Clayton gave another thin smile, and the talk became general between the eight of us: Susie and Tom Threadgill, half-drunk and riding a kind of crazy animation; Clayton and Rennie Kell, gracious and looking oddly alike; Ardrey Carr and his wife, Sandra, dark and thin, whose nerves had been ravaged by Ardrey and four children and now a murder, and who was looking at me strangely. At the last party, Tom Threadgill had asked brightly if everyone still masturbated and when he closed in on me, I’d said no I didn’t have to, I was a hermaphrodite. Clayton had smiled, Tom looked disappointed, and Sandra had clearly been puzzled. From her expression now, she had looked it up.

“Goddamn Atlanta,” Tom Threadgill burst out angrily to Clayton Kell. “Got stuck again in the screwed-up airport. I swear to God, flush a toilet south of Louisville and even the crap goes through Atlanta.”

Clayton nodded politely as I half listened, wondering why either of us bothered. But with the exception of Ardrey Carr—and me—they had all been born with money and large houses to parents who were friends and then gone to prep school together and met during college vacations until they became part of a context, reminding each other of who they were and had always been. I thought perhaps to Kris Ann they were familiar things, like her mother’s crystal or the pictures of Cade she kept. I forgot them and began wondering about Henry’s last call to Lydia until I heard her name and picked up the thread again.

“Poor woman,” Rennie Kell was saying.

“Nobody’s safe.” Sandra Carr’s shrill voice seemed wired to her nerve ends. Next to her Ardrey tottered on his heels. She glanced at him, almost quivering. “You start out thinking you know how your life is going to be …”

Tom Threadgill had forgotten the airport. “Life plans are stupid,” he pronounced. “It’s all contingent. Lydia lives this decorous kind of life that’s supposed to get you loving children and a party for your golden anniversary and instead she ends up murdered, like all along it’s been this big fucking joke.”

Clayton frowned. Sandra Carr turned angrily to her husband. “Let’s go home, dammit. We should never have left the children with that girl.”

“I don’t know,” Susie Threadgill was saying. “It’s more like these other parts of you reach out so no matter how hard you try, they get you. I just wish Lydia had been more authentic—you know, more in touch with herself. Here she was always doing for other people and never anything but nice, and it makes you think inside maybe she was burning up and that somehow it all came out, and then—”

Ardrey Carr leaned forward, ignoring his wife. “They say she was bruised something awful,” he said loudly. “Raped too.”