A Maidens Grave

de l’Epée had already sent his men around the slaughterhouse looking for places where the girls might get out. Maybe some were even cutting their way in right now to rescue them.
    She thought back to their arrival at the slaughterhouse this morning. She remembered seeing groves of trees on either side of the building, a muddy slope down to the river, which glistened gray and cold in the overcast afternoon light, black wood pilings, dotted with tar and creosote, a dock leaning precariously over the water, dangling rotten tires for ship bumpers.
    The tires . . . That’s what had given her the idea. When she was a girl, every summer in the early evening she and Danny would race down to Seversen Corner on the farm, run over the tractor ruts and through a fog of wheat down to the pond. It was nearly an acre, surrounded by willowsand grass and stiff reeds filled with cores like Styrofoam. She ran like the Kansas wind so that she’d be the first one to the hill overlooking the pond, where she’d leap into space, grab the tire swing hanging over the water and sail out above the mirrorlike surface.
    Then let go and tumble into the sky and clouds reflected below her.
    She and her brother had spent long hours at the pond—even now, that glassy water was often her first thought when she stepped outside into a warm summer evening. Danny had taught her to swim twice. The first time when she was six and he’d taken her hands and eased her into the water of the still but deep pond. The second time was far harder—after she’d lost her hearing and grown afraid of so many things. She was twelve then. But the lanky, blond boy, five years older, refused to let her dodge the swimming hole any longer and, using the sign language he alone in the Charrol family had learned, talked her into letting go her grip on the bald Goodyear. And he calmly trod water, supported her and kept her from panicking while she finally remembered the strokes she’d learned years before.
    Swimming. The first thing she’d done that gave her back a splinter of self-confidence after her plunge into deafness.
    Thank you, Danny, she thought. For then, and for now. Because it was this memory that she believed was going to save some, if not all, of her students.
    The river was wide here. The surface was choppy and the current fast but she remembered a tangle of branches and garbage washed up against a fallen tree that hung into the choppy water maybe a hundred feet downstream. Melanie pictured the girls moving silently through the back corridors of the slaughterhouse, over the dockside, into the water, then drifting with the current to the tree, scrambling out through the branches. Running to safety . . . .
    “Never underestimate a body of water,” Danny had told her. “Even the calm ones can be dangerous.”
    Well, there was nothing calm about the Arkansas. Could they manage it? Donna Harstrawn can swim. Kielle and Shannon—superheroes that they are—can swim likeotters. (Melanie pictures Kielle’s compact body cannonballing off the diving board, while Shannon’s willowy frame leisurely completes her laps.) The twins love to play in the water. But they can’t swim. Beverly knows how but with her asthma she can’t. Melanie doesn’t know about pretty Emily; the girl refuses to put her face underwater and always stands demurely in the shallow end of the pool when they go swimming.
    She’ll have to find something for the ones who can’t swim, a paddleboard, a float. But what?
    And how do I get them to the back of the slaughterhouse?
    She thought of Danny. But Danny wasn’t here to help. Panic edged in.
    De l’Epée?
    She sent her thoughts out to him but all he did was whisper his reassurance that there’ll be police to find the girls that escape into the river. (They’ll be there, won’t they? Yes, she has to believe they will.)
    Crap, Melanie thinks. I’m on my own here.
    Then, suddenly, the smell changes.
    Her eyes open and she finds herself staring into the face of Brutus, a few feet away from her. She no longer smells the river but rather meat and stale breath and sweat. He’s so close that she sees, with horror, that the marks on his neck—what she thought were freckles—must be the blood from the woman with the purse, the woman he killed this afternoon. Melanie recoiled in disgust.
    “Sit tight, missie,” Handy said.
    Melanie wondered again, Why can I understand him? Sit tight. A phrase almost impossible to lip-read, and yet