“Don’t know them.” Her brows knit. “Family still here?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

“White folks?”

“Black.”

“Ummm.” Her mouth made a little bow. “Let me check in the back room. But don’t get your hopes up. Sometimes the records weren’t that good.”

“I know.”

She went through a door behind her and closed it. The man frowned at me. I smoked three cigarettes, waiting.

I was stubbing the third when the girl came out, gingerly holding a single worn document. She laid it on the counter, turned toward me so I could read it.

It was a yellowed birth certificate. On May 4, 1930, it said, Moses and Jane McCarroll, Negroes, had a son. Otis Lee McCarroll.

“Is this what you were looking for?” she asked.

“I’m afraid so.”

Outside, I called Kris Ann to say I’d be a few more hours. A van full of teenagers waving beer cans careened around the corner, soul music trailing from their radio. I got in the car and drove south again.

Eighteen

EIGHTEEN

Perhaps Kris Ann’s picture had made it personal. Perhaps I felt the lives of others becoming part of mine. I drove to Lee’s shack without calling Rayfield.

Lee wasn’t there. His neighbors—women, children, or sullen idle men—didn’t know him or where he was. I felt almost relieved. Then the last old woman said sometimes she’d seen him in the park by the county courthouse. Maybe he liked it there, she said. It was quiet and there was all that shade.

The park was a wooded square surrounded by the public buildings of the city and split into quadrants of oak and lawn by narrow stone walks that issued from a central reflecting pool like spokes. I parked and entered, looking to both sides as I walked toward the pool. At its center a gold-painted Statue of Liberty gazed toward the police station, her face in shadows. Old men on benches, wearing hats in the shade, waited for nothing to happen. One got slowly up to study his reflection. He stood over the brackish water, bent and patient and puzzled. I stared down in silent imitation. Beneath me was a dim, dark-haired figure, faceless from a low wind blowing ripples through it. I looked up.

Otis Lee watched from a bench beneath a grove of trees on the far side of the pool. We stared across the water in mute acknowledgment. He didn’t run, or move. I circled the pool until I stood over him.

“Did she make it up to you?” I asked.

His gaze upward held a cold curiosity. “How you find me?”

“A neighbor. Or do you mean how I knew?”

“That.”

“By digging, like the police are now. It would be better to turn yourself in.”

His eyes filled with smoldering bitter resignation. “I didn’t kill that woman.”