Bad Blood

23
Virgil didn’t know what to expect when he went in, but he went in behind the muzzle of his pistol. At the top of the entry stairs, he saw Edna looking at him from the doorway to the living room. She was dressed from head to foot in a dress that was either dark blue or dark gray, and fell in one line from her neck. She said, “There’s nobody to shoot.”
Virgil said, “Why don’t you come around behind me?”
She shook her head and said, “No, we’re all in here,” and she stepped away into the living room. Virgil expected something weird, in keeping with the rest of the night. Instead of following, he edged backward across the kitchen to the mudroom, made sure there was nobody there, who’d be behind him.
Edna came to the doorway again and watched him as he crossed the kitchen—somebody had been frying chicken, but a while ago, without cleaning up, and he could smell the cold grease. He paused at the dining room door, then stepped through: it was empty, but another arch at the end of the dining room led into the living room. With a last glance at the girl in the doorway, he stepped into the dining room, and she said, to somebody he couldn’t see, “He’s coming. He’s checking the dining room.”
A woman’s voice—Alma Flood’s, Virgil thought—said, “Pull that other chair around for him.” He moved forward slowly, got to the arch, did a quick peek into the living room, then moved into it, still behind the muzzle of his gun.
The room was lit by two lamps and a television that had been muted; it had been tuned to either a religious channel or a history channel, because the show involved a tour of Jerusalem.
Virgil was somewhat behind Alma Flood, who was sitting in her platform rocker, facing Wally Rooney and Emmett Einstadt, who sat in two recliners, which had been dragged around to face her. Both men were leaning back with their feet up. The two girls, Edna and Helen, sat to one side, on dining room chairs. And an empty chair sat next to them.


FLOOD WAS LOOKING at Einstadt and Rooney, but when she heard Virgil’s boots on the floor, she glanced at him and said, “Put the gun down, Virgil. Take a seat.”
“I really don’t have a lot of time for conversation—” Virgil began.
Einstadt snapped, “Sit down, goddamnit, she’s got a shotgun pointed at me.”
Alma was left-handed, Virgil noted, which explained why he hadn’t seen the long gun. She had the butt braced against the back of the chair, under her arm, with her trigger hand by her side, her other hand on the forestock. Not a pump; the gun was a Remington semiauto twelve-gauge. The muzzle was about six feet from Einstadt’s belly. That also explained why the men were sitting the way they were. With their feet up, higher than their hips, they couldn’t move quickly. If Alma really wanted to shoot them, she could.
Virgil asked, “What’s going on?”
“Sit down,” Alma Flood said.
“I don’t want to shoot you, Ms. Flood,” Virgil said. “There’s been enough shooting tonight.”
“Maybe and maybe not,” she said. “But I’ve got this trigger about half pulled, and if you move that gun toward me, I’ll pull it the rest of the way. You’ll be killing two Einstadts with one shot.”
“Sit down, please, sit down,” Rooney whined. Rooney was sweating hard, though the room was cool.
Virgil sat. He kept the gun in his hand, resting on his right leg, and put the radio down between his legs, with the microphone up, and hoped that Schickel and Jenkins and the others could hear it. “What happened here?” he asked.
“From what I hear, you know most of it,” Alma said. “We’re talking about that.”
“We’re having a trial,” Helen said. “Because of Rooney, mostly, but then maybe for Grandfather, too.”
“What’d Rooney do?”
The shotgun barrel swung to Rooney, the muzzle moving a short four or five inches, not nearly enough time for Virgil to do anything even if he’d been prepared. Alma said, “In the World of Spirit, nothing too serious. He took his women, just like the rules say he can. That being me, and then the girls. But as I understand it, under most laws, and maybe even normal Bible laws, we were raped.”
“If you didn’t consent, then it’s rape. If he had sexual relations with the girls, it’s rape whether or not they consented, because they’re too young to give consent,” Virgil said.
“I was taught it was the right thing, from the time I was a boy,” Rooney said, a pleading note in his voice.
Edna said, “We were begging you not to.”
“We was always taught girls need to be broke in,” Rooney said. “It’s not my fault we was always taught that.”
Virgil said to Alma, “Let the law take care of this. If you shoot him, you’re going to go to prison. After what you’ve been through, that hardly seems right.”
“What do you think I’ve been in, for forty-three years?” Alma asked.
