Four days ago, Henry had seen the results firsthand. After years of fruitless attempts to get past Katy’s husband and interview her about Pooky Wilson, Henry had done something he almost never did: scheduled an interview under false pretenses. Under the pretext of doing a human interest story on breeding bichons frises (Katy’s main hobby), Henry had visited Mrs. Regan at home while her husband was at work. After making her comfortable with some puffball questions, he’d segued into her childhood in Ferriday. At first Katy spoke glowingly of those years, as most adults tended to do of rural childhoods. But when Henry brought up Albert Norris, a glaze had come over the woman’s face. When he pushed on and mentioned the name Pooky Wilson, Katy denied any knowledge about the boy. At first Henry had been sure she was hiding something. After all, following her return from Texas, her father had married Katy off to Randall Regan, the brutal roughneck who had chauffeured his boss away from the Albert Norris murder scene. One of Regan’s jobs had been to insulate Katy from reporters like himself. But when she insisted that she recalled nothing about either Pooky or Albert Norris, Henry began to wonder whether the doctors at the Borgen Institute had turned those sections of her memory to mush. When he left the house, Mrs. Regan had politely thanked him for coming and invited him to return anytime he wished. Henry felt so guilty about what he’d done that he actually went back to the office and wrote a story about Katy Regan and her dogs.

But later that night, lying in bed, the nagging thought had returned that she must remember something. As a young girl, Katy Royal had made love to Pooky Wilson many times, and she must have been as heartbroken by his disappearance as Henry had been by the realization that Swan Norris would never be his. How much had Katy known at the time? Surely some trace of the intense pain she’d felt as a young girl must remain in her cerebral cortex.

As the volume of the den television rose to compensate for his mother’s increasing deafness, Henry realized that with Viola and Morehouse dead, Katy Royal’s importance as a potential witness against her father had dramatically increased. Next time he got access to her, he decided, he would confide to Katy his love for Swan, and the heartache he’d suffered at losing her. Maybe that would summon an echo from the white space that supposedly lay in Katy Royal’s traumatized memory banks.