In small towns the most beautiful women are married, and Lucy Perry proves the rule. Ten years younger than her husband—the surgeon hosting the party—Lucy has large brown eyes and a high-maintenance muscularity shown to perfection in a black silk dress that drapes just below her shapely knees. She also has suspiciously high cleavage for a forty-year-old mother of three, which I know she is, having been given a social update by my father on the way over to the party. Lucy uses the sorority squeal mode of greeting, which is always a danger in Mississippi. She flashes one of the brightest smiles I’ve seen off a magazine cover and throws her arm around my father.

“I’m here for the free liquor,” Dad says. “Not for Wiley Warren to pick my pocket.”

Lucy has a contagious laugh, and Dad has drawn it out. He’s one of the few people honest enough to use the mayor’s nickname within earshot of the man himself. Now Lucy looks at me as though she’s just set eyes on me.

“So this is the famous author.”

I offer my hand. “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Perry.”

“Mrs. Perry? For God’s sake, Lucy.” She steps inside my proffered hand and draws me to her in a one-armed hug that lasts long enough for me to learn that she’s been drinking gin without much tonic and that her breasts are not original architecture. “I’ve forbidden anyone to mention that awful newspaper story. No one believes anything they read in the Examiner anyway.”

The house is full of people, and it’s some house. Though not one of Natchez’s premier mansions, it would easily fetch nine or ten million dollars in Los Angeles. A brass plaque announces that it is on the National Register of Historic Places. The interior has been meticulously restored at a cost of countless gall bladders and appendices. A wide hallway bisects the ground floor, with arched doorways leading to capacious rooms on both sides. Of the fifty or so faces in the hallway I recognize about a quarter. People I went to school with, friends of my parents, a half dozen doctors I know. I give a broad wave to cover the group. Many nod or smile in acknowledgment, but no one approaches. Caitlin Masters’s article has done its work. I stick close to Dad as we work our way toward the bar table at the end of the hall.

As Shad Johnson predicted, the only black faces in the house belong to white-jacketed bartenders and maids, who circulate with heaping platters of hors d’oeuvres.

“Bourbon and water, Roosevelt,” Dad tells the bartender. “Easy on the water. Penn?”

“Gin and tonic.”

The bartender grins. “Good to see you, Dr. Cage.”