Helen said to Virgil, “He took me upstairs and he was so ready, he was like a bull; he pulled all my clothes off and he ripped my blouse, not on the seam, but right across the fabric so I can’t fix it, and it’ll always have a rip in it.”
She was fingering her dress; Virgil said, “That’s not such a big deal anymore, even if it was—”
“We’re only allowed two dresses,” Edna said. “More than that would be vanity.”
Alma said, “What’d he do after he pushed you on the bed?”
“He made me suck on him and then he serviced me, and then he made Edna suck on him and he serviced her, and then he made both of us suck on him, and then he went into me the dirty way.”
Alma asked, “Tell Mr. Flowers how often he did that.”
“Almost every day. He’d hit me, slap me, really hard....” The girl’s voice was rising, as though she were reliving it.
Virgil jumped in and said, “Miz Flood, maybe you shouldn’t be putting the girls through this. They need treatment.”
“I think they do, and I’m sure they’ll get it, that you’ll see to it if I can’t,” Alma said. “But that’s not the question here. The question is Rooney. Now, I’m an old crow, and these men don’t like me as much as they used to, and I won’t tell you what Rooney did to me, but I’ll tell you that he had to work harder to get himself excited than he did with the fresh ones. Didn’t you, Wally?”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry if you didn’t like it. I thought you liked it,” Rooney said.
Alma got angry. “Don’t you go saying that. Don’t you go saying that I liked it. I told you I didn’t like it, I screamed at you that I didn’t like it, and the last time, there was blood, and how in the hell can somebody be bleeding like that, how can you think they’re having a good time?”
“Jake used to do it; I seen him,” Rooney said.
“That’s all you got to say? Jake used to do it? I’ll tell you, Wally, if Jake was here, he’d be sitting right next to you, all three of you like birds on a wire.”
“Don’t shoot me, Alma. Please don’t shoot me. I never meant you any harm,” Rooney said.
The muzzle of the gun never moved, but Alma said to her father, “What do you have to say for him?”
Emmett Einstadt said, “Women are supposed to serve men. That’s why God put them on earth. Rooney might not be the best we got, but he tries hard enough. You’da got used to him if you’d gave him some time.”
She shook her head and said, “I don’t believe I would have. I started out liking Jake, and ended up hating him; I started out hating Rooney. How you could ever give us to him, I’ll never understand. How many times did we say no?”
“I didn’t even know that you said no,” Rooney said. “I’m sorry for what you think I’ve done, I didn’t mean any harm by it. But that’s just nature taking its way.”
Virgil said, “Miz Flood, from what they’ve said, we can take both of them in, and I think I can promise you that they’ll be sent to the state prison forever. When word of this gets out, when a judge and jury hears about this, I mean, they’ll be out of your life. Just as clean as if you killed them; but at least you won’t have to pay for killing them.”
“I’m not exactly getting an eye for an eye, though, am I?” she asked.


VIRGIL’S CELL PHONE RANG. They all jumped, and a smile might have flickered over Alma Flood’s face. She said, “Well, answer it. Or the ringing will drive us crazy.”
Virgil fished the cell phone out of his pocket with his free hand, and said, “Yeah?”
“This is Gene. We can hear you. Jenkins is in that tree in the front yard, looking through the front window. He says he’s got a shot at her, but there’s two panes of glass between them and he can’t guarantee that nobody else would get hurt. He said you and the two girls are in his background. He thinks he can probably miss them, but maybe not. He wants you to say yes or no.”
Virgil said, “No, not yet. Definitely no. I really don’t think that would be appropriate at all. I could probably get that done myself; but, I’m really busy here, so I’ll talk to you later. Okay? Yeah, she’s fine, they’re all fine. Listen, I gotta go. I’ll call you later.”
He clicked off and put the phone back in his pocket.
“That was ridiculous,” Alma Flood said.
“Yes, it was,” Virgil said. “Miz Flood, I’ll tell you what...”
She shook her head and said, “Let me finish something here. Girls. What do you think about Wally? Guilty, or not guilty?”
“Don’t do that to the girls,” Virgil said.
Alma asked, “You know what they say about girls out here, Mr. Flowers? They say, ‘Old enough to bleed, old enough to butcher.’ And that’s what they do.” She turned to her older daughter and said, “Edna, what do you say?”
