July 9

WHEN GILLEY was a young boy, his father showed him how to make glass. Sand and limestone and soda ash went into the furnace, where the fire, its temperature anywhere from 1,500 to 3,200 degrees, melted the mix down until it was like honey. “You wouldn’t want to be in that furnace,” Junior said. “You’d be vaporized. There wouldn’t be anything left but the nails from the soles of your shoes. Now that’s no lie.”

The night he shot Raymond R., he lowered the Colt and said to Mr. Dees, “I imagine you didn’t bargain for this, but now you’re in it. Mister, you’re all the way in.”

Mr. Dees knew it was so. He’d been there as a witness to it all; he’d even involved himself by trying to make Raymond R. talk. Soon it would be clear that Raymond R. had vanished, that someone had come with the bail money that night, and then the man the police knew had kidnapped Katie Mackey was gone. Not a trace of him.

If it got out to Tom Evers that Mr. Dees knew something, he’d want answers, and those answers, if Mr. Dees gave them, would lead to this night and this moment—the one burned into him now forever: Junior Mackey and his boy, Gilley, and Mr. Dees, no closer than before to knowing where Katie was, and Raymond R. dead at their feet.

Gilley was sitting up now, rubbing at his throat, gulping breath into his lungs.

“You wanted my life?” Junior was shouting at Mr. Dees. “Well, now you’ve got it. As close as you’re ever going to come, anyway.”

He crouched down by Gilley, rubbing his hand in slow circles on his back, telling him to take his time, to breathe, everything was going to be all right. “You did what you had to do,” Junior said. “You went for that gun. You remember that. Whatever else you carry away from all this mess, you make sure you remember that you stepped up. You protected your family. That’s what we did here tonight, Gilley. We looked out for family, and how can that ever be wrong?”

Soon, Gilley’s breath came more easily and Junior helped him to his feet.

Mr. Dees was thinking that if by some chance Tom Evers never knew his part in this—if he went back to his house in Gooseneck and come September he stood at the head of his classroom and the years went on, years and years of other people’s children—there would still be Junior Mackey to answer to. Junior Mackey, who came to him now and leaned in close and whispered, “You can’t tell this. You know that, don’t you?”

“But he was choking Gilley. You had to do something.”

“You can’t tell it because I got him out of jail. You don’t need to know how. No one needs to know that. Tom Evers knows all about this Colt.” He held up the gun so Mr. Dees could get a good look at it. “He tried to get it away from me.”

“I wish you’d given it to him,” Mr. Dees said. “Now look what’s happened.”

“Listen to me,” Junior said. “I got this Wright out of jail and I brought him here under force. That’s conspiracy, Henry. Now there he is, dead. Not one bullet in him, the way someone would have shot him in self-defense, but six, the way someone would have shot him for the pleasure of it. Do you understand what I’m saying? Add it up, Henry. What’s this going to look like? Whatever they call it—murder, manslaughter—you’re in it, too. You were here when it happened. You tried to get him to talk. Is that much clear to you?” Mr. Dees nodded his head to say he understood. “Good. Now I want you to go home. I want you to forget what’s happened here. Go on, Henry. Gilley and I are going to take care of things.”

Mr. Dees knew he would drive away. He and Junior would seal the secret between them. As full of horror as it was, he would carry it with him the way he did the martins’ dawnsong, a memory all fall and winter, until he heard them again come spring. It would be his to recall, this night when Junior traveled so deeply into his love for Katie that he came to something else, something savage and seemingly not born of love at all. But there it was: how far a man would go, a man who was powerless to turn away from the most monstrous part of himself—the man he was when he was alone in the dark.

“I suppose you had your reasons for watching us, for taking those things of Katie’s,” Junior said. “I can’t say I understand it. In fact, if you want the truth, it disgusts me. If this was some other night, I’d show you what I think of it. I wouldn’t want to be you on some other night, Henry. If we were alone and I had a chance to hurt you, I would. The only thing I regret—I mean it, Henry—is that I still don’t know where to find Katie.” He leaned in even closer, the way boys sometimes did on graduation night to say quietly so no one else could hear, Thanks, Mister Dees. “Henry,” he said, and his voice was shaking, “if there’s a God, he’ll forgive me, don’t you think?”

“It’d be nice to think so,” Mr. Dees said.

Junior nodded. “Just tell me. You would have done it, too, wouldn’t you? Killed him? If she were your little girl and you were sure he was the one who took her, and you were sure .  .  .” His voice died away, and he couldn’t finish. Mr. Dees knew that. How long would it be before Junior would be able to say the words? How long before any of them would be able to say them? So many days had passed now, it was unlikely that Katie was still alive.

“Yes,” Mr. Dees said, knowing that he was lying, that the lie was necessary. As soon as he said the word, something opened inside him, and he knew it was his heart filling with a love unlike any he had ever felt: the truest kind, selfless and tolerant and enduring, the love a father had for his child. “Yes,” he said again. “I would have done it, too.”