6

Upstairs, she settled on a gray pencil skirt and a cashmere sweater.

She dressed in silence and then walked across the hall to her daugther’s bedroom. Morgan had rolled onto her stomach, her breath a soprano whistle. Caren turned on the lamp by the bed. She pulled the quilted comforter off her daughter’s legs and waited for her to stir. “Morgan,” she said, repeating the name twice when she didn’t move. Caren knelt beside the bed, placing a hand on the girl’s forehead. The skin was warm and plump, but not feverish, and Caren couldn’t understand why Morgan was sleeping so soundly, almost five hours before her bedtime. “Morgan,” she said, shaking her. When she finally opened her eyes, Caren was standing over her, holding the stained shirt. “Sit up,” she said. Morgan pushed herself onto her elbows, her body still sluggish with sleep. “I’m hungry,” she mumbled, rubbing her puffy eyes.

“What is this, Morgan?”

“What is what?”

“This.” Caren held the large stain beneath the lamp’s light. “Why is there blood on your shirt?” Morgan stared at the shirt for a long time, her expression as flat as pond water. She wrinkled her nose but didn’t say anything. Her hair was mashed on one side from where she’d been sleeping, and her school uniform was a mess of wrinkles. There was dried spit in the corners of her mouth. Caren sat down on the edge of the bed. Across the hall, she heard the crackle of her walkie-talkie, followed by Gerald, who was still out making his rounds. “First guests arriving, ma’am,” he said.

“What time is it?” Morgan said, in a voice that sounded small and sleepy. She scratched at a bug bite on her leg, then tugged on her cotton socks, each of which had slid past her heels. When she swung her legs off the bed, the soles of her feet didn’t even reach the worn, pea-colored carpet. Caren set the shirt on top of the rumpled sheets. Morgan glanced at the brown, half-moon-shaped stain, as if she were looking at a stone on the ground, a common enough sight and certainly no cause for concern.

Caren felt her veins pulse, a throbbing behind her ears.

“How did you get blood on your shirt, Morgan?”

“What are you talking about?”

“This . . . this stain on your shirt.”

Morgan shrugged. “I don’t know what that is.”

Caren reached for her arms and pulled at them, yanking at the skin, searching for a scratch or a scar or anything that might explain the amount of blood on her clothes.

“Did you hurt yourself?”

“No.”

“Did someone else hurt you?”

“You’re hurting me!”

She snatched her arms free, scooting as far away from her mother as she could, pressing her back against the bed’s painted headboard and knocking it gently against the rose wallpaper. Caren asked her again, “How did you get blood on your shirt?”

“Why are you yelling at me?”

“I am not yelling,” Caren said, even though she was. Her voice had taken on that thin, high-pitched quality it did when she got really scared. And there, in her daughter’s bedroom, the bloodstained shirt between them, Caren was quite possibly the most afraid she had ever been in her life. “Did someone hurt you, Morgan?”

“No.”

Which left open another possibility, the thing that frightened Caren the most.

She reminded herself to breathe.

“This afternoon,” she said, speaking carefully and deliberately, drawing a line of emphasis under each word, “when the police asked if you saw or heard anything last night, you were telling the truth, weren’t you, ’Cakes?”

Morgan mumbled something.

“Morgan?”

“I said yes.” She rolled her eyes, this new thing she’d picked up at school that Caren couldn’t stand. She wanted to swat her little legs to get her attention, the way she might have when Morgan was just a tot and danger meant something as real and present as a lick of fire burning on the stove. But her daughter wasn’t a preschooler anymore. She couldn’t put her in a corner or physically wrest the truth out of her. At this stage, the two of them, mother and daughter, were left with the crudeness of language, the imprecision of words. “What is going on, Morgan?” she said. “Why do you have blood on your shirt?” Her voice was shrill. She was yelling again.

Across the hall, she heard Lorraine’s voice on the walkie-talkie. “Miss White Lady is looking for you, baby,” she said, speaking of Ms. Quinlan. “I do believe they are waiting for someone to call an official start to this thing.” The two-way sputtered in static, and then Lorraine was gone. It was after five, for sure. Caren was late and due in the main house. But she didn’t care. The world outside this room could wait.

She started again, slowly. “Morgan . . .”

