All These Bodies

That’s a long story.” “I love stories,” I said. “Long, short, and in-between.

I always thought that about Marie. That the trauma had aged her. Took the life out and left something else behind.

All these bodies without blood,” she said. “And you won’t believe in vampires. Yet you believe in God.

She said from the moment she met him she could tell that all he wanted was to find a way to strap her into Nebraska’s electric chair. But the joke was on him. Because she requested hanging.

I was never trying to 'steal away with my life," Marie said, "I was trying to steal away with my soul." I told my father later that she had almost gotten to Pilson, that I saw his brow uncrease at those plaintive, Christian words. But my father only frowned and said the truest thing I'd ever heard. "Benjamin Pilson is no real Christian.

But he shook his head. “There has to be. I don’t believe that little girl ever hurt anyone.

As for me, sweeping quietly in the back, I might as well have been invisible. Until later, when he had a use for me, which told me everything I needed to know about the kind of man Benjamin Pilson really was.

He wanted Marie to fear him, but the truth was that he feared her: Marie was someone he couldn't intimidate. No matter which of his many faces he presented her with, Marie remained the same. Unflappable and threatening.

Benjamin Philson was not about to let a girl's whims derail his plans. He was of the fire-and-brimstone sort, firmly on the punishment side of the punishment versus rehabilitation argument. He was not swayed by Marie's youth nor by her sex nor by the incredulity that she would be cable of committing such heinous murders. He wanted her brought to Nebraska in chains. He wanted her dragged before a jury. He may have also been coming up for relection

The road was hard-packed with snow, and the air was crisp and clean. Orange light flickered in the trees from the fire someone had started by the shore but we’d have been able to see without it: out there the moon reflected off all that snow and made it bright enough to see the happy grin on Percy’s face. That night was warm, all the way up to the low thirties. Which may not sound like much, but when the temps drop regularly into the single digits, twenty-five starts to feel downright balmy.