Five

And so, life went on. This is not to say that the shock of Sarah Roth’s murder diminished in Essex but rather that it became integral to our ethos. We went about our business, yet we still talked of little else. But now much of our talk evolved into outright speculation. Into suspicion. No one could say for sure who first started it but rumors about “that black woman” multiplied like guppies. Some claimed it was Marynell Pittman, that every time the Baptist church ladies took her clothes and food for her children, she began ranting and raving about how she’d seen Maum Chrish performing witchcraft. The Baptist ladies came back home and started asking questions themselves—just what was going on out in those swamps anyway, was it true those people practiced voodoo or something? Langley Thompson got in the act then, told somebody how he was hunting out there one time and saw a bunch of ’em gathered around a fire singing and dancing and, sure ’nough, now that he thought about it, that big woman was right there in the middle of everything. This got back to John Loadholt’s wife, who had a sister who lived down near New Orleans, and her sister told her on the phone one night that in Louisiana, where voodooists sacrificed animals all the time, one group had been arrested in 1973 for a murder the police believed was actually a ritualistic human sacrifice. In three weeks time almost everyone in Essex with nothing better to do suddenly remembered something weird he or she had once seen in the swamps.

It was, of course, an easy way to explain the unexplainable. Counter one brand of lunacy with another.

The annual May Day Festival was canceled in Sarah’s honor, and April passed into May unheralded, without our endorsement or consent. Spring had failed Essex this year. A few of us, to be sure, endeavored to keep our perspective. Stoney McFarland went to work every day and worked unusually hard, although he bought an inordinate amount of gas every week from the HandiMart in Ashboro, in his continuing quest to form an opinion about J. T. Turner. Heyward Rutherford, for his part, wrote six letters to Sarah Roth’s cousin, increasing his offer for the store each time, always claiming this was his final offer. Harriet Setzler was busy cataloging the new books she’d ordered for the town library, which she still ran, and she tried not to notice the FOR SALE sign on Sarah’s house when she came home every evening. Jim Leland called the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division in Columbia twice a week to check on the agent they were supposed to be sending to Essex; each time he described the town as being “in a state of crisis.” Seth Von Hocke wondered if he’d ever get through the sixth grade. Leonard Hansen used the good weather to put a new roof on his house. Amos Tumley went back to the Wilson’s house eventually, but despite profuse apologies from the Wilson boy, now he left the vegetables at the curb rather than on the carport. Marian Davis yearned for the end of the school year more ferociously than normal and seriously considered making this her last year in Essex. Ever since Sarah’s death she’d had trouble sleeping too; she was definitely overdue for a change.

On the first Saturday in May, Anna McFarland invited Marian to lunch. Usually Marian went to Charleston on Saturdays but today she accepted Anna’s invitation; she and Anna needed to talk about Career Day, so she walked up the steps of the McCloskey house at eleven-thirty. Facing the sun, the house was flooded with light from the azure sky; Silas was lying on the front door mat and he immediately popped up and pointed at Marian, uncertain. “It’s okay, Silas. You know me,” she assured him. Then the dog decided the black woman was okay and ran over to her and started sniffing.

The front door opened and Stoney came out, in nylon shorts and jogging shoes. “Silas, down,” he ordered. He grabbed the dog’s collar and pulled him backward. “Hi, Marian. How’re you doing?”

“I’m okay. You?”

Stoney nodded at the retriever, who was now standing on the edge of the porch staring out at the sidewalk. “We’re going for a run. Something makes me think I’m holding him up.” A pause. “I’m glad you and Anna are getting together. She’ll be down in a second. Go on in.”

“Thanks.” Marian hesitated. “Stoney, have you heard anything else about the investigation?”

“Not really. All I’m hearing these days are crazy rumors. Why?”

“Oh, no reason.” Marian changed the subject. “Thanks for the locks you put on Harriet’s doors. You’ve really been good to everyone around here since this happened.”

