Channing’s face was momentarily thoughtful. “I think there was.” Brusquely, he added, “I didn’t really notice. You want to know about the boy, check down at the courthouse.”

“I’ll do that.” I rose to leave. “Thanks for your time.”

Sitting, Channing seemed suddenly brittle and disrepaired. “Wait.” His upward look was furtive, almost shy. “You were talking about Lydia Hargrave. What’s the boy to do with that?”

“I think perhaps he knows about Lydia Cantwell’s murder.”

The coldness in his eyes had vanished. “You found her, Mr. Shaw, didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir. I did.”

“What—what was she like?”

“She was strangled.”

There was a long silence. Channing looked away to where I’d sat on the glider. In the shadows his face was almost yellow. “She was beautiful then,” he said softly. “I tried to tell her, right on this porch—explain how it was. She didn’t understand. Said she was leaving to marry someone else. ‘Please,’ I begged her. ‘Don’t go. Is it that I’m too old?’” Channing’s voice fell. “She turned her face. ‘You’re dead inside,’ she answered. I tried to stop her. She pushed me away and ran out into the darkness.”

I left him there.

The courthouse square was still crowded. I angled through mothers and children and vendors selling belts and lamps and old beer bottles, passing a bookstall. A lean young black with cornrows stood thumbing a worn copy of Soul on Ice, oblivious to the aching past where Luther Channing lived suspended in bitter memory, like a fly in amber. Three white girls with Cokes and lemonades slid chattering around him. The old men still whittled. I wondered which of them might have milled outside the courthouse forty years before. But it hardly mattered now; the ones touched by it were dead. Except for Channing and perhaps one black man, bound by Grangeville and a murdered woman.

I crossed the lawn, went up the courthouse steps and through its white pillars, inside. The corridors were dim and sleepy. On the way to the clerk’s office I passed the double doors of the courtroom. I hesitated, then stepped inside. The jury box was there, and Hargrave’s bench. But the room was dark and empty, the way only a stage or courtroom can be empty. It looked like nothing had ever happened there, or ever would. I backed out.

The clerk’s office had brown walls and a varnished counter with one swinging door. Behind that were a baldish man with three missing fingers and a strawberry blonde in her twenties. I spoke to the girl. “I’m Adam Shaw, out of Birmingham. I wonder if you can help me.”

She smiled all the way to her round blue eyes. “We can try.”

“I need some birth records from the early thirties.”

“Inheritance case?”

“In a sense. The family’s named McCarroll.”