Cole leans forward from the back seat, chin nearly on Logan's shoulder. “Wait. The doc was in histrailer?”
“Don't,” I say.
“In thetrailertrailer? The sacred trailer? The no-humans-allowed?—”
“Cole.”
“I'm proud of you is all.” He drops back into his seat and spins a can of paint in his palm like one of his knives. “Genuinely. Warms my cold dead heart. Did you?—”
“Finish that sentence and I'll feed you to Caesar.”
“Caesar loves me.”
“Caesar tolerates you because you smell like jerky.”
Logan rolls us to a stop under a dying maple and cuts the engine.
The street is completely quiet, the silence of people who lock their doors against nothing because nothing has ever come for them. Porch lights every third house. An Americanflag hanging limp off a bracket. Somewhere a dog barks twice and gives up.
And there it is.
The craftsman with the wraparound porch. Green front door. The wreath from the photo, dried flowers and a little wooden cross wired into the center of it.
Samuel Harlan is asleep inside that house.
My lungs stop working.
I stare at the dark windows, and my thumb finds my left forearm through my sleeve, and for a second, I'm eleven years old and the smell of lemon polish is in my nose and a voice like razorblades is telling me to be still, be quiet, be good?—
A can of paint lands in my lap.
“Hey.” Logan's twisted around in the driver's seat, gray eyes steady on mine. Not smirking now. “You're here. You're thirty-five. You have a lion and a bear and a girl who blushes when you look at her. He's an old man who's about to have a very bad week.”
I breathe.
“The very worst week,” Cole adds cheerfully, already easing his door open. “Historically bad. Biblically bad, if you will.”
“I will,” Silas says, materializing out of the dark with a magician’s timing. He must have already finished with Harlan’s hardware store. He nods at me in confirmation.
We move like we have a dozen times. Cole ghosts up the porch steps without making one of them creak, testing sightlines. Silas peels off toward the side of the house, the wall facing the neighbor's bay window. Logan shakes his can, the rattle of the mixing ball obscene in the quiet, and grins at me over the fence rail.
“Porch is yours and mine, brother. You want the door or the boards?”
“The door.”
“Attaboy.”
The green door has a brass knocker shaped like a pineapple. I stand in front of it with the can cold in my fist and my heart going like Peanut's after the accident, too fast, too small, and then I think about Wren's voice. The register she uses on frightened animals.Come on, Rowe. Let me see.
I shake the can and start writing.
BE SURE YOUR SIN WILL FIND YOU OUT.
The paint hisses. White letters on green, dripping at the edges, and something in my chest unclenches with every line. He loved verses. Recited them while he worked me over. Numbers 32:23 was one of his favorites, delivered soft as a lullaby, and now it's four feet tall across his front door where the casserole women will read it on Sunday.
Logan's working the porch boards at my feet, sweeping strokes, tongue between his teeth like a kid with a coloring book.
ASH IS WHAT REMAINS WHEN SIN IS BURNED AWAY.