And then suddenly her daughter had something to say, something by way of an explanation. “Maybe it’s not even my shirt,” she said, her tone hopeful, courteous even, as if she really was trying to help, to solve a mystery as benign as where her mother may have misplaced her car keys. But the more Morgan talked, and the harder she tried to sell it, the more Caren realized how much trouble they were in. “Sometimes our uniforms get mixed up in PE,” Morgan offered. “They’re all the same. And you said you would sew my name in the back but you never did, and so it probably just got all mixed up. I bet I just picked up the wrong shirt after gym class.”

“ ’Cakes,” Caren said, swallowing hard, “I need you to tell me the truth.”

“I am.”

Caren could hardly look at her. She lowered her eyes, her gaze falling on the stain, lying face up between them. She saw its twin in her mind. She saw the open grave and the dead woman and the shock of blood that soaked the front of her clothes.

“Did you leave the house last night, Morgan?”

“No.”

“Tell the truth, ’Cakes.”

Not that Caren would have any way of knowing.

For the cops, she’d already tried to recall anything odd about last night, and now tried again to divine her daughter’s movements after dark. Morgan, even at nine, still had bathroom issues at night, a partial explanation for why she refused even the few sleepover invitations she received. She used to come to Caren at night, cradling her wet sheets. But since the start of this school year, she often changed the bedding herself in the middle of the night, shamed even to tell her mother. And, anyway, Caren had had wine with dinner, a lot actually. She’d slept soundly and heard nothing at all.

Morgan had her back pressed against the headboard.

Again, she was mumbling something Caren could hardly hear.

“What is it, ’Cakes?”

What came out was barely a whisper. “You said I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Oh, Morgan,” Caren whispered.

She felt a brick-sized lump forming in her throat.

“I’m only going to ask you this one more time. How did you get blood on your shirt?” But when her daughter gave a small shrug and said, “I don’t know, Mom,” Caren simply accepted it. She knew it was all she was going to get. “Okay,” she said calmly. She pushed against the side of the twin bed, rising slowly to her feet. She picked up the soiled shirt. And because she had no better idea, she tucked it into the top drawer of Morgan’s wooden dresser. “Gerald will be here in a few minutes. You are not to leave this building under any circumstances, do you understand?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Okay, then.”

She didn’t intend to stay long, just until the guests were seated and she’d shaken hands with Giles Schuyler, the chief executive of Merryvale Properties. He was not at all what she’d pictured. He resembled something of an aging football player, with broad shoulders that no suit could contain with any grace and jowls thick and going soft with age. On his right hand, he wore a small mountain of gold, in the form of an LSU class ring, the center stone cheap and dull. If you’d told her he’d just gotten off his shift at Sears selling Amana washer-dryers, she would have believed it. His appearance was that of a simple man, a local boy, not one you’d necessarily expect to be running a company that traded on the New York Stock Exchange. He was affable and warm, patting her on the back and offering to fetch her a flute of champagne, as if they were standing in his living room. He was completely at home, an aperitif in hand and his suit coat undone. Whatever, if anything, Ms. Quinlan had told him about the body out by the fence, he didn’t seem fazed in the least. Ms. Quinlan, on the other hand, hadn’t let a glass of butter-colored rum too far from her lips. She was glued to Schuyler’s side, taking one small sip after another and eyeing closely the goings-on in the room, tracking the invited guests.

“I understand your little girl is at Laurel Springs Elementary.”

“Yes,” Caren said, glancing down at her watch, trying to think what time it was in D.C., how soon she could get to a phone. “We’ve been very happy there.”

“Well, that’s what we’re all about,” Schuyler said. “Building communities where families can thrive.” It was a line right out of his brochure. He took a sip of his drink, gesturing toward the gathered crowd. The guests in the dining room were in their midthirties and older, part of a generation late to home ownership, men and women whose first home might very well be their last. Each of them had been brought here, beneath the crystal chandeliers, as an invitation to take part in a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: to become founding investors in Louisiana’s next great upscale living community, Douxville Estates, for which residential plots were currently being sold. The houses in the brochure were an echo of the historical elegance of a place like Belle Vie, only with new plumbing, of course, and custom-made granite countertops. It was an offer to retire inside of a Margaret Mitchell novel, to a time of opulence and refinement where you could end each workday as your forefathers had, sitting out on the front porch with a drink, imagining land that stretched for acres and acres instead of stopping crudely at the end of a concrete driveway. Mr. Schuyler opened the evening by asking the guests to stand and toast their new neighbors, before reminding them, with a salesman’s flair, that time was running out. There were only a handful of plots left. “Act now,” he said.

“Who is that?”

