Foster put his hands in his pockets. “When she came down here in 1890 she didn’t stay very long. Went right back home—where she wouldn’t talk about what happened, what she learned. But it was something bad. Because they heard her talking to herself about it. When she thought there wasn’t anybody around. Then one day in November of that year she hanged herself.”

For the first time Alexander Mebane looked away from him. Down through the porch railings into the long shade of afternoon over the ruined gardens, his eyes glazing there as if seeking something, his thin lips working, silent. His hand wrapped around the cane handle. He lifted the cane and thumped the tip hard twice against the porch boards. Then he looked back at Foster.

“Tell me one thing about yourself, Foster Pelham.”

“What’s that?”

“As a man, are you practical? Or romantic? By nature.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what difference you’d make between them.”

“Well now. A practical man would be thinking he might get something out of all this. Might find a way to turn it to his advantage. A romantic man, on the other hand, he wouldn’t care. He’d already know what he wanted out of it. His blood would be up. He’d already have featured it all out and would go along so it fit his plans. Some kind of revenge, some kind of reckoning.”

“I don’t think I’m either one.”

“What is it then you want?”

Now Foster looked away. At the hot car where his dogs waited. Back at the old fierce man with the cane. “I just want to know what happened is all. That’s all I’m after.”

“I see. A poet.”

“No sir. I’m just after the truth.”

Alexander Mebane smiled at him then. He twisted the cane handle in his hand and the cane rose up in an elaborate loop, then back down. Foster did not smile back; there was a tremble in him that he was breathing over. Mebane lost his smile and ran his eyes up and down over Foster. The way a woman would. Or someone seeking some own lost self. Then he kicked the screen door back and stepped out to hold it open. He said, “Pawn captures bishop. I can’t stand like this. Come inside.”

Foster behind him, Alexander Mebane turned off the hall into what had once been a dining room, the table still there and the sideboards and the chairs lined against the wall but also bookcases built in between the sideboards and a pair of castered spring-backed captain’s chairs pulled up to the table which was covered but for a small bare space with stacks of books and magazines and newspapers; also a green blotter on a leather pad and a stack of ledgers. The bare space held a linen place mat and a blackened silver napkin ring with a piece of dirty fabric stuffed through it. The mat and the smudged surface of the table littered with crumbs of food.