“Guilty,” the girl said.
Helen nodded, her face solemn, and she said, “Me, too. Guilty.”
“Alma...” Rooney said.
Alma said, “I vote guilty as charged,” and she pulled the trigger.


THE BLAST in the small living room was deafening, and Virgil rocked back away from the flash, almost tipped off his chair, and by the time he recovered, the shotgun was pointing at Einstadt and Alma shouted at Virgil, “Don’t. Don’t move that gun.”
Rooney had been knocked back when the blast hit him in the upper chest, throat, and face, but the recliner chair was tipped back so far that he didn’t slump forward; instead, he sat in the chair and bubbled to death, the last breath squeezed out of his lungs as a bloody foam.
Virgil’s phone rang again and he opened it and said, “I’m okay. Miz Flood just shot and killed Wally Rooney. Everybody sit tight, we’re talking.”
Helen said from her chair, about Rooney, “He looks awful.”
“That’s because your mother just shot him in the face,” Einstadt said. “Look at that. That’s what she’s threatening to do to your grandpa. Shoot him just like a sick horse.”
Edna said, “I like him better this way.”
“He was sick. He was sick in the head,” Alma said. “He needed to be put down, just like you’d do with a sick dog. A dog that’s got rabies.”
“You’ve got rabies,” Einstadt said. “Killing an old friend.”
“It’s time to talk about you, Father,” Alma said. She looked over at Virgil. “I want to be fair, and since you’re the law around here, and you want to do everything proper, I appoint you the defense attorney. You can say what you want in his defense, and I will listen to every word. How’s that for fair?”
“Hell, he wants me dead,” Einstadt said. He wiggled in his chair, and the shotgun muzzle, which had been an inch off line, came up.


VIRGIL WAS LOOKING at Rooney, at the mess that used to be Rooney before Rooney left the building. He thought that he might do a tap dance, stalling for time, because the longer they sat looking at the dead man, the more oppressive the body would become. So he asked, looking at Alma, and then at Einstadt, “How did this happen? How did you get here? I can understand, a hundred years ago, it might be all right to marry off young girls, but even then, this wasn’t all right. What happened?”
Alma said, “The church got taken over by perverts, including my own father. And grandfather. I don’t think it was like that before then.”
Einstadt said, “No TV.”
Virgil: “What?”
“Sex was what they had before electricity out here until after World War Two. So every night was dark, or lit by lanterns, and there just wasn’t a hell of a lot to do. Hard to read. They were poor, didn’t have much in the way of musical instruments. In the wintertime, you just couldn’t get anywhere, and everybody in the church was really close. . . . I don’t know when it started, but it might have gone right back to the beginning, in Germany. Exchanging wives and some of the wives were young, like you said. Thirteen. Boys were men when they were fourteen, and set to work. Hell, some famous rock-and-roll star married a thirteen-year-old girl back in the sixties, because it was done even then, wasn’t no hundred years ago....”
“But how did that fit with the idea of a church?” Virgil asked.
“You can read the Bible any way you want, and they did,” Alma said.
“No, no, no,” Einstadt said impatiently. “It’s all there, what they did, the patriarchs, and it went unpunished, because it wasn’t wrong. Look at Lot. It’s beautiful. The World of Law says it’s all right to go to Iraq and kill a hundred thousand people, but it’s wrong to have sex with people close to you? Does that sound even a little bit reasonable? What we did was all right—”
“What you did was probably the most f*cked-up crime in the history of the state of Minnesota,” Virgil said. “Pardon the language. And to tell the truth, I’m not all that happy with the war in Iraq, but there are arguments for and against it, greater evil versus lesser evil, and unless you’re a simpleminded moron, you can’t make the kind of comparison you just did.”
“We didn’t live in your World of Law,” Einstadt said. “We lived in the World of Spirit, and it was better. It is better, and it’ll be better again. We’ll make some changes—”
“You won’t be making any changes; you’re going to be in prison,” Virgil said.
“It’s a religion,” Einstadt said. “You’re going to persecute us because of our religion?”
“Damn straight,” Virgil said.


ALMA HAD BEEN STARING at her father, and now she turned to look at Virgil, her dark eyes glittering in the light from the muted television. She said, “Not everybody in the church were involved. Some pulled back, and some left the church entirely and moved away, so it’s not all the church. It’s people in the church.”
