“I stood out front, beyond Pops’ close and beautiful flower beds, staring at the big columns of the house until Aunt Queen came out on the front porch and told me she’d been looking for me everywhere. I knew I ought to answer her but it seemed difficult for me to break the silence that surrounded me.

“I knew on some level that her genial, sweet face was just what I needed in my selfish little soul, but I couldn’t speak. I thought of the mysterious stranger, I thought of the bodies slipping into the muck. I saw the moonlight as if it were shining on me now. I saw the dim figure who had stood at my bedroom fireplace. Glint of light on hand, on forehead, on cheek. Terror. I felt mystery, yes, but cold panic.

“Aunt Queen came near to me. She said words but I didn’t hear them. Then out of the silence I heard her voice . . . something about men being on the property to guard it. Men paid from an agency in New Orleans, excellent security men.

“Cerebrally I knew these words meant something. They meant something good, and I formed mental images of these men—of their being at the doors, and sitting in the parlor, the kitchen, the dining room. I pictured. When I can’t think or register, I picture. I listened.

“But nothing could touch the cold panic I felt, and my only recourse seemed a motionlessness.

“ ‘Quinn!’ she said. She put her hand on my neck, and I looked at her and I thought, How long will it be before she dies? And my throat was so tight I couldn’t speak.

“Finally I came to the surface. I took her hand and kissed it, and I said, ‘Let me help you up the steps, you always wear these impossible shoes, look at you, and what if you fall and you break a hip, what then, my beloved aunt, you won’t be able to go to Katmandu or Timbuktu or Iceland.’

“She took my arm and into the house we went, and after seeing her to her room, and nodding to the security guard who sat in the far corner of the dining room, I went up the stairs.

“This memory’s etched: but what isn’t?

“The panic was still on me. Would it be washed away? I went into the bathroom, stripped off the dirty swamp clothes and stepped into the shower.

“I let the warm water splash over me, praying, if I was capable of praying, that this feeling of despair, this awful despair, would leave me. I tried to reach back to the excitement I’d felt when I first came upon the island. I tried to feel anything that would lift the awful despair from me. But excitement had turned to dread, and I was an expert on dread. Now it had other springs to feed it.