Solomon looked out his window. No toys in front of the house. A laundry line wired from the rear corner of the house to a tree was empty but for two bobbing black crows. No television antenna on the roof. Curtains in the first-floor windows but no shutters outside. The windows, strangely for this heat, were closed.

“I should go alone,” said Solomon.

“Ain’t no other way,” said Macklin.

Still, Macklin stood out of the car when Solomon exited. Tyler remained sitting in the driver’s seat, smoking. The sheriff and others got out of their wagon but only to fan themselves and wait.

Solomon went to the door and knocked. It was opened almost immediately by a young girl wearing a stiff cotton dress, blue with white lace hanging from the raw hem.

Solomon said, “Hello there. Are your parents home?”

She looked at him with large brown eyes, her head barely upturned. “You a doctor?”

“No, miss.”

She turned and walked inside. Solomon waited, expecting to hear her call for a parent, but no voice came. No footsteps, either. The hallway inside split left and right, but it was dark, and his eyes wouldn’t adjust from the harsh sunlight unless he stepped inside.

The floor was dirt. There was wood flooring farther ahead. A young man stood there with a wax sleeve of saltines, chewing. He was maybe twenty years old.

“You the man of the house?” asked Solomon.

“No, sir.”

“Your daddy home?”

“He’s out in the fields.”

“This is the Jamus house, is it not?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your name, son?”

He selected another saltine. “Coleman, sir. Cole.”

“Is your mama home, Cole?”

Cole nodded and turned, starting away, looking back over his shoulder for Solomon to follow him into a side room with a thickly braided oval rug and a few pieces of furniture around it. Near the corner, seated before a window looking out at the sugarcane, was a woman in her forties in a beige housedress, her face in one hand, weeping. She had cried a stain of tears on her waist, more tears running down her wrist and forearm.

Solomon’s mouth started to form the word Ma’am, but he never uttered it. Getting any information from this grieving woman was a lost cause. She was better left to her emotions.

He looked to Cole, chewing another saltine, looking at his mother like he was used to this.

“He’s in the back room,” Cole said to Solomon, his eyes still on his mother. “He’s chained up.”