Patricia Quinlan had slid beside Caren. She was nodding her head at someone across the room. Schuyler was just then getting into the meat of his presentation, the PowerPoint displays of floor plans and computer models and testimonials from residents of Merryvale’s other success stories: Oakwood Village in Dallas; Sweetwater Estates in coastal Virginia; and, of course, the town of Laurel Springs, right here in Louisiana. Caren wasn’t listening closely. She was still trying to find a way to steal upstairs to her office when Ms. Quinlan pointed to a man standing near the hors d’oeuvres table, picking at the displays of food without a napkin or a plate—and, what was likely worse in Ms. Quinlan’s eyes, he wasn’t wearing a name tag. “I don’t believe he’s one of our guests,” she said, glancing down at a tiny clipboard, small enough to fit inside her purse. “We don’t want to be letting just anybody in here,” she added.

“He’s not just anybody,” Caren said, feeling a flush.

Across the crowded dining hall, Bobby Clancy was stuffing his face.

He dabbed at the corners of his mouth with his fingertips and took a sip of whatever it was some waiter had put in his hand—in this case a ’96 Burgundy he guzzled unceremoniously—before setting down the empty glass and reaching for another from a passing tray. He was wearing black jeans, faded in places, and an olive-green T-shirt that hung loose on his frame. He was underweight, and his hair had thinned over the years. Drink and time had laid a road map to middle age in the lines of his pale face, but he was a Clancy and therefore slyly handsome still, with black hair and broad shoulders and eyes of a color both blue and gold. He seemed to be enjoying himself royally, dipping into the bounty at the buffet table, and his presence was thoroughly irksome to Ms. Quinlan, no matter his last name. “Why is he here?”

Caren offered to refill Ms. Quinlan’s glass. She would take care of this, she said.

She crossed the dining hall to greet Bobby, thinking how strangely out of place he looked in the chandeliered hall. In his faded street clothes, he looked for all the world like a man who didn’t belong here, a man who could hardly afford even the most basic of Schuyler’s starter homes, instead of a Clancy, a man whose family had owned Belle Vie for generations. Bobby, she remembered, used to play in this very room.

He was swallowing a buttered roll when she approached.

She set down Ms. Quinlan’s empty glass and handed him a clean saucer.

“Bobby Clancy,” she said. “What’s this? Two times in, what, less than a week?” They had seen each other in town just a few days earlier.

“I’m spoiling you, I know.”

He signaled a waiter for more wine.

Then, turning to Caren, he smiled.

He eyed the getup: the dress and the French braid in her hair.

“I’d better be careful,” he said. “You may start to get the wrong idea here, me coming around again.”

She smiled, despite herself. He still had a sense of humor.

“What are you doing here, Bobby?”

“Checking up on the family business, that’s all,” he said. “Seeing what my brother’s up to.” He looked around the ballroom, the chandeliers and the starched tablecloths, staring at the dozens of strangers standing in what used to be his living room.

“What’s this, a five-, ten-thousand-dollar deal?” he said.

“Something like that.”

Across the room, Ms. Quinlan was staring at them, her lips pursed.

Caren sent a waiter to see about a fresh drink for her.

“I liked it better the way it was, the way it used to be,” Bobby said. “Just family, you know. Daddy and Ray, me and Mother. And all the old-time folks on the place, your mama and her kin, the cutters in the field.” He popped another bun in his mouth, a roll baked around a hash of zucchini and potato, smoked sausage and chives, something Lorraine had thrown together at the last minute. Bobby swallowed it whole, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “I liked your mama’s cooking better, too.” He craned his neck, looking around, still hunting for that second or third glass of wine.

Caren wondered if he knew about the murder.

This was the most she’d seen Bobby since she’d returned four years ago, and she suspected something had to be behind his sudden appearance on plantation grounds. Raymond had sworn her to secrecy, made her promise he would be the one to break the news to Bobby. Twenty, thirty years ago, that wouldn’t have counted for much. But these days Raymond was her boss, and the truth was, she and Bobby weren’t friends anymore, not really, not for a long, long time. He had followed in the family’s footsteps to Ole Miss, picking up, along the way, Raymond’s ideas about how Clancy men ought to behave, including not spending so much time with the help; Raymond had teased him mercilessly about his particular fondness for Caren. She was only thirteen years old when Bobby went off to college. He stopped hanging out with her after that. No more dropping by the kitchen for teacakes and milk, tugging on the curls in her hair; no more racing her up the trunks of trees, or through the grove of willow oaks; and no more ghost stories in the quarters. Caren kidded herself as long as she could that it was the age difference between them that had suddenly come to significance. And when she couldn’t kid herself any longer, she simply accepted the truth as she knew it. She was the daughter of a plantation cook, the descendant of slaves. Bobby had been born in the big house. He played his role, and she played hers, biding her time until she could get out of there, away from Belle Vie. Still, it had stayed with her a long time, the lines that were drawn, reminding her of where she came from.

