She backed stiffly from the door to the living-room couch without answering or dropping her gaze, and sat. She looked smaller, older, less today like Lydia Cantwell than a lone black woman strip-mined of dreams. Through the sepia gloom, she asked, “What do you want?”

“The truth about Jason, from the beginning.”

Her eyes moved sadly to Lydia’s picture, as if saying that it was only she who had lived to know the end of things. “I don’t see it matters now.”

“It matters to me. I think Lydia’s murder began long before she died, perhaps with Jason. Or don’t you give a damn?”

Her face toughened. “They’ve arrested Otis Lee.”

“Yes, and maybe he killed her. Maybe that’s a chance you’d like to take.”

The sound of my own hypocrisy echoed in the room. But only I heard it. Her hardness dissolved in doubt. I had the sense of a long ago secret, hoarded inside until its sadness was hurtful to the touch. More gently, I asked, “Jason isn’t Henry Cantwell’s son, is he?”

She looked at the picture. Then, slowly, she nodded.

My knees were buckling. I sat heavily across from her. “How do you know that?”

Her legs were crossed, thin shoulders drawn in. “It’s all complicated,” she finally murmured. “I came to the Cantwell’s after she’d married him, when I was just past being a girl, like her. Clifton—the one I’d meant to marry—he was killed in Korea.” She paused, swallowing, and her words came faster. “After that I didn’t know what I’d do. My godmother got me a place with the Cantwells because she’d been maid to the family. It was such a big house I was scared when I came there, not knowing my duties, my mind still with Clifton. At first I didn’t see much and I don’t know about before, except what she told me later.”

“What was that?”

“Nothing to start with. It was more a feeling things weren’t right. Oh, they talked some; every night I’d bring them Manhattans in the sitting room after he’d come home. But something was left out. You know how a man watches a woman when she’s new to him—sort of follows her with his eyes—like the way she’s made, or even that she’s there, surprises him?”

I nodded, for a moment almost smiling. “I think so.”

“Well, Mr. Cantwell wasn’t like that.”

“How was he?”