“No.” She said it quickly, as if embarrassed. “Three years ago he started turning up again. It was like she didn’t care about the secret anymore. She’d run to the door every time he came. I felt strange. We’d gotten older together, caring for the house and Mr. Jason, and I hadn’t seen her act like that since before he was born. She looked younger. I didn’t like how he’d gotten so smooth but to her it didn’t matter. It was a second chance, she said: Jason was grown, for worse or better, and she didn’t want to be with Mr. Henry anymore.”

“Was she divorcing him?”

“She never said.” Her forehead creased. “One day Mr. Mooring and her had a long talk out back and after that she stopped leaving the house to meet him. He still sneaked by—she was still glad to see him—but they acted more careful.

“It was like that the last time he came. He dropped by the day after the fight with Mr. Jason, just before she went to see Mr. Cade. He was there maybe fifteen minutes. They talked out back looking real serious and then he went his way and she went downtown. She told me she had an appointment to see Mr. Cade and that I could leave.”

“But you don’t know what she and Mooring talked about?”

Etta looked at me gravely. “I never saw her again.”

In the silence that followed, my head filled with metronomic pounding. Finally, I asked, “Who do you think killed her?”

She stared at me. “I guess Otis Lee had reason,” she said evenly. “And he watched her all the time.”

“Would she have let him in?”

“I don’t know.”

“But she would let in someone she knew, like Mooring. Or Jason.”

“I don’t see why Mr. Mooring—”

“But you do see Jason, don’t you.”

Etta looked back at Lydia’s picture. After a long time she said, “Lord knows she tried. But all that caring didn’t seem to matter at the end. He had a terrible temper and Mr. Henry always pretty much ignored him. And they’d had that fight. Still, it would be so wrong. I mean, she gave up everything for that one child.”

Until the end, I thought, and even then, when she wanted more, she had never quite made it. “Did she ever ask you to go with her if she left Mr. Cantwell?”

Etta’s head snapped up. “She didn’t have to. I was the only one who really saw her.”

But did she see you, I wondered. Etta read my thoughts. “She understood me,” she said sharply. “She understood about Clifton. She gave me part of her own life to make up for that.”