Older now, she didn’t hold it against him.

People grow apart, move on.

Of the brothers, she probably still liked Bobby best. But his nostalgia for the old days was of a color she could not match. “Raymond know you’re here?” she said.

Bobby skipped over the question.

“There’s a cop out there, you know, sniffing around.”

“Deputy Harris.”

Caren had forgotten about the young cop and his planned night watch, and now had a panicked thought that Lang had put him on duty as a ruse, a way to keep a watch on the plantation, but also a watch on her. It was an irrational worry, a fear that Lang somehow already knew what she knew, that he could see what she had seen: the blood on her daughter’s shirt.

Bobby leaned in, hovering over her. “I heard you were the one who found her.”

“Raymond told you.”

Again, Bobby didn’t react to his brother’s name.

“A fucking shame,” is all he said, reaching for the nearest cocktail tray, settling for a pale glass of champagne and downing most of it in one gulp. “I could have told him that company out there wasn’t going to bring nothing but trouble.”

Caren wasn’t sure what Groveland had to do with it.

“The cops seem to be looking closer to home,” she said.

“Hmph,” Bobby muttered.

She didn’t know if it was the liquor or the bewitching hour, the faded sunlight through the leaded-glass windows, but she couldn’t miss the grayish crescents beneath his eyes, the washed-out color in his cheeks, and the bleakness of his expression. There was deep sadness there, but also anger. “It’s the money, is what it is,” he said. “Every goddamn thing with Raymond is money. You watch yourself with him, Caren.” He reached for her arm, all six feet, two inches of him blocking nearly all the available light, throwing her into shadow, standing so close she could count the hairs on his chin.

“Be careful, is all I’m saying,” he said.

Caren felt light-headed, overheated, and overwhelmed.

She wanted to get upstairs to her office, alone.

She grabbed a drink from a passing tray and said, “It was good to see you, Bobby. But I left some work on my desk. You can stay if you want to, but I know they’d rather you didn’t,” she said, motioning toward Ms. Quinlan across the room.

Let her deal with him, Caren thought.

She turned and walked out before the first course was served.

Upstairs, she closed the office door behind her. Hot and slightly rattled, she cracked open her office window, propping a parish phone directory under the painted wood frame to hold it open. She sucked down the warm red wine, and then stood over her desk, watching her trembling fingers as they dialed Eric’s home phone number.

Lela answered.

Caren knew that decorum called for her to pause here, to ask Lela how she was doing, to ask after her family or inquire about her work, and ordinarily her own ego wouldn’t allow for any less. She had never met the woman and had always known Eric to show good judgment; it would be tacky, frankly, to be anything less than cordial. But she also thought she had earned the right, in an emergency, to skip all social graces.

“Is Eric home?” she said.

There was a pause on the other end. She could hear the hum of Mr. Schuyler’s amplified voice from the PA system downstairs, coming up through the floorboards.

On the phone, she heard her name.

“Caren?”

“Yes.”

There was another pause, and then Lela’s voice, cooler than before. “He’s here.”

Caren heard a dull thump, and then silence, Lela setting down the phone.

When Eric picked up the line, almost a minute later, he seemed in a good humor, almost cheerful and happy to hear from her. “Hey,” he said. Then, picking up on some ongoing conversation, the last e-mail or a voice message she didn’t remember, he said, “You know, I think it’s best, Caren, if you just let us go ahead and buy the plane ticket. American has a direct from New Orleans to D.C. right now for less than four hundred.”

She hadn’t seen Eric in almost a year.

His last visit, sometime in the spring, he and Lela had picked up Morgan while Caren was in Baton Rouge meeting with a vendor. Morgan had stayed in a hotel with them in New Orleans through the weekend and was dropped off in Laurel Springs that Monday morning in time for school. Lela had never been to New Orleans, and Morgan came home with three disposable cameras’ worth of pictures. It had made Caren sad to think of her daughter as a tourist in the city in which she was born. And though she promised more than once to sit down with Morgan and look through the photos, she never got around to it. Eric’s fiancée, therefore, remained a mystery to her. She had, embarrassing as it was to admit, initially pictured her as something of a rival: tall, with bigger breasts maybe, and a law degree. For weeks, she even wondered if Lela was white. It was Morgan who put that idea to rest, reporting, unsolicited, that Lela was brown, of average height, with a “very pretty smile.” “She kind of looks like you, Mom,” she said. Eric, on the other hand, was always the same in Caren’s mind: tall and lean, with close-cropped, tightly coiled hair and round, rimless glasses. They talked on the phone at least once a month, e-mailed more often, mostly about Morgan’s schooling, but she had not stood with him, face-to-face, in quite a long time. “I think Morgan is starting to worry you’re changing your mind about her coming up here,” he said.

