“Ma’am, I know how you feel. But the canker’s not a joke. If we don’t deal with it, there won’t be any citrus trees left…”

“I want to know who called.”

“We don’t know that, ma’am. We’ll get it straightened out, and we certainly apologize for the inconvenience. We’d like to explain your options. When’s a good time to come back? Will you be around later in the day? We’ll get a pathologist to look.”

“You can tell your damn pathologists and supervisors and whoever that they’ve not heard the last from me about this. Do you know who I am?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Turn on your damn radio today atnoon. Talk It Out with Dr. Self.”

“You’re kidding. That’s you?” one of the inspectors, the one with the PDA, asks, impressed, as he ought to be. “I listen to you all the time.”

“I also have a new TV show. ABC, tomorrow at one-thirty. Every Thursday,” she says, suddenly pleased and feeling a bit more charitable toward them.

The scraping sound beyond the broken window sounds like someone digging. Ev breathes shallowly, rapidly, her arms raised above her head. She breathes shallow, rapid breaths and listens.

It seems she heard the same noise days ago. She doesn’t remember when. Maybe it was at night. She listens to a shovel, someone plunging a shovel into the dirt behind the house. She shifts her position on the mattress, and her ankles and wrists throb as if someone is beating them and her shoulders burn. She is hot and thirsty. She can barely think and probably has a fever. The infections are bad and every tender place burns unbearably, and she can’t lower her arms, not unless she stands.

She will die. If he doesn’t kill her first, she will die anyway. The house is silent, and she knows the rest of them are gone.

Whatever he did to them, they aren’t here anymore.

She knows it now.

“Water,” she tries to call out.

Words well up inside her and disintegrate in the air like bubbles. She talks in bubbles. They float up and vanish without a sound in the hot, foul air.

“Please, oh please,” and her words go nowhere and she begins to cry.

She sobs and tears fall on the ruined green robe in her lap. She sobs as if something has happened, something final, like a destiny she never could have imagined, and she stares at the dark spots her tears make on her ruined green robe, the splendid robe she wore when she preached. Beneath it is the small pink shoe, a left shoe, Keds. She feels the little girl’s pink shoe against her thigh, but her arms are raised and she can’t hold it or hide it better, and her sorrow deepens.

She listens to the digging beyond her window and begins to smell the stench.

The longer the digging goes on, the worse the stench gets inside her room, but it is a different stench, a dreadful stench, the acrid, putrid stench of something dead.

Take me home, she prays to God. Please take me home. Show me.

She manages to get on her knees, to kneel, and the sound of the digging stops, then starts again, then stops. She sways, almost falls, willing herself to stand, struggles and falls and tries again, sobbing, and then she is on her feet and the pain is so awful, she sees black. She takes a deep breath and the blackness passes.

Show me, she prays.

The ropes are thin white nylon. One is tied to the coat hanger bent and twisted around her inflamed, swollen wrists. When she stands, the rope is slack. When she sits, her arms are raised over her head. She can’t lie down anymore. His latest cruelty, shortening the rope, forcing her to stand as much as she can, leaning against the wooden wall until she can’t stay on her feet any longer and she sits and her arms go straight up. His latest cruelty, making her cut off her hair, then shortening the rope.

She looks up at the rafter, at the ropes over it, one tied to the coat hanger that binds her wrists, the other to the coat hanger bent around her ankles.

Show me. Please God.

The digging stops and the stench blots the light out of the room and stings her eyes, and she knows what the stench is.

They’re gone. She is the only one left.

She looks up at the rope tied to the coat hanger around her wrists. If she stands, the rope is slack enough to loop once around her neck and she smells the stench and knows what it is and she prays again and loops the rope once around her neck and her legs go out from under her.