He was dead. I’d seen the body, seen what little of the head was left, and those skinned hands like squirrels, the dark red and glistening muscle, the white tendons of his hands. I’d seen it.

Here he was, the one from the file footage on the news the night his wife came in and told me to cherish my momma.

My mom: no one I knew.

Or was she? Thigpen’d lied about killing Simons. Or he’d made us think he’d killed him. So why wouldn’t he lie about me, about Mom and Unc, just to get me to run like I did, get me to blink?

I’d blinked. And maybe Thigpen was lying.

But he wasn’t. I knew. I’d known forever.

I shivered from the cold and wet, even with Tabitha’s jacket around me.

“Timing is everything, now isn’t it, Leland?” Simons said. We were headed upriver, the bluff already past. We sat facing him in the stern, Mom and Miss Dinah still on the bench at the bow, Unc and me on the middle bench, Tabitha next to Simons, facing us. He had one hand to the engine, the other with the pistol pointed at Unc. The boat was moving slow, headed into the current, and I wondered where we were going, and I knew in the same moment it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.

“I hope our little interruption of the festivities between you three and Deputy Thigpen hasn’t disappointed you much,” he said. “Of course, Miss Gaillard and her daughter’s cameo appearances this evening have certainly put a crimp in their day, a day otherwise filled with information gathering. But once one finds intruders rummaging though one’s e-mail, of course it behooves one to go to the source, as it were, and prune the offending branches.” He paused. “As I said, timing is everything, and the coincidence of our crossing paths in this manner has the ring of Providence about it.”

Unc was silent.

Simons shrugged. “Or maybe not. Maybe quite the opposite. I guess we’ll find out once we rendezvous with Deputy Thigpen. We’ll see whether Providence plays a hand or not.”

“Dorcas found what station he sending mail from,” Miss Dinah said from behind me, her voice low, steady. “She found out he sending from Miss Constance address at the museum.” She paused. “But he found us out.”

“I am sorry, Miss Dinah,” Unc said. “I placed you in this, and I am truly sorry.”

“Sweet sentiment,” Simons said. “And it may sadden you even more when I inform you the mail was nothing. Only cosmetic, in case someone came knocking where he ought not, figuring out what is best left a mystery.” He paused. “To paraphrase Mr. Clemens, e-mail as regards my demise has been greatly exaggerated.” He laughed. “This way it appears as though messages sent from Constance to Cleve Ravenel incriminate the two of them, implicating them in my death as well as yours, LD.”

Unc let out a breath. “And Pigboy and Fatback don’t even exist.”

“Precisely,” Simons said.

The river widened out here, a clearing coming up on the Hungry Neck side, and we would be right where I’d parked the Luv that first day I had it, the marsh stretching away for miles. “Almost to the cut,” he said, and looked at the motor a second. “If this troller will get us there. Truth be known, I hadn’t expected all this company, even though we’ll be packing out a great deal of material this evening. Even so, the engine I’ve got will do the work, I’m certain.” He looked past Unc now. “Truth be known,” he said. “Truth be known. Now there’s an oxymoron if ever I encountered one.”

He turned the engine, and we were heading out into the marsh and off the Ashepoo, beside us the gray walls of marsh grass, the channel suddenly narrow, twelve feet across, and now Hungry Neck was what I could see behind him and Tabitha: trees growing smaller as we pulled deeper into the marsh.

Unc said, “If you’d wanted the land, you could have come to me.”

“Hah!” Simons let out quick, his head tipping back a moment, and Tabitha flinched at his move. Without thinking, I reached a hand out to her, touched her knee a moment.

She did nothing.

Simons hadn’t seen it. He shook his head, looked at Unc, then past us again, maneuvered us deeper into the marsh, the walls swallowing up the trace of the Ashepoo I’d been able to see behind us. “Your lack of vision, Leland—and I apologize for the bad pun—though precisely what I’ve come to expect from you, still astounds me,” he said, his words perfect the way South-of-Broaders made them perfect: to remind you of who they were, and of who you weren’t.