Virgil said, “But if people knew what was going on, even if they didn’t take part, then they’re to blame, too. You have to go to the law.”
“We went to the Spirit,” Einstadt said. “The Spirit says there’s nothing wrong with a proper sexual attachment between—”
“We’re not talking about sex,” Virgil said. “There’s nothing wrong with sex, but this isn’t about sex. This is about slavery. The children don’t have a proper choice. They can’t say no. We’ve got photographs taken by Karl Rouse, hundreds of them, and they don’t show sex: they show humiliation, bondage, slavery, desperate children being used by old men for their own enjoyment. I honest-to-God want to get you into a proper court, but I don’t understand how human beings could do what you people did. You’re monsters in this day and age; throwbacks to the days of slavery, and the slaves were your own children. I’m disgusted just looking at you.”
“Disgusted by physical love—”
“Bullshit,” Virgil said. “I talked to one of the victims—Karl Rouse’s daughter. The language she uses isn’t love language, it’s language right out of a porno film. I’m a cop, I’ve seen some of everything, and she shocked the hell out of me. And she doesn’t even know—”
Alma said to her father, picking up on Virgil: “You remember what you did the first time you took me up to the bedroom? You remember Mother down crying in the kitchen, and you hit her? How many times did you hit her, Father? She had blood in her mouth, and then you took me up to the bedroom. You remember what you made me do? I didn’t even understand. I didn’t know what happened. One day I get my monthlies, and as soon as they stop, you stopped being my father and started to be the man who came to rape me every week.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Einstadt said. “You liked it. You remember taking my hand? You remember—”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t hurt me.”
Virgil said, “Whoa. Alma, I’ve heard enough here. You’ve got to let me have him. Believe me.”
“So you can put this all out in a trial? So we can all talk about it? You think I want to get up there and talk about it? I don’t. That’s why we’re having this here trial.”
She said to the girls: “And he did the same to you. Did you take his hand?”
The two girls shook their heads, and the older one, Edna, said, “I don’t remember so much when Father took me up, or Grandfather took me up, as when they took Helen up. I thought that all the awful things were coming to her now. I thought even that my night dreams would go away, because Helen would have them instead. I thought maybe they wouldn’t service me anymore. I prayed to the Lord Jesus that they wouldn’t come anymore, that they’d only service Helen.”
Helen said, “I got the night dreams from you, but not about Father and Grandfather. I had night dreams about Mr. Mueller, after you told me about going in the pool. But I was hoping that I wouldn’t have to go in the pool. Mr. Mueller would look at me during Spirit worship. I know what he was thinking. . . . At least I didn’t go in the pool.”
Alma said to Virgil, “After World of Spirit, some girls were taken in a pool to be serviced by the men who wanted to service them.”
“Is that what happened to Kelly Baker?” Virgil asked. “A pool?”
“No. That was . . . something different. Some of the girls went a little crazy, and they asked for it. Kathleen Spooner—what have you done with Kathleen Spooner?”
“She’s in custody. We ran a trap for her, and some of the other men,” Virgil said. “They went up to talk to Birdy and gave themselves away. We were recording everything. They left Kathleen behind to kill Birdy. Kathleen’s . . . agreed to help us.”
Einstadt said, “She’s made a deal? She’s the devil’s own daughter, Kathleen is. She’s worse than anyone here. She killed Jim Crocker—”
“We knew that,” Virgil said.
“And she would have killed anyone else who got close to her, if you gave her the chance. She had guns and she always wanted to use them.”
“Good for her,” Alma said. “She kept the worst of you away from her.”
Virgil: “What happened to Kelly Baker?”
Alma said, “She was like Kathleen Spooner—I got sidetracked there. Kathleen liked being serviced. So did Kelly. And she liked other things: we heard that she had whip marks on her legs. Father might know more details, but as I understand it, my dead brother, Junior, my husband, Jacob, Jim Crocker, and John Baker took her out to the Baker barn and had their own little pool. She choked on Jacob’s thing and they couldn’t get her to breathe again. They knew what would happen with the World of Law, so they took her car to town, and put her in the cemetery.”
“They washed her body before they did that,” Virgil said. “Was that some kind of religious death thing?”
Alma said, “They were talking about this DNA thing. They say they live outside the World of Law, but they know all about it. You think we got one hundred years of this thing, if Father is right, without keeping an eye on the World of Law?”
