The story came to her almost as a rumor, whispered across the decades and arriving in her ear while she was packing to leave New England for good. She heard it from her mother, who had driven over from Brookline to help her sort through her things but didn’t do much except to drink Diet Cokes and chain-smoke and talk about whatever came into her head, darting from topic to topic with such speed that Sybil could no more track the conversation than follow the flight of a hummingbird. Catherine was suffering another attack of what she called “nerves,” either because she had taken herself off lithium (once again) or because her only living daughter was moving across the country to a desert backwater twenty miles off the nearest paved road. When not occupied with a cigarette or a Coke can, her fingers curled her hair, dyed to its original carbon black above its gray roots, or swept across her forehead with hard, sharp strokes, as if she were trying to rub off her freckles—those fossil marks of youth that had acquired the liverish appearance of age spots. After half an hour of seamless improvisational chatter, she paused to rest her emphysemic lungs and fidgety hands. It was then that something (a random connection of manic synapses?) summoned the tale from her memory. Its telling took no more than five or six minutes, her raspy voice and spooky narrative style—Catherine had been raised in New Orleans on legends of Confederate ghosts and bayou witches—making the whole thing sound like sinister gossip best told sotto voce. She finished abruptly, and without stopping for a breath, said she had got the story some years ago from Emily Williams, whose word she trusted, because Emily’s family had been friends with the Braithwaites for so long they were practically relatives. And that was all. She did not volunteer why she had kept the episode to herself until now; when Sybil began to ask the obvious questions, she uttered a litany of “I don’t know”s in a tone of bemused surprise, as if she had never considered those questions herself, then stopped the interrogation with a swatting motion. She’d told as much as she knew, she protested, exactly as she’d heard it from Emily—well, as exactly as memory allowed—and had never thought, much less tried, to find out more. Sybil said she found such lack of curiosity not in keeping with her mother’s inquisitive nature. Catherine drawled teasingly:

“Daughter, one thing I learned in nearly fifty years of marriage is that when it comes to your late father’s family history, some things do not bear looking into too closely.”