“Land,” he said, and steered this time to his left, those walls still around us. “If it had been only the land, there would have been no need for all these forensic pyrotechnics. No need for the degloving of hands and the blasting away of any dental records an indigent male of my approximate height, weight, and skin coloring might have revealed, rounded up with no questions from me by my loyal sidekick, Deputy Thigpen. I could have simply gone in with the rest of the boys and made an offer to you. But you and I both know what good that’s done. Delbert Yandle as front man? Come now. Even you’re not going to give in for that.”

“Let them go,” Unc said. “Let them all go. You want me. It’s only me, Charlie.”

“Noble, certainly,” Simons said. I still couldn’t make out his face for the shadow across it, only pictured that file footage, him standing at a podium and waving in triumph, his wife seated beside him, looking up at him.

“Noble, unto death. But if you believe I’m merely after a blood sacrifice, you are mistaken, and prove yet again you haven’t the ability to grasp the scope of things around you. To my way of thinking”—and now he turned us again, the moon swinging through the sky above us, the walls of marsh grass the same, all of us weaving deeper and deeper into the marsh—“there is a vast array of information that has been disseminated by hook or by crook to each one of you, including the deaf-and-mute young virgin beside me.” He nudged Tabitha, and she flinched again. She had no idea what was being said here, her eyes on us. “Even Miss Dorcas here possesses information quite detrimental to my endeavors, and though you, Leland Dillard, are responsible for her sifting through cybertrash, that responsibility isn’t enough to have you serve as stand-in at her execution.”

“Goddamn you, sir,” Miss Dinah said, and I heard on the words a tremble, and heard steel at the same time.

“There is no God, Miss Gaillard,” Simons said, in his voice a kind of laugh. “But if it gives you a certain semblance of comfort to call down on me the wrath of your empty faith, please do so.”

“No need,” she said, that tremble gone now. “You done that work yourself.”

“Quick-witted to the end,” Simons said, “and just in case I forget later on when things will get ugly between us, let me say thank you for all those biscuits and eggs and bacon and grits and fried chicken you’ve served me over the years Saturday mornings at Hungry Neck.” He turned the boat again, that moon moving once more, and now in my line of sight fell one of those nameless islands, a small one, a rough rise of brush and a single palmetto, black and silhouetted in black above the marsh. It was maybe a hundred yards off, the snake of this cut maybe headed there, maybe not, and I wondered if the plan was just to kill us all and bury us out on one of these islands and be done with it, head back to Hungry Neck and whatever was so valuable even the land itself was taking a backseat.

“What do you want?” Unc said, his voice low, too hard and sharp for a whisper but nearly silent all the same.

“What you don’t know will kill you, Leland,” Simons said, and gave that same sort of laugh. “But if you must know, it’s money. Hate to be as vulgar as all that, and as predictable, but it’s money. And with the money to which I am laying claim comes all its attendant joys, chief among them a new life. Born again, as it were, Miss Gaillard.” He leaned to his left, looked past us and nodded at her.

She said nothing. Mom had stopped her crying, was breathing quick and shallow.

He looked back at Unc, that gun still out and pointed. “It occurred to me only a few years ago,” he said, “after having lost a patient to anaphylactic shock, that there were certain fiduciary amenities available only to the dead, Leland. This was a woman of great standing in Charleston society, a fervent supporter of Spoleto, a Junior League charter member.” He gave a shake of his head. “In for a breast implant and liposuction, two birds with one stone. But with her cadaver there on the table before me, what had only moments before been a South of Broad force of culture, I realized that there were great luxuries she had initiated simply with passing on, chief among them her life insurance. For the first time, believe it or not, it occurred to me that a graying cadaver could suddenly, in its passing, become worth whatever policy had been taken out on it, and that all that money would be given to someone else.” He laughed. “A travesty, certainly. And it was at this point I began taking measures that have brought us to this moonlit evening in the marshlands of the Carolina coast.”

“And to killing Constance,” Unc said, his voice the same low and cold whisper. He moved his hand from the bench beside him to his lap.

“Constance, Constance, Constance,” Simons said, in it nothing. Only three words. “A necessary evil, to my way of thinking. Of course she never quite got over you, Leland, and many were the times amidst tears shed at bedtime that your name was offered up as a sort of votive. There was no love lost between us, as I’m not quite certain there had ever been any to begin with. But the harridan of a mother she had was, chiefly because of my middle and last names, on my side from the beginning: a Dupree-Middleton union by way of the Simons family. What greater cachet hereabouts, Leland?”