Stoney thought about the footprint in Harriet’s back yard and wondered if the locks were enough. He’d been back over to her house in the middle of the night several times, on his own, but had found no other sign that anyone had been there. He wished Marian a good lunch, and he and Silas took off running down the street.

Marian walked through the open door into the living room of the McCloskey house. Bookshelves lined one wall, a large brick fireplace another; the third was dominated by the curved bank of windows overlooking the porch outside. Low-slung modern easy chairs around the fireplace, beside them end tables Anna said were made from the cypress beams of old Charleston houses, an abstract modern sculpture in a corner, a Colonial sofa in deep burgundy, and an Indian throw rug over the center of the polished oak floor. The eclectic furnishings had a carefully crafted feel; only the sunlight streaming through the bay window felt accidental. To Marian this room looked more like someone’s idea of a contemporary salon than a place where living people propped their feet up on rainy afternoons.

In a moment Anna appeared, in a short skirt and oversized cotton sweater, and she and Marian walked from room to room for a few minutes looking at the newest renovations being made on the old house. Then they got in Anna’s Subaru and drove out to Fairfield Plantation, a bed-and-breakfast with the finest restaurant in Ashton County, both housed in the only surviving Civil War estate in that part of South Carolina. The two women walked up the curved stone staircase to the porticoed entrance of the four-story Federal mansion. Inside, a hall laid with Italian marble led to the rear of the brick building where a solarium had been created by uniting a drawing room with two bedrooms. The exterior wall was now glass and overlooked the terraced grounds which bordered the Salkehatchie River. The music of Segovia was playing softly as the headwaiter led Anna and Marian to a corner table with a nice view of the river.

Marian gazed around the room, with its damask draperies and tables set with Irish linen. Somehow she’d suspected Anna would want to come here. To the one restaurant near Essex where a black patron was still uncommon. Marian gazed over at her companion; Anna was smiling like a dictator after a successful coup. That, Marian remembered, was the reason she usually declined Anna’s invitations. The two women had seen each other socially fairly often, starting when Anna was invited to talk about photography at Career Day at the high school the previous year. But Marian never felt totally comfortable with Anna McFarland. There was an off-putting edge to the other woman: she was so strident, she always seemed slightly irritated with the world, as though she were having to fight so hard to maintain her place in it.

They ordered the scampi, the Fairfield specialty, and a bottle of chardonnay. When the waiter left, Anna leaned back. “I’m glad you could come today, it’s been ages since we talked. How’s everything at school?”

Marian smiled. “It’ll be better soon. Right now the month of June seems like proof that God is not dead after all.”

The other woman laughed and for a while they talked desultorily, about school, new books, the weather. Marian mentioned several changes in the Career Day program and asked Anna if her presentation would be the same as last year’s.

“No, I want to expand a little, do more on the history of photography. I think anyone going into the field needs that overview.”

The schoolteacher nodded. “Thanks for participating again. It’s nice to have a professional photographer in town.”

After their lunch arrived and they began eating, Anna broached a different subject. “Sometimes I wonder why a woman like you—with so much to offer—stays in Essex.”

The black woman didn’t respond at first. It was a very personal comment; Anna often alienated Essex with her city-bred directness. Marian laid down her fork and picked up her wineglass, thinking: why did “a woman like you” sound so much like “you people”? She sipped the white wine. Why was she so sensitive today?

“This is home,” she said after a minute. “I lived in Columbia for ten years and I’ll probably go back there before long. But over the years I sort of lost touch with my teaching, with what made it mean something, you can do that in the bureaucracy of huge city schools. I needed more one-to-one with kids again.”

Anna watched Marian’s face and thought about photographing her. She wasn’t tall nor bone-thin enough to be a fashion model, but she had a warmly sensual look that was interesting. Marian wore tapered slacks beneath a long tunic in a bold abstract print which was belted below her hips; the bright color flattered her gold-tone skin and the tunic was split at the neckline in a deep V which touched the intersection of her full breasts.

