.

Jenner waited.

“It’s so fucking dull…it happens every day to some girl somewhere in the country.” She calmed a little, wiped her face. She said, “I was twenty-three, home from grad school for spring break. And we went to the Polo Grounds, and we got drunk, both of us, real drunk.”

She sat straighter and wiped the damp hair from her eyes.

“We were in the kitchen alone, and ‘Stand by Me’ came on the radio, and he hugged me, and we were dancing in the kitchen. And then I felt him pressing against my leg, and I pulled away, but he wouldn’t let me go. He dragged me into the breakfast room, and he was kissing me, trying to get his tongue in my mouth, but he couldn’t, so he was licking my neck—I remember that so clearly, his spit on my neck, the smell of alcohol in his mouth. And he was too big for me to get him off of me. And it was like, you know…It all went quiet inside me. I just let him do it, I stopped fighting and just let him do it.”

Maggie breathed out. “When he finished, he rolled off me, and went to the kitchen and got a bottle of wine, and asked me if I wanted any. And that was that.

“I mean, I washed myself as best I could, but there wasn’t a morning-after pill back then. And when I told him I was pregnant, he wasn’t mad or even upset—he was…interested. He took me out of school, brought me back to Stella. He took me to a clinic in Gainesville to have early amnio, and when it came back all right, he promised me all sorts of things. And I kind of just went along with it.”

She noticed the photo of Lucy on the bedside table and picked it up, running her thumb softly over the little face.

“I was worried, but she came out pretty much perfect. She had some hearing problems; the doctor didn’t know, he said I probably had a viral infection while I was carrying her. But she was beautiful, and sweet, and a good girl.”

There was crackling on the police scanner. She stood abruptly, flicked the scanner off.

“But she’s dead, and my father’s dead—my turn now! Sorry.”

Maggie smiled helplessly at Jenner, lifted the gun to her temple, and he shouted, “No!”—and she pulled the trigger.

She fell back against the bed and slipped to the floor as he tried to gather her in his arms. Blood soaked her hair. She wasn’t moving.

Jenner laid her flat. He touched his fingers to her neck, felt for a pulse. He pressed harder, felt nothing but the beat of his own heart in his fingertips.

He pressed the heel of his palm into her breastbone and began to pump, felt the give of her chest wall, the recoil of her lungs. He pumped for a minute, then felt for a pulse again.

And there was none, and Jenner knew she was dead.

He stood, looked around the room. Craine lay dead on the floor, his daughter by the bed, four feet away from him.

Jenner went to the scanner and tried to find a microphone to call for help, but there was none. He switched it on, and the overheated chatter from the farm filled the room. In the moment, confronted with the carnage and the loss, the deputies had given in to chaos, abandoning ten-code and just blurting out whatever was going on out into the air-waves. The sheriff was on the scene now, shouting out orders to establish a perimeter, to keep the press at a distance.

Jenner walked down the stairs. In the kitchen fridge, he found a carton of apple juice. He poured a tall glass, sat at the counter, and drank it, tried to figure out his next step. He had Maggie’s blood on him, both her blood and her father’s; God only knew what else he’d touched in the house.

He finished the glass and poured another. He drank, then rinsed the glass, and put it back in the cabinet.

He took the bags of cash from the breakfast room and walked them out to his car. He jammed them into his trunk, pressed them as flat as he could get them, then covered them with his clothes.

In Craine’s bedroom, the air smelled of blood and metal and gun smoke. Jenner stood in the doorway, looking at the bodies. Maggie Craine lay stretched next to the bed, her right leg draped over her left; she looked like a mannequin now, as if she’d never drawn breath.

Jenner listened to the noise of the scanner for a minute, then went out to his car and drove to the farm. Just north of Bel Arbre, he stopped, threw the spare tire into the irrigation ditch by the side of the road, hid the money in the tire well, then laid the carpet back down on top of it.