“Was Jim Crocker in on that? Keeping an eye on the law.”
“Of course he was,” Alma said. “He wasn’t any regular church member—you wouldn’t see him praying—but he was sure there when it came time to service the girls.”
“Your dead brother, Junior. Is he the one who was laid out in your father’s house?”
“He was. He was shot,” Alma said. “Everybody who was shot and killed was laid out, and the houses burned, because somebody said that the fires would get so hot that nobody could prove they was shot, and so the World of Law couldn’t take the farms away. The houses weren’t worth so much; it’s the land that’s worth a lot.”
Helen said, “I’m glad Junior’s dead.”
Edna: “So am I. I’d service him, but he was just mean. Mean, and he never washed.”
Virgil asked the girls: “How many men were you involved with . . . over the years?”
The younger one said, “I was only with family, because I wasn’t in the pool yet.”
The older one said, “I don’t know. Most of the men who were still in our part of the church. How many is that?”
Alma said, “Many.”


ALMA SAID, “We’re getting close to a verdict, seems to me. Mr. Flowers, you’ve been asking questions, but you haven’t been putting up a defense.” She said it as “dee-fence.”
Virgil said, “Miz Flood, I’ll tell you the honest-to-God truth, and that’s that I don’t care much about what happens to your father. I came out here to arrest him, and put him in jail for the rest of his natural life. And while I don’t believe in hell, I understand that you folks do, and I suspect that if there is, he’s going to be burning there forever after. So, from my point of view, your father’s taken care of. He might as well be dead.
“But if you kill him, you’re going to have to pay. If you—”
“I already killed Wally; I’m going to have to pay for that, anyway,” she said. “What are they going to do, make me pay twice?”
“It goes beyond that,” Virgil said. “You’re not only threatening to kill him, you’re dragging your daughters into it, by making them vote. And you think it’s not going to hurt them, growing up without parents, after everything that they’ve been through? Killing Wally, you’re going to have to pay for—but given what was going on, I’ve got to believe that a judge will let you out pretty quick. Plead temporary insanity—”
“It’s not temporary,” she said.
“Plead insanity. I think you’d get off, and given some time, you’d get out to see your children. Maybe even some grandchildren, someday. Edna and Helen will be taken care of by the state, and given treatment, and maybe, there’s a possibility that everything will work out for them. So the thing we’ve got to think about here, is not your father, but what happens to you and the girls.”
“I don’t care much what happens to me,” Edna said. “The World of Spirit is coming to an end, and I don’t know if I can live in the World of Law.”
“You’ll fit right in,” Virgil lied. “You’ll be amazed. You’re young enough that in a few years, with treatment, this life will be like a bad dream.”
Alma said, “Pretty smart. Taking that path, I mean. Saying it’s not about Father, it’s about us. You’re a smart fella, Mr. Flowers.”
“I got more, if you want it,” Virgil said. “You’ve been reading the Bible, I know, the New Testament and the Old Testament, and they both have a lot to say about killing, and it’s not good. If you hope . . . if you have a soul, killing won’t do it any good.”
“Do I have a soul?” Alma asked.
“I believe you do,” Virgil said.
“Of course you do,” Einstadt said. “Maybe you think what happened here was wrong, I can see you believing that. But you do have a soul, Alma. It may be a pitiful thing, covered with bloodstains from poor Rooney here, but it’s still alive; it can still be saved. You can’t shoot your own father.”
“Sure I can,” she said. “I just pull the trigger.”
“Don’t do it,” Virgil said.
022
ALMA SAID to Edna: “So what do you have to say? Guilty or not guilty?”
The young girl looked straight at her grandfather and said, “It’s not only what you made us do to you, all the men want that; it’s what you made us do to each other, after Helen got old enough. And that wasn’t Spirit. That was you wanting it to be like pictures on the Internet. That was not right and you should burn in hell for that.”
“I’m your grandfather,” Einstadt said. “You remember the toys you got for Christmas? Where did those come from? You remember when we built the swings?”
“This is pathetic,” Alma said. “Edna, say what you think.”
“Oh, he’s guilty,” she said. “But I leave it up to you, Mother. Mr. Flowers might be right. It might hurt us more than it hurts Grandfather.”
