“ ‘Rebecca would pyroot through their rooms whenever she wanted, and then came the incident of her finding Camille’s poetry in a leather-bound book, and reciting the poems at dinner to taunt poor Camille, wounding Camille all but mortally so that Camille threw a hot bowl of soup in Rebecca’s face.’

“ ‘I have Camille’s book,’ I told Aunt Queen. ‘I found it in Rebecca’s trunk. But why didn’t someone else find it when the trunk was packed? Why were there cameos in the trunk? I know everything was thrown in there but still—?’

“ ‘Because the woman disappeared under violent circumstances, and it was Manfred who grabbed up her things and heaved them into the trunk. And besides, the old madman had been absent when the affair of the poetry took place, and who knew how much he knew? He didn’t see the book, or care about it, that’s plain enough, and he didn’t bother to save the cameos you found in the trunk, either, though he did save five cameos as I’ll explain.’

“ ‘How did Rebecca disappear? What were the violent circumstances?’ I pushed.

“ ‘She tried to set fire to this house.’

“ ‘Ah, of course.’

“ ‘She did it with the oil lamps.’

“I gasped. ‘So that’s why everybody believed me!’ I said. ‘Jasmine and Lolly and Pops. They knew the story of what Rebecca had done in the past.’

“Aunt Queen nodded. ‘Rebecca set the lamps on the windowsills of the front rooms. She had a blaze started in four places when Ora Lee and Jerome caught her in the act, and Jerome struck her and shouted for the farmhands to come in and put out the fire. Now you know what a risk that was for Jerome, a black man, to haul off and slap a white woman in those days, but this crazy Rebecca was trying to burn down this house.

“ ‘The gossip was that Jerome knocked her unconscious. And that she had almost succeeded in her mad designs, the fire really blazing before they caught it, and the repairs costing a mint.

“ ‘Now, imagine what a danger fire was in those times, Quinn. We didn’t have the pumps on the banks of the swamp in those days, Quinn, we didn’t have the water out here from town. This house could have really gone up. But it didn’t. Blackwood Manor was saved.

“ ‘Of course Jerome kept Rebecca under close watch in the room without candles or lamps until Manfred came back from the swamp.

“ ‘You can imagine the tension, Quinn, with Jerome, a black man, taking on this responsibility, and Rebecca being locked up there in the dark, calling him a “nigger” and threatening to have him lynched and every other thing she could think of through the door. There were lynchings in those days, too. They didn’t happen hereabouts that I know of, but they happened.