Louisiana Lament

there, strong and clear.
    She went back to Eve’s for a manicure, but the girl was gone. No one could say why or where to. One day she hadn’t shown up for work; end of story.
    Without hesitating, though it was the middle of a workday, Talba drove to the house on Mystery Street (another phrase that wasn’t lost on her), raced up the steps and pounded. Either no one was home, or no one chose to answer. She left a note, which she followed up with a letter and phone calls, but it seemed Janessa didn’t want to be found.
    Talba had unwittingly done her sister an evil turn when they were children—not mischievous, truly evil—and the thought that the girl might know and hate her for it clutched at her.
    It was the act of a child—nothing she could even remember in the usual sense, but she had done hideous, irreparable damage to that girl. Perhaps that was why she needed her now—to do something good, something to start to commence to begin (as Miz Clara sometimes said) to make up for it.
    She made up a big pot of red beans and rice and took it to the Reverend Scruggs. “How’s Ella today?”
    “She is… barely with us, I’m afraid. Her light, her beautiful light, is shining its last.”
    “I’m so sorry, Reverend.”
    He patted his belly. “But we have been eating well, thanks to you. Miz Lura Blanchard has been many times to see us, always bringing something fine and nourishing. Of course Ella barely touches anything, but I have benefited greatly. Thank you kindly for remembering us to her.”
    Another funny phrase: “to remember” one person to another. She thought it meant to say hello by proxy, which she hadn’t. She spoke before she thought. “I’m glad
something
worked out.”
    Reverend Scruggs smiled, eyes twinkling. He seemed to be making his peace with Ella’s imminent death. “Are you in need of pastoral counseling, child?”
    “You know, I could probably use some.”
    “Feel at liberty to unburden your soul.”
    Talba laughed, pretending to check her watch. “Have you got about a week and a half?”
    “I have all the time in the world, except when Ella needs me.”
    “I just dropped by to tell you I found my baby sister.”
    “Congratulations, Sandra. I’m happy to hear it.”
    “Finding her was easy. Dealing with it is something else again. I had very weird feelings about her. Snobbish, sort of. She looked like so many girls you see on the street—fat, sloppy… aimless, I guess. I didn’t think I had anything in common with her. But then I started thinking about it—about what would make a person like that. She has no mother, and her aunt more or less hates her. She’s living with a family that might be very nice—I met the mother and she certainly seemed to be—but they probably have no time for her, either. Anyway, I thought maybe… I don’t know, maybe I could do something for her. And then I realized I also wanted to get to know her; I just wanted her in my life.”
    “What could be wrong with that?”
    “She rejected me. Doesn’t answer my letters, phone calls, anything.”
    “Have you tried e-mail?”
    Talba was shocked. She hadn’t even thought of it. “She wouldn’t… I don’t think…”
    “Perhaps you underestimate her. I have one thing to say to you, Sandra. Ecclesiastes 3.”
    “What?”
    “Borrow Miz Clara’s Bible. Something tells me you don’t have one yourself.”
    She left, promising to come back and knowing it would be soon, when Ella died. On the whole, she felt the worse for the visit.
    But out of curiosity, she got Miz Clara’s Bible and looked up the verses. The chapter was really a poem, one she’d known a long time ago, and a version of the one she never wrote, the one about the inevitability not only of death but of life, which had hovered in her when Clayton died and Michelle lived and Sophia was born.
    It was the passage that began, “To everything there is a season,” and it made her feel as settled and serene as anything had lately.
    But that wasn’t saying a hell of a lot. At the moment it wasn’t all that comforting that somone had written hundreds of years ago that there was “a time to kill.” Killing seemed to have gone into overtime lately.
    Exactly when,
she thought,
is it going to be time for Trey Patterson to go to jail?
    The answer was never. In Louisiana, the statute of limitation on aggravated battery was four years, and on attempted murder, six. It had been more than sixteen since the crime and nobody in