“I’m not saying I’ve always been comfortable with black people,” she said, rather softly, again playing with the white pearl at her throat. She’d grown pensive, thinking about what had happened to her son. “I don’t socialize with them. It’s just not like that around here; it’s not how I was raised. My people came over from Louisiana right before the Civil War, and we just had our ways of doing things. Never meant blacks any harm—they’re just not my people, if you know what I mean?” Frighteningly, Darren saw both Roger and Quinn, whom he’d come to like, nod their heads in understanding. Darren felt his limbs stiffen on the ridiculous sofa. “I didn’t fuss when they integrated the high school,” she said. “I had a colored girl in my home economics class. She made the best lemon Bundt cake I’ve ever tasted, and she smelled like lavender and honey,” she added in a tone of mild surprise. “We both liked the same type of lip gloss. We even talked about boys. But I would never have brought her home. I don’t believe I’ve ever had a black person in my home, not counting Mary and Clyde, of course…and you.”

“Rosie,” Roger said, a soft attempt to stop her from talking.

She shook her head, indignant, mad she’d been bullied into admitting any of this. Her neck grew tall, as did her sense of herself as a good person. “But listen,” she said to Darren, “I have never discriminated against a black person in my life, Mexican neither. I’ve never kept them out of my hotel. I mean, not since it was illegal to do that sort of thing. We have always followed the law.”

Rosemary King, it turned out, owned the Cardinal Hotel, where Darren would be staying in town. She wanted that point made and even said she’d call ahead to ensure that Ranger Mathews got one of their best rooms, a suite on the first floor with a view of the garden in back. The luxury hotel was one of the oldest in the state. Her people had built it the year they’d moved from New Orleans to Jefferson and turned it into the most exclusive palace for moneyed tradesmen and shipping barons during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; there were even rumors that President Benjamin Harrison had stayed at the Cardinal. But guest records had been lost in a devastating fire in 1910.