“You haven’t talked to Roland? I thought that’s why you’d come. The police were here an hour ago.”

I tensed. “Without telling us? Did they talk to Henry?”

“No, it was me they wanted. They called my home in Virginia and traced me here.”

“What did they want?”

Her mouth tightened again. “What this Lieutenant Rayfield said he wanted was to ask about Lydia. But it all seemed to work around Henry, and finally I asked them to leave.”

“What did he ask, exactly?”

She looked quickly behind her. Henry didn’t seem to be downstairs. Our only company was the end table and an empty vase. “It was more what he implied. The lieutenant wanted to know how Lydia and Henry got on. I think what he meant was whether they were still intimate.”

The old-fashioned word made it somehow more disturbing. “Did you tell them anything?”

“Nothing. I didn’t like the man. There was something cold about him.”

“Did he let on what was behind all that?”

She was unbending now, and the anger showed. “He wouldn’t tell me anything. But I think perhaps Jason. He has a very strange perspective.”

“On what?”

She crossed her arms, hugging herself in a protective, virginal gesture. “They weren’t demonstrative, that’s all. There’s such a thing as taste.”

I nodded. “I always thought there was a nice courtliness between them.”

“Explain that to this Lieutenant Rayfield. Or to someone like Jason. We—the family—were all surprised when they had that boy and now I wish they hadn’t.”

“Surprised? In what sense?”

“It was just, oh, I don’t know exactly, perhaps a little after they were married, Henry told me they’d decided not to have children. Something about Lydia. He wasn’t specific.”

“But you don’t know what it was?”

“Not really, but Lydia was a tenser person than she seemed. You weren’t born here, were you, and of course you wouldn’t remember anyway.”

“Remember what, exactly?”

She frowned. “The Grangeville business. It turned sour on Lydia’s father. Some of the Birmingham papers even attacked him. Then he lost for governor and not too long after died of a heart attack when Lydia was only twelve or thirteen.

“We didn’t know her then, of course, but when I met her mother after she and Henry were engaged, she told me it was hard on Lydia, that before the executions she’d been quite a happy little girl, very imaginative and a little spoiled by her father—not at all like Henry, whose father terrified him and asked too much. Apparently, she changed. I know there was some unhappy involvement with an older man in Grangeville before she married Henry. But the woman I knew always tried to be perfect. I suppose she thought she wouldn’t be perfect as a parent.” Her jaw worked. “Perhaps Jason proved she was right.”