“I’m not calling about the trip, Eric.”

“Oh,” he said, briefly clearing his throat. She wondered if Lela was listening.

“We have a problem, Eric.”

“What’s going on?”

“There’s been an ‘incident’ here,” she said, regretting the weak choice of words almost as soon as they were said. She didn’t want to soft-pedal, or be in any way misleading. She wanted him to have all the facts. “The police were here this morning.”

“Are you okay?” he asked, his voice sharp and alert. He sounded genuinely concerned, and for a brief moment she felt a warm lump in the back of her throat.

“Yes.”

“Is Morgan?”

She hesitated. “Yes.”

“Well, what is it, then?”

“They found a body, here at Belle Vie. It was way out on the edge of the property line, by the fence and the cane fields out back. She was half-buried in dirt.”

“Someone died.”

“Someone was killed.”

“Out there?” he said, in some disbelief. “Who?”

Caren pushed the woman’s face out of her mind.

“I don’t know. It looks like it was a woman from the fields.”

“Oh, man,” Eric said, taking a slow, leveling breath. “Does Morgan know?”

She was getting to that.

“They’ve talked to the whole staff, trying to find out if anyone saw or heard anything. I don’t even know how someone got on the property, the woman . . . or whoever it was that did this to her.” She looked out the window where the world of Belle Vie had gone black. She could hardly see more than a few feet beyond her office window, a fact that had never bothered her before. But suddenly she was aware of feeling afraid and alone living out here. “I don’t know, Eric, the whole thing is creepy.”

“Is the plantation looking to protect itself from liability?” he said, completely misunderstanding her reason for calling. “I’m sure Clancy’s firm can handle it, but I still know some folks at DeLouche & Pitt in the city. Bob Klein is still convinced I’m coming back to work any day now.” There was a faint chuckle in his throat that faded almost instantly, as he realized, too late, that he’d stumbled into tender territory. They were both silent for a moment. Caren said, “The detectives also spoke to Morgan.”

“Why?”

“She lives here, and they wanted to know what, if anything, she knew about it.”

“She’s just a kid.”

“I was with her the whole time,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady, the facts laid bare. “They asked her if she had seen or heard anything strange on the property in the last few days. I was right next to her when she told the cops no.”

“She must have been terrified.”

“She was lying.”

“What?”

“I found blood on one of her shirts, Eric.”

He was quiet, his breathing momentarily halted.

“I don’t understand.”

“In the laundry, on the right-hand sleeve of one of her shirts, I found blood.”

“So you think she killed someone?” he said, sounding amused and also vaguely relieved. The idea was so preposterous that it seemed to lighten things on his end. Caren said, “No, I don’t think she killed someone,” adding, “She’s left-handed.”

The silence returned.

“Jesus, Caren,” he mumbled.

Then, more sternly, he said, “You’re not serious, are you?”

“How did she get blood on her shirt, Eric?”

“Oh, Caren,” he said, his tone warm, almost playfully admonishing, treating this like the time Morgan was six months old and Caren was sure she’d stopped breathing until Eric put a mirror to her nose, or when she was convinced the women at the day care center were secretly feeding her newborn daughter bottles of whole milk.

“She probably just fell down and scraped herself at school or cut her hand or something,” he said.

“It was too much blood.”

The words painted a picture, one that gave him pause.

“And you asked her about it?”

“She’s lying.”

“How can you know that?”

“What do you want me to say, Eric? She’s my kid.”

Eric let out a short, bullish sigh.

She knew the sound. It meant he was thinking.

“Blood?”

“Yes.”

“All right, let me talk to her, then,” he said.

“She’s home right now.”

Before hanging up, she told him she’d be waiting for his return call.

Outside, the wind had picked up, snaking in ragged coils through the dark and shaking the trees against the window. The branches were like fingertips on the glass, tapping for her attention. She walked around her desk to the window. As she bent to remove the phone book on the ledge, she swore she heard voices, coming from the direction of the quarters. She swore she heard . . . singing. It was faint, and she thought she was imagining things, but when the wind picked up, it delivered the sound right to the window’s ledge. Caren took a step back, thinking that someone was out there.

