She caught me thinking ahead to the next question. “Of course not.”

I said it hollow and too late. Her hand loosened. She squinted up at me and then recognition came into her face. I could almost read its stages: who I was; why she had lunged at me that night on the porch; why I was here.

“Joanne—”

“I know you.” She stood, backing away. Her festering smile was no smile at all. “You don’t want me. You poor stupid bastard, you think Dalton killed Lydia Cantwell.”

“Didn’t he?” I managed.

“Oh, my God.” She laughed shrilly. “And you’re Henry Cantwell’s lawyer. Dalton didn’t kill his precious Lydia. He just did everything else.”

“What does that mean?”

Her eyes lit. “I was there—the same night he killed her.”

I tried to show nothing. “The black man?”

“No.” Her smile was unpleasant. “Your precious client, Adam Shaw. Henry Cantwell.”

I felt a chill. “How can you know that?”

She stopped to pour a daiquiri, stretching it out. She had all my attention now. “I followed him—Dalton. He thought I was asleep. But I knew who he was running to. I could see him dressing in the bathroom, smiling a little to himself in the mirror. He thinks I can’t do things by myself, but I dressed and waited until he drove out of the garage. Then I followed him. To her house.”

“Mrs. Cantwell’s?”

“Lydia’s,” she corrected. “Precious Lydia. I parked down by the road where they couldn’t see me, trying to pull myself together in the dark. Ever since he’d met her he’d stopped wanting me and still I’d waited all those years, hoping he’d change, decorating each room so he would like coming home; and now here he was, with her. I thought of them inside and me alone in the goddamned car he gave me instead of himself. And then I decided to take every rotten minute of every rotten year and cram them down her fucking throat.”

“By killing her.”

“Don’t you wish. No, I sat and waited, like always. I don’t know how long I was in the car, thinking about it. I sat too long. How will I look to her, I thought. She’ll laugh at me and Dalton will turn away. I didn’t want him to see us together, her like she was and me … I was sitting there crying when Dalton’s Cadillac came back down the driveway and left”

“Then it was Dalton.”

“Wrong.” She was gleeful now. “Lydia Cantwell was still alive.”

“Because that’s Dalton’s story?”

“No.” She was circling now around the counter where I sat, waving the drink and cigarette butt and talking with the stagy intensity of an actress at her moment of triumph. “Because I heard her voice.”

“You heard her,” I repeated. “Through a quarter mile of pine trees and a closed door.”