“What’d you do now?” he hollered.

Sheriff Thorn’s words struck my heart. Without thinking, I grasped the knife to pull it from her chest.

“Shit, you crazy coot, drop it,” he snarled, then grabbed me up and slammed me against the side of the cruiser. “What’d you do?”

I shook my head at his question. “We need to help her.”

“You retard, I knew it would come to this one day,” he said and grabbed me up and shoved me into the back of the deputy’s cruiser. “Matt, take this guy into town. I’ll call the county medical examiner.”

I curled into a ball against the door. Matt didn’t talk to me on the ride to town, and I didn’t speak, out of respect for what I’d seen.

When Matt pulled me out of his cruiser, I said, “I’ve got to get home.”

He just looked at me and crushed a column of ants crawling past his boot, step, step, the way a horse stomps his hoof. “Let’s go,” he said, and pushed me ahead of him through the jailhouse and into a cell.

“Matt! What are you doing?”

No one came for me, not that I expected Hap to. Loneliness ballooned in me until it swallowed me whole. The first night Matt’s wife, Mandy, brought me dinner. She looked pretty, with a heart-shaped face and shiny strawberry-blond hair. I didn’t have any appetite.

The next morning, she brought me a breakfast tray and saw the untouched dinner. “You’re not hungry?” she asked. I shook my head.

She put the breakfast down and took the dinner tray. I looked at the food. It was better than what I ate at home. I ate but took no pleasure in it. I was in four walls, all gray, iron bars, one tiny window, dark with dirt.

At noon Mandy came back with tomato soup and a cheese sandwich. Despite myself, my mouth watered. She saw my hunger, looked at me and asked, “Why’d you do it?”

I looked into her swamp-grass green-gold eyes, and distrust stared back at me.

“I didn’t hurt her.” I hoped she might hear me and