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floor.
    “Get up!” she shouted, kicking him. “Get the fuck up!”
    He groaned, curling into a ball, and she was reminded that even in a weakened state, the body did what it could to protect itself. She wanted to pummel him with her fists. She wanted to beat his face until no one would recognize him. How many nights had she lain awake, crying her eyes out as she waited for him to finally come home? How many mornings had she found him facedown in his own vomit? How many strangers had stayed the night—nasty, vile men with their leering smiles and fat, prodding fingers—while Hank remained oblivious to anything but chasing his high?
    “Was that your dealer?” Lena demanded, feeling a wave of nausea building in her stomach. “Was that your connection?”
    He whispered something, blood spraying in a fine mist on the filthy linoleum.
    “Who?” she screamed, leaning over his curled body, wanting to hear his words, to get the dealer’s name. She would track him down, take him into the woods, and put a bullet in his skull. “Who was that man?”
    “He was…” Hank wheezed.
    “Give me his name,” Lena ordered, kneeling beside him, her fists clenched so tight that her fingernails were cutting into her palms. “Tell me who he is, you stupid fucker.”
    His head turned up, and she saw him struggling to focus. When his eyelids began to flutter closed, she grabbed his greasy yellow hair in her fist, yanked his head up so he had no choice but to look at her.
    “Who is he?” she repeated.
    “The man…”
    “Who?” Lena said. “Who is he?”
    “He’s the one,” Hank mumbled, his eyes closing as if the effort of keeping them open was just too much. Still, he finished, “He killed your mother.”

MONDAY EVENING

CHAPTER 3
    FROM THE MOMENT JAMES OGLETHORPE first set foot in Georgia, men had been trying to chop up the state into their own perfect little pieces. The first attempt came in 1741, when the Trustees decided to split the land into two colonies: Savannah and Frederica. When Georgia became a royal colony and adopted the Church of England as their official religion, the territory was sectioned into eight parishes. After the Revolutionary War, Creek and Cherokee land in the south was taken for white expansion, then later more Cherokee land was claimed in the north.
    By the mid-1800s, no Indian territory remained, so the good ol’ boys decided to start subdividing existing counties. Once 1877 rolled around, there were 137 counties in Georgia—so many little pockets of political power that the state constitution was amended to stop the overdevelopment, then amended again in 1945 to close loopholes that had allowed the creation of 16 counties in between. The final number allowed was 159, each with its own representative in the state assembly, its own county seat, its own tax base, schools, judges, political systems, and its own locally elected sheriff.
    Jeffrey did not know much about Elawah County, other than that its founders had obviously borrowed the name from the Indians they had kicked out for the land. Night had come by the time he and Sara reached the town limits, and from what they could see, the place was not much to write home about. Lena was hardly the type to sit down and chat about her childhood, and Jeffrey understood why as he drove through Reese, Elawah’s county seat. Even the dark of night could not obscure the town’s depressing bleakness.
    Jeffrey had studied American history at Auburn University, but you wouldn’t find it written in any textbook that there were some places in the South that still had not recovered from Reconstruction. Running water, indoor plumbing, basic necessities that other Americans took for granted, were considered luxuries to people living on the wrong side of Reese’s tracks. Jeffrey’s hometown of Sylacauga, Alabama, had been poor, but not this kind of poor. Reese was the sort of festering wound that was only exposed when some kind of natural disaster yanked