Unc was quiet a moment, the only sound the dull, empty hum of the engine. Unc moved, settled himself, his hand on his knee now. He said, “You are evil.”

“But as there is no God,” Simons said, and turned the boat again, “then there is no evil, simply each organism for itself. This organism—namely, Charles Middleton Simons, M.D.—with the wheeling away of a dead, still lipidinally and mammarially challenged South of Broad matron, immediately set about upgrading his insurance and adapting his will to plans set in motion. When I died, all proceeds were to go directly to poor, devoted Constance, who, as an aside, wrote out her death confession with no more prompting from me than three whiskey sours and a Magic Marker one night not a month ago.” He chuckled, his shoulders up and down with it, and Tabitha pulled away from him an inch, squirmed a moment beside him. “The degloving, of course, was a touch anvil-like in its irony, the wife of a plastic surgeon having skinned her murdered husband’s hands. But it served as well to eliminate any corroboration of fingerprints.”

He turned us again, that island I’d seen now gone. “And were Constance to die,” he went on, “all benefits go directly to the Christian Children’s Reconstructive Surgery Foundation, a charitable organization I set up that treats needy children with cleft palates and harelips in Third World countries, headquarters of which is nestled in the pleasant little town of Lucerne, Switzerland, which feeds a branch office in Bangkok, which in turn wires funds to its satellite facility in the Cayman Islands.” He shrugged. “As warned, Leland, this is awfully predictable: filthy lucre and all that. But now that I am dead, and as this foundation exists only on paper, and as my murder has been solved by a signed confession and the murderer’s suicide to boot, there will be waiting for me in a matter of weeks the tidy sum of six million dollars at that branch office, this in addition to thirty-three million I’ve managed to sock away one way and another. Not bad for a four-year setup. A sort of business-administration project for the passed-away, proving that yes, indeed, Miss Gaillard”—and now he leaned left again, nodded behind me again—“there is life after death, but also dispelling that nasty rumor you can’t take it with you. I can.”

“But why now?” Unc said. His hand was still on his knee, but I could feel him begin to lean forward in the smallest way, felt his leg touching mine tense up. He was getting ready for something.

“Things have been pushed toward fruition on this day, Leland, because of a change of heart our dear departed Constance had in the last few weeks, culminating with her telephone call to you last Wednesday. A change of heart our late Carolina Museum of History trustee undertook once our buried treasure yielded a bit of history for which she hadn’t prepared her emotions. Trinkets, really, two of them.”

He looked past us again and stood in the boat, the tiller still in hand, but now he put the gun to Tabitha’s head, held it there as he looked forward.

Tabitha’s hard breaths came back, and that high-pitched shard of sound from deep inside her.

“By the way, Leland, I realize you are about to try and jump me, thereby sacrificing yourself in Jesus fashion, one death for all. But the gun is now at Little Eva’s head for the duration, the destination of our clandestine junket not far ahead. So don’t try.” He paused, turned the tiller. There behind him was another island, smaller, farther away. Or maybe it was the same one. “In a few moments all will be made clear. Unexpected gravy. Buried treasure. The pièce de résistance, as it were. The pièce d’Africain.” He laughed. “And though Miss Gaillard and the nubile nubian here are not on the original guest list, it seems most apropos they are with us nonetheless.”

Unc eased off, let his head drop, leaned back. He let out a breath.

And then the bow scratched bottom, a sound like sandpaper from beneath us, and we stopped.

“Everyone out,” Simons said.

I turned, looked forward. There sat Miss Gaillard and Mom, both turned, too, looking.

The bow was nosed into marsh grass, just beyond it an island, black trees and bushes, a single palmetto, all silhouetted against a black sky. One of those nameless ones, way off and small, you could see from Hungry Neck.

Buried treasure, I thought. Two trinkets.

One is sin, and the other is love. And I can’t tell the difference.

The paperweights.

But I was thinking, too, of Eugenie and Leland. My mother, and my father.