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will be waiting for him and for Grace in here." She walked into the study, closing the door with a restrained click.
    Jennie opened the front door and breathed deeply, letting the cold seep into her lungs. The snowfall the night before had been heavy, but the morning was crisp, blinding blue and white. The sounds of the morning were clean as ice—the squawks of hungry birds in the snow-tipped trees, a lion's roar from the barns. In the distance, she saw Porter trudging up the hill with Grace. He made slow, careful progress, like a man trying to cross a river of ice cracking with spiderwebs, like a man who wasn't sure if he wanted to get to the other side.
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    AT NIGHT the water cried. Sister told Jennie that long ago, Spanish priests used baubles and rum to lure the Biloxi Indians to Christ, away from their goddess mother. She rose from the sea, beckoning to her children from atop a mountain of wave and foam, and the Biloxi rushed into the sea to beg her forgiveness. She spread her arms, scooped them up, and took them with her to the bottom of the Gulf. Sister said, "The sea's brimming with failed mothers and their sorry children. All of them crying, and their tears lap the shore."
    Jennie was sixteen when she finally told Sister. All of it. Saying nothing, Sister lit a lantern and motioned for Jennie to follow her into the night. They made their way through fields of sea oats to the site of her father's latest dig—a long trench cut into the beach. In the moonlight, Jennie saw shovelfuls of sand shooting out of the hole to the familiar beat of her father's grunts. Sister picked up a shovel, swung it over her shoulder like a spike-driving hammer, then handed it to Jennie. Sister whispered, "Your mama wouldn't have it no other way."
    Because he stood below her in the trench, because it was dark, Jennie saw no blood, not even the look on his face. "Hear that," Sister said. Jennie heard nothing but the sound of the waves, and Sister said the water had ceased its crying. "Good sign," she said. They tossed everything in the hole with him—whiskey bottles, shovels, tinned meat, his tent and blanket, even the blackened logs from his camp fire—and the earth obliged, swallowing Slater Marchette whole.
    Later, Sister took a pair of scissors to his Confederate flag and fashioned a costume that bared plenty of midriff and thigh. She told Jennie a circus was showing up in Mobile. "A pretty little white girl like you, they'll snatch you up in a minute." When Jennie protested that she had no special talent. Sister opened the thin pages of her Bible and pointed to the verse that had nearly saved her mother's life. "You know this, you can do anything, child."
    She became "Jennie Dixianna" the moment she signed her first performer's contract. Jennie Marchette was a dirty flopsy doll buried deep in the sand.
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    WALLACE PORTER visited Jennie Dixianna's bunkhouse that night and found her bundled up with quilts at the fireplace. Porter knelt down and put his head in her lap, massaging her sinewy thighs. He covered the pink bracelet scar with small kisses—in a few months, the Spin of Death would begin and her wrist would be red, always red. "How do you do this, every night," he asked.
    Jennie kissed him softly and quickly, like a butterfly landing and fluttering away. She poured them each a glass of wine. "Some morning you had."
    "Yes." Porter looked at the floor like a guilty boy.
    "I'm sorry if I was the cause."
    "I forgot they were coming."
    "What did you tell Mrs. Cooper?" Jennie asked, but she already knew the answer. She'd heard their angry whispers through his study door.
    "What women you bring into this house is your business. And God's," Elizabeth had said, "but how could you expose my daughter to this?"
    "I haven't exposed her to anything." Porter's tone was soft and soothing, like a man calming his angry wife.
    "What happened here last night, Wallace? Don't lie to me."
    "Nothing at all. Miss Dixianna and I