Worst of all, Harry had to talk to Jill’s mother on the telephone. The police had broken the news to her and her tone fluctuated between a polite curiosity about how Jill came to be living in this house and a grieved outrage seeking its ceiling, a bird cramped in a cage of partial comprehension.

“She was staying with me, yes, since before Labor Day,” Rabbit told her, over the downstairs phone, in the dark living room, smelling of furniture polish and Mom’s medicine. “Before that she had been bumming around in Brewer with a crowd of Negroes who hung out at a restaurant they’ve closed down since. I thought she’d be better off with me than with them.”

“But the police said there was a Negro.”

“Yeah. He was a friend of hers. He kind of came and went.” Each time he was made to tell this story, he reduced the part Skeeter played, beginning with having to lie about driving him south that morning, until the young black man has become in his backwards vision little more substantial than a shadow behind a chair. “The cops say he might have set the fire but I’m sure he didn’t.”

“How are you sure?”

“I just am. Look, Mrs.—”

“Aldridge.” And this, of all things, her second husband’s name, set her to crying.

He fought through her sobbing. “Look, it’s hard to talk now, I’m dead beat, my kid’s in the next room, if we could talk face to face, I could maybe explain—”

The outrage tested a wing. “Explain! Can you explain her back to life?”

“No, I guess not.”

The politeness returned. “My husband and I are flying to Philadelphia tomorrow morning and renting a car. Perhaps we should meet.”

“Yeah. I’d have to take off from work, except for the lunch hour.”

“We’ll meet at the West Brewer police station,” the distant voice said with surprising firmness, a sudden pinch of authority. “At noon.”