I glance around the dark parking lot, searching for suspicious vehicles. Would I even see surveillance if it was there? Surely the FBI is better than that. I pull Caitlin to me and put my mouth to her ear. She stiffens.

“What are you doing?”

“Stone says we’re probably under surveillance. Act like we’re lovers.”

After a moment her arms slip around me and her breasts flatten against my chest, but her eyes are anything but romantic.

“We’ve got to go with my slander plan,” I whisper. “We don’t have time for anything else, and the more public this is, the safer we are.”

She slides her cheek past mine and answers in my ear. “I won’t do that. Don’t ask me to.”

“It’s the only way.”

She pulls away from me, her eyes bright. “Take me back to my car.”

“You told me you wanted to shake up your father’s business.”

“Not like that. I have no right to put him in jeopardy that way.”

We get into the car, and I cross the highway to 61 South. “You think Marston’s going to stand on ethics?” I ask her. “He’d kill us in a second if he thought he had to.”

She turns to me with a defiant look. “As far as I know, the worst thing Leo Marston has ever done is sabotage your love life. And that’s not against the law.”

“The danger is real, Caitlin.”

“Give me a break. Nobody killed Woodward and Bernstein.”

“They weren’t working in Mississippi.”

CHAPTER 25

Einstein said the arrow of time flies in only one direction. Faulkner, being from Mississippi, understood the matter differently. He said the past is never dead; it’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose provenance dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.

And who among us, offered the chance, would not relive the day or hour in which we first knew love, or ecstasy, or made a choice that forever altered our future, negating a life we might have had? Such chances are rarely granted. Memory and grief prove Faulkner right enough, but Einstein knew the finality of action. If I cannot change what I had for lunch yesterday, I certainly cannot unmake a marriage, erase the betrayal of a friend, or board a ship that left port twenty years ago.

And yet . . . today I am granted such a chance.