I hardened my voice. “Anyone special?”

Her eyes grew large with understanding. Reflexively she said, “What do you mean?”

I hesitated, suddenly wondering whether Rayfield had been there or was coming later, and then I saw what Cade had meant: “So Mr. Shaw came to see you, Mrs. Parsons?” “Yes, sir.” “And what did he want to know?” Leaning forward, I asked, “Have the police been here?”

She stiffened. The fetor of too much bad history came to me in the darkened room: a black woman, cornered; a white man wanting answers. I pushed all that aside. “Have they?” I demanded.

She shook her head. “No.”

“They will, Mrs. Parsons, and when they do, they’ll ask the same things and you’ll tell them, because you have to. All I’m asking is that you do that much for Henry Cantwell.”

She eyed the floor in confusion. For an instant I felt close to something. But when she looked up, her head was tilted in that haunting angle of repose. “I’ll tell them she and Mr. Cantwell got on fine, if that’s what you mean.”

“It’s partly what I mean.”

“Mrs. Cantwell was a good woman,” she said coldly. “It won’t help Mr. Cantwell or anyone else to try to know everything about her.”

She began smoothing her skirt.

I knew then it was useless. In her reactions—the crumbling poise retrieved by her symbiotic grasp of the dead woman’s personality—was an unsettling glimpse of her own life. Over time, she had become half of someone else, until now she protected not just Lydia Cantwell. She protected herself.

I stayed long enough to ask the gardener’s name.

Eight

EIGHT

I parked next to the L & N railroad yard and started up the street. On both sides were row shacks painted a flat green that peeled like dried bark. Except for cramped porches there was no shade and the street was pebbled with glass and gravel and lumps of tar and crowded with boys in cut-offs who pitched and batted a red rubber ball. Their parents—men in undershirts and women in cotton dresses—watched me from the porches.

On the third porch to my left a lone black man wearing Army fatigue pants hunched in a metal chair. At his feet were an old coffee can and a bottle of beer which sweated in the heat.

“I’m looking for Otis Lee,” I told him.

The man spat tobacco in the coffee can, took a long, deliberate swallow of beer, and said, “What you want?”