A Maidens Grave

windowless and damp. The walls and cement floors were stained dark brown. A worn wooden ramp led to the left side of the room. An overhead conveyor holding meat hooks led away from the right side. In the center was a drain for the blood.
    This was the room where the animals had been killed.
    Cold wind blows, it isn’t kind.
    Kielle grabbed Melanie’s arm and pressed against her. Mrs. Harstrawn and Susan embraced the other girls, Susan gazing with raw hatred at whichever of the men happened to catch her eye. Jocylyn sobbed, the twins too. Beverly struggled for breath.
    Eight gray birds with nowhere to go.
    They huddled in a cluster on the cold, damp floor. A rat scurried away, his fur dull, like a piece of old meat. Then the door opened again. Melanie shielded her eyes against the glare.
    He stood in the cold light of the doorway.
    Short and thin.
    Neither bald nor long-haired but with shaggy, dirty-blond strands framing a gaunt face. Unlike the others he wore only a T-shirt, on which was stenciled the name L. Handy. But to her he wasn’t a Handy at all—and definitely not a Larry or a Lou. She thought immediately of the actor in the Kansas State Theater of the Deaf who had played Brutus in a recent production of Julius Caesar.
    He pushed inside and carefully placed two heavy canvas bags on the floor. The door swung shut and once the ashen light vanished she could see his pale eyes and thin mouth.
    Melanie saw Bear say, “Why . . . here, man? No fucking way out.”
    Then, as if she could hear perfectly, Brutus’s words sounded clearly in her mind, the phantom voice that deaf people hear sometimes—a human voice yet with no real human sound. “It don’t matter,” he said slowly. “Nope. Don’t matter at all.”
    Melanie was the one he looked at when he said this and it was to her that he offered a faint smile before he pointed to several rusty iron bars and ordered the other two men to wedge the doors tightly shut.

9:10 A.M.
    He’d never forgotten an anniversary in twenty-three years.
    Here’s a husband for you.
    Arthur Potter folded back the paper surrounding the roses—effervescent flowers, orange and yellow—mostly open, the petals perfect, floppy, billowing. He smelled them. Marian’s favorite. Vibrant colors. Never white or red.
    The stoplight changed. He set the bouquet carefully on the seat beside him and accelerated through the intersection. His hand strayed to his belly, which pressed hard against his waistband. He screwed up his face. His beltwas a barometer; it was hooked through the second-to-the-last hole in the worn leather. Diet on Monday, he told himself cheerfully. He’d be back in D.C. then, his cousin’s fine cooking long digested, and could concentrate on counting grams of fat once more.
    It was Linden’s fault. Let’s see . . . last night she’d made corned beef, buttered potatoes, buttered cabbage, soda bread (butter optional, and he’d opted), lima beans, grilled tomatoes, chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream. Linden was Marian’s cousin, in the lineage of the McGillis forebear Sean, whose two sons, Eamon and Hardy, came over in steerage, married within the same year and whose wives gave birth to daughters, ten and eleven months, respectively, after the vows.
    Arthur Potter, an only child orphaned at thirteen, son of only children, had enthusiastically adopted his wife’s family and had spent years plotting the genealogy of the McGillises. Through elaborate correspondence (handwritten on fine stationery; he did not own a word processor) Potter kept up religiously, almost superstitiously, with the meanderings of the clan.
    Congress Expressway west. Then south. Hands at ten to two, hunched forward, glasses perched on his pale fleshy nose, Potter cruised through working-class Chicago, the tenements and flats and two-family row houses lit by the midwestern summer light, pale in the overcast.
    The quality of light in different cities, he thought. Arthur Potter had been around the world many times and had a huge stockpile of ideas for travel articles he would never write. Genealogy notes and memos for his job, from which he was soon to retire, would probably be the only Potter literary legacy.
    Turn here, turn there. He drove automatically and somewhat carelessly. He was by nature impatient but had long ago overcome that vice, if a vice it was, and he never strayed above the posted limit.
    Turning the rented Ford onto Austin Avenue, he glanced in his rearview mirror and