She picked up a jar of Estée Lauder foundation and unscrewed the lid, then let it sit open. A copy of the Natchez Examiner lay on the marble counter, its bottom half faceup. A photograph showed a middle-aged black man standing with his arms folded in front of a music store, several young black men standing proudly beside him. Beside this image, another photo showed the same piece of ground a week later. All that remained were two partially burned pianos standing in a mass of charred wreckage.

Katy heard her husband turn off the water. In her peripheral vision, Randall Regan grabbed a towel from a peg, then stepped out and began drying his hair. With his vision obscured, she stole a glance at the monster who had guarded her since she was a girl. Even at fifty-eight, Randall remained a dense mass of muscle and sinew and anger, stronger than most men twenty years his junior. And when angered, he could be cruel beyond all imagining.

“The fuck you lookin’ at?” he asked, noticing her attention. He dropped the towel from his waist. “I know you don’t want any of this.”

Katy whipped her face forward.

“What the hell’s wrong with you this week?” He bent to dry his hairy legs. “You walk around like you’re in a fog, which ain’t far from normal, but this week it’s like a damned Alzheimer’s ward. You don’t even wash yourself. You stink. Why don’t you take a bath?”

How could she answer that? If she told the truth, Randall or her father would have her committed again—or worse. Neither man had any qualms about killing, and as depressed as Katy was, she didn’t want to die yet. She glanced over at the Examiner. The side that lay facedown displayed two portraits of Henry Sexton. One showed the reporter as a college intern, questioning an elderly black preacher in Gilbert, Louisiana. The other showed paramedics loading Sexton into an ambulance in front of the Concordia Beacon, which had been gutted by fire last night.

Ever since Henry visited this house last week, sparks had been firing through the blank spaces in Katy’s brain. Images flashed out of nowhere, like the visions she’d had after alcoholic blackouts, pictures she wasn’t sure had ever been real. Henry had asked her about a colored boy, one he’d claimed she once loved. Pooky Wilson. The name had scarcely moved her when he’d first said it, like a stone dropped into a deep lake that sank endlessly into darkness. But later that night, as she drifted into uneasy sleep, that stone had finally hit bottom. And when it hit, it jarred something loose.