When the phone rang, she actually jumped.

On the other end of the line, Eric repeated the same story Morgan had told her earlier, that the shirt was probably not even hers, the whole thing likely a mix-up at school, and Eric still didn’t think any of it added up to much; he still had a hard time believing it was blood on his daughter’s shirt, or that Morgan would lie. Caren bit her tongue rather than point out the ways she felt she knew her daughter better than he did. It seemed mean-spirited. It was never his idea for Morgan to stay in Louisiana.

She reminded him of the amount, the odd placement on the sleeve.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said, sounding suddenly very far away. For the first time, Caren wondered what he was doing when she called, if his dinner was getting cold, if Lela had been waiting this whole time, alone at the table.

“They’re getting a search warrant, Eric.”

“The cops?”

“They’ll be here in the morning,” she said.

Something shifted in Eric’s demeanor.

He was a trained lawyer after all, and Morgan’s father.

He was quiet a good, long while.

Then he said, “I honestly wouldn’t worry about it, Caren.”

“Okay,” she said, because she wasn’t going to worry about it.

She was going to get rid of it.

Her first thought was the river. But there was, of course, the issue of weight, of how to keep the thing from merely skimming the surface of the water and floating along in plain view. She could just imagine someone finding her daughter’s shirt tomorrow morning, tangled in a thick of weeds along the riverbank, having traveled barely a mile by sunrise. And anyway, the levees in this part of the parish were eight feet and a challenge to navigate even in broad daylight. Nor could she come up with a convincing enough story to tell Gerald that would explain her stepping out on an errand in the middle of the night, after she’d made a point to put him on post, right outside her front door. Besides, she knew from experience that literal disposal was often tricky. That’s where most people made their biggest mistakes. One of the first cases she’d assisted on, a kid had tossed a knife in a Dumpster, mere feet from his apartment; it was city property by morning, as soon as the trash trucks rolled past. No, it made more sense to keep any evidence close, within the bounds of a carefully laid argument about Fourth Amendment rights against improper search and seizure. She didn’t know what was on the shirt or how it got there. But she knew Detective Lang would never lay eyes on it. Not until Caren had more information. The law, she knew, is a narrow little box, and it takes only a single misstep to find yourself on the outside of it.

It was after two in the morning when she came up with a plan.

Morgan asleep upstairs, Caren washed the shirt twice, both times using double the amount of bleach. She leaned against the stove, watching the swish and slosh of the machine, the violent jerk-and-pull of her daughter’s white shirt. The plate of food from Lorraine’s kitchen was still sitting untouched. Caren made a halfhearted attempt to eat. The fried ’gator was rubbery and cold and completely inedible. The greens were coated in white animal fat. The sight made her stomach lurch. She settled on a single lump of creamed potatoes, a small spoonful to dull the gnawing emptiness in her belly.

She swallowed, and she waited.

It was as calm as she’d felt all night.

The shirt, once out of the dryer, was startlingly white, everywhere except the spot on the right sleeve, where a ghost lingered. The color had faded to a muddy gray, but the half-moon shape was outlined clearly. Still, Caren felt relief. Who would make anything of this relatively small stain, the color and spirit drained to nothing, which, at this late hour, she was willing to concede might not have even been blood? Why would her daughter’s rose-colored bureau ever make it within the bounds of a police search warrant? Surely, if she folded the shirt tightly, sleeves tucked in, and placed it in the back of some rarely used drawer, no one would ever notice. Upstairs, in her daughter’s room, she watched Morgan sleep. It was almost ten hours she’d been out like this. Caren tried to wake her, gently shaking her shoulders. She heard her utter a sound, a faint hum that sounded a lot like Mom. But maybe it was only a wish, a whisper inside Caren’s own head. Morgan’s body remained motionless, save for the soft rise and fall of her breath. Caren pulled the sheets from the foot of the bed, covering Morgan’s bare legs. Finally, she tucked the laundered shirt into the top drawer of her bureau before crossing the hall to undress for bed.

She lay down and closed her eyes, thinking of the strangeness of running into Bobby Clancy again, and the things he’d said about his brother, Raymond. She lay in the stillness with it. Only then, in the dead of night, her body on the very edge of surrender, did an image finally pop free: the dead woman, her face, the black eyes drawn in charcoal. She finally remembered where she’d seen her before.