The protesters carried signs reading "FOR SHAME" and "NIMBY" and—this placard held by a corn-fed young woman wearing a man's fishing hat—"PERVERTS OF A FEATHER FLOCK TOGETHER." They numbered about three dozen. Dr. Sand paced back and forth with a bullhorn, warning, "This is a family community, not a social experiment. Predators are not welcome here. Nobody has a right to welcome sex predators to our community." Two junior officers from the Pontefract police department sat guard on the Sucrams' porch. Myra ordered her daughters to remain inside and to stay away from the windows.

"I'm sorry you girls have to be exposed to this at your age," she said. "But they'll get tired and give up soon enough."

"I want to go out there," threatened Bill. "I won't be bullied in my own home by a pack of McCarthyites."

"Well, you can't," answered Lizzie's mother. "You're in no physical condition to take on a mob—and I'm not having you get yourself killed over nonsense." Myra stood behind her husband's chair and kneaded his shoulders. "Let them blow off their steam. What does it matter to us?"

"It's not nonsense," said Bill, but while he maneuvered his chair into the foyer, he made no effort to wheel himself onto the porch.

Lizzie waited for her father to drive off the protesters, and then she realized that her mother was also waiting, and her sister too, that they were all expecting her father to defy Myra's warning and take on the mob. But he didn't. Lizzie's father was now as much a prisoner inside his body as the sex offender was inside his grandmother's house, and Lizzie understood now that he truly was going to die. On impulse, she rushed toward him and wrapped her arms around his chest, pressing her head into his neck. That was the moment that would last with her—long after her mother resumed cooking meat, and Rex Benbow returned to prison, and Julia Sand choked to death on her own vomit in a motel room with an hourly rate. Lizzie would remember being thirteen years old, hugging her dying father, knowing that he was no longer the man who could fend off danger: It was the only thing that she could never forgive.

*           *          *