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apple pie, and acted like everything was okay. Like she was part of the family again.
    Back home, across the river, there was movement. Crane’s blue Ford pulled into the driveway, hours before he was supposed to return home. He got out of his truck, went into the house, came right back out, and looked across the river. She realized Crane would notice her boat tied on the wrong side of the river, so she hurried down to the water to wave and let him know she was not at the party, but by the time she got to where he would have seen her, he was already back in his truck. Crane’s tires spat mud from beneath the crust of frozen ground. Margo was grateful Cal was nowhere to be seen. But then, as if conjured by her thoughts, Cal appeared on the riverside path, walking in her direction, looking drunk. Maybe Crane had seen him, maybe that was why he was driving here instead of just yelling across the river. Margo silently backed away and then hoisted herself into the apple tree above her and up onto the wooden platform Grandpa and Junior had built a few years ago. She knelt and watched and listened as Cal approached. When he stopped beside the shed, he was only twenty feet away, close enough that she could see him blink, close enough to see that one of the buttons was missing from the plaid shirt he wore under his unzipped Carhartt vest. She wondered if there might be a girl in the shed, but through the dirty window glass she saw only a skinned deer carcass hanging from the ceiling. It was hard to tell, but it looked smaller than any of those she had killed this year.
    Cal stood facing the river. He put his plastic cup of beer on the window ledge next to the door, so he was in profile between her and the white shed wall. Margo heard Crane’s noisy exhaust on the road bridge downstream, but Cal lit a cigarette and did not pay any attention to the sound. She watched Cal inhale, saw his chest rise and then fall as he exhaled a blue cloud. The air was colder than it had been last Thanksgiving. The platform was just high enough off the ground that Margo could see the roof of her daddy’s Ford when it pulled up to the rail fence a few hundred yards away. Cal fumbled with his fly. He didn’t seem to hear the truck door creak open or slam shut. He drew on his cigarette and stared down at his pecker in his hand, waiting for something to come out. Margo shifted to sit cross-legged, nestled the butt of the rifle into her shoulder, and looked at her uncle Cal over the sights.
    She slowed her breathing and heartbeat in order to focus more clearly. Her daddy had threatened to kill her uncle, and that was likely what he was coming to do. Margo thought Crane could not survive being locked up for the crime he was about to commit. She also knew Crane wouldn’t shoot a man who was hurt or lying on the ground. She wondered if she should take Cal down herself before Crane got there, injure Cal rather than kill him. Margo took aim at one of Cal’s insulated work boots. At this distance, her bullet would cut through the leather and insulation to strike his ankle bone.
    Margo lined up the side of Cal’s right knee, saw how she could shatter the kneecap.
    She aimed at his thigh. For a split second Cal would not know what hit him. A stray horseshoe? A hornet’s stinger? If the bullet grazed the front of his thigh, it could continue on through the wooden siding of the old shed, bury itself in the dirt floor.
    Years ago, Billy and Junior had held Margo down and put a night crawler in her mouth, and she, in turn, put dozens of night crawlers in the boys’ beds. Junior had stopped picking on her after that. The time she had revenged Billy with the dead skunk he’d put in her boat, she had to endure Joanna’s tomato juice bath—a consequence she had not considered, as her daddy pointed out—and she stank for a week anyway. But it had been worth it to rub that skunk in Billy’s face and hair. Her cousins had teased her, enjoyed her shrieks when they