“Listen to your daughter, Miz Flood,” Virgil said. “She’s a smart one.”
Alma said to Helen, “What do you think?”
Helen looked at her grandfather and said, “You hurt me really bad. I think you liked hurting me, after that first time, when you found out how much it hurt. I think you’re a rotten old man who never thought of anything but himself.”
“You never told me any of this,” Einstadt said. “Why didn’t you tell me? I thought—”
“You thought we liked it?” Alma said.
“I don’t know.” He looked away.
Helen said, “But I think the same as Edna—that Mr. Flowers might be right. I think I would like to get to live with you, Mother, after all this is done, and maybe the World of Law will let you get away with Rooney, because of what he did, but I don’t know if they’ll let you shoot two. Two seems like a lot more than one.”
“Guilty or not?”
“He’s guilty. We all know he’s guilty. I don’t even know why we have to have a trial. But should we shoot him? I don’t know about that. Maybe we should listen to Mr. Flowers.”


ALMA SAID to Virgil, “You made an impression on the girls, anyway. But you haven’t said one word in Father’s defense. You want to say that word now?”
Virgil shook his head. “Miz Flood, I think just like Edna. He is guilty, I believe, but let the law take care of it for you.”
Alma said, “I’m a child of the World of Spirit, Mr. Flowers, and I don’t pay too much attention to the World of Law. My father was right about that: the World of Law is crazy. We see it on the television, and we know how crazy it is—people go around killing other people, and nothing happens to them; people stealing money so big that you could buy all the farms in this whole country for the money they steal, and nothing happens. That’s crazy. I don’t give two bits for your World of Law.”
“Miz Flood—”
“Don’t ‘Miz Flood’ me, Mr. Flowers. Either say your defense, or give up.”
“I don’t have a defense,” he said. “But don’t do this to yourself.”
Einstadt said, “For God’s sakes, Alma, don’t be crazy. Put up the gun and let’s go with Flowers.”
As she turned back to Einstadt, Virgil, who’d had his feet flat on the floor, slowly pulled them back, got his toes cocked: given a half-second distraction, he might be able to knock the shotgun sideways. Most people thought of shotguns as being infallible at short distances, as though the shot goes out in a wide screen. In fact, at the distance that separated Alma and her father, the spread would only be a couple of inches across, or maybe three or four at the most. If he could knock it just a bit sideways . . .
He said, “Miz Flood . . . I do have one more thing to say....”
She off-paced him again. As Virgil was getting ready to fling himself at her, leaning forward, cocked, ready, she said, “Father. I always wanted to do this.”
And she pulled the trigger, with the same tremendous blast as the one that killed Rooney, and Virgil flung himself from the chair and knocked the shotgun sideways, and then wrestled it away from her.
Too late for Einstadt: the shot had hit him in the stomach and lower chest, and though he was still alive, he wouldn’t be for long, with a hole that you could put a fist into.
Einstadt was trying to speak, but couldn’t, and Virgil yelled at the radio, “Get somebody in here, I’ve got the gun,” and at that instant, Jenkins burst in, and then stopped. “Holy shit.”
Alma leaned forward, putting her face in front of her father’s clouding eyes, and said, “You’re on your way to hell, Father. Maybe I’ll see you there sometime. I hope not, but maybe I will. In the meantime, I hope you burn like a sausage on a griddle.”
Einstadt might have heard some of it—his eyes flicked with the words—but he didn’t hear the griddle part, because at some point between “on your way to hell” and “sausage,” he died.


JENKINS SAID to Virgil, “We recorded it. Some of it was a little dim.” He picked up the taped radio and pulled the tape off, clicked it, and said, “Gene, keep most of the people out of here. We’ve got a crime scene.”
Schickel came back: “Copy that.”
Jenkins said to Alma, “Miz Flood, I’m sorry for your troubles. I truly am. And I gotta tell you, I would have pulled the trigger. If you want to call me up in court, I’ll tell them that. I think you did the right thing.”
She looked up at him and said, “So you don’t agree with Mr. Flowers, that it was about us? Me and the girls?”
“I have a different view of it,” Jenkins said. “If you’d seen that old sonofabitch living in prison, getting three meals a day and hanging out with his pals, you would have wondered where the justice was. Well, you know where it is now.” He put out a hand to her. “Come on along. I’ll take you and the girls into town.”