“You’re home now,” she assured me. “You can relax.” But when I’d finished toweling off and followed her to the bedroom she was loading Cade’s revolver. She took it with us to the living room, secreting it behind a vase on the mantel. Cade’s bulky rented policeman paced the porch outside.

I listened for the telephone.

Kris Ann brought two mineral waters. “I think you should talk with him.”

“Henry?”

“Daddy. Maybe if you discuss this face to face …” Her voice trailed off.

I got up and began pacing with the policeman on the other side of the window. “How good was Henry with guns?”

She looked at me curiously. “Good enough to teach me, remember? Jason, too.”

“I’ve got to see him.”

Her eyes widened. “Jason?”

“Henry.”

The policeman’s footsteps sounded from the porch in monotonous rhythm. Kris Ann looked silently up at the mantel. In a flat voice she said, “So now you think it’s Henry.”

“I just need to talk to him.”

The telephone rang.

Kris Ann went to answer it. “Oh, hi,” I heard her say. “He’s fine, just resting.… No, Daddy’s not here. I think today’s his board meeting.… Yes, he’s up.… You’re sure?… All right, just a minute.”

She reappeared in the living room. “It’s Clayton,” she said almost sadly. “He says he has to see you.”

The taxi dropped me in front of the fifty-year-old building I thought of as Henry’s bank.

The Cantwell-Alabama Bank and Trust was a cement-pillared structure with marble floors and oak-paneled rear offices of which Henry’s was the largest, a commodious rectangle with high ceilings, a brass chandelier, and a green rug so deep it muffled my steps like a prowler’s.

He wasn’t there. Neither was any piece of him—plaques or portraits or family pictures—except the sense of a man passing silently through. I wasn’t sure why the room made me sad. I didn’t stay to think about it.

I stopped in the wide marble lobby as customers passed and employees in white shirts or blouses glided around me at such a uniform pace they seemed run by remote control. I’d wanted enough to find Henry, imagined it so clearly, that I seemed unable to do what I had come for.

“Adam.”

I turned to see Clayton Kell hurrying toward me. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You look terrible.”

“I’m okay. It sounded important.”

“It is.”

I trailed him to his office, a windowless square he’d worked years for, sitting while he shut the door behind us and reached for ice in the small refrigerator he hid in his credenza with a fifth of bourbon. He filled two glasses, slid mine across the desk, took a hasty gulp of his, and blurted, “It’s all a mess.”