8 Count

For eleven years the Blackwater Stallions have been the best thing about Southampton County, Virginia. Forty grown folks in matching boots. A plywood floor screwed down over grass. A generator, a treeline, and a DJ who knows what a crowd wants before the crowd does.

Then Hope Greenfield leaves a field party on Memorial Day and dies on her bathroom floor before morning.

Twenty-six days later they lose another one. Then another.

Every death comes with an explanation. A bite. The heat. A bad heart. Three counties, two states, three sets of professionals who signed off and moved on. Jamila Artis is the only one counting, and every time she says it out loud it costs her something. Her crew. Her president. Her name in the mouths of people who used to love her.

Sheree Joyner keeps the books. Permits, receipts, who rode with who. Eleven years of legal pads in a tote in her hall closet, and one line she never typed.

But a line dance faces one direction. Forty people on the same beat, all looking the same way, nobody watching the dark behind them.

Somebody has been.