“I guess what I meant was—this must be so tame for someone who was politically active.” Anna stared across the table. “Stoney told me about your work in Columbia. It’s hard to imagine you could be satisfied here—or that you ever lived with Harriet Setzler, for that matter.”

Marian explained no more about her reasons for returning to Essex. “Harriet’s a tough old bird. She absolutely thrives on public contention. My mother once told me that Harriet was the only woman in town in the twenties to bob her hair, seems it was a major scandal.” Marian smiled. “Can you imagine?”

“No. That woman as daring, as a leader of the avant-garde, no I can’t.”

The black woman swallowed the last of her shrimp. “Harriet’s always been self-sufficient and that’s made her more than a little suspect around here. Women were not supposed to survive that well alone. During World War II—by then she’d lost her husband—she helped support herself making baked goods for other people to send overseas to their sons. She got extra ration coupons for the sugar. Before that, during the Depression, when schoolteachers got credit vouchers instead of their salary, Harriet started sewing for people in order to keep her own kids in shoes. She clothed half the women in this town for years.” Marian paused. “Black women couldn’t afford store-bought clothes so they’d take a dollar and a piece of cloth to Harriet and she’d make them a dress.”

“You’re awfully generous to her. Considering.”

Marian eyed Anna directly. “I’ve known Harriet for a long time, Anna, and I know what her faults are. She’s color-blind. Certain colors blind her: when she sees them, she responds generically, with Pavlovian training, without thinking. That this response is so impersonal makes it even worse.” Marian slowed down. “Nonetheless—she has a resilience I admire. Come war or depression or just bad times, she never let anything defeat her. She never once just threw her hands up and said, I can’t take any more. She never once let fear of other people talk her out of being who she is. She’s nobody’s mule and never has been.”

Anna was silent for a second. Then, “You can honestly say her racism doesn’t bother you?”

For a second Marian regarded the other woman irritably. Thinking of her NAACP days, she snapped, “Of course it bothers me.” She hesitated, tried to control her tone. “But as long as I keep defining myself in terms of what bigotry has done to me—it was white men who made slaves of us both, you know—then I remain powerless. Hate keeps me his victim. Victimization is a powerful opiate, you keep coming back for more. You’ll win this time. But hate makes you stupid and careless, you don’t think things through. Hate is too emotional. Like love. So he gets you all over again, and again and again and …”

The black woman stopped sharply, realized what she’d said. What was wrong with her? She looked at Anna. Their eyes locked and neither said anything for a moment.

Marian finally looked away. “The scampi really was good.”

“Marian, I understand what you’re talking about.” The other woman wouldn’t meet her eyes again but Anna persisted, “Something like that once happened to me too.”

The schoolteacher cleared her throat but didn’t speak. Something in Anna’s blue eyes saw through her, instinctively recognized what she’d not said. If a mirror could steal your soul, no doubt those eyes could make off with your life story. A story she had no desire to discuss.

Anna let it drop. She took a sip of wine and said, “While I’ve got you here, I wanted to ask you something else. Do you know anything about Maum Chrish?”

Am I supposed to? Marian wondered. “What about her?”

“Do you think she’s crazy? Do you believe that stuff about voodoo? I’m asking because I’d like to shoot some film of her.”

Marian laughed. “I see you’ve been listening to the grapevine.” She paused. “I don’t know anything about her, Anna. I’ve heard she’s a recluse. The fact that we’re both black doesn’t make us intimate. As for voudou—voudou’s a religion, it has almost nothing in common with Hollywood voodoo. I studied it once in a Black Studies class at the university; it’s an archaic pantheistic religion. I gather Maum Chrish is just a superstitious woman caught up in old African customs and beliefs. She lives out there because she can’t adapt, I suppose.”

Anna described her visit out to the swamps. “That place is scary but sort of fascinating too. You should see all the stuff around her house—the trees are decorated, there’s this boat hanging from the rafters.”

The other woman nodded. “The boat represents the moon, the goddess Erzulie. In Haitian voudou, anyway.” Marian’s eyes flickered. “She’s a dark-skinned woman because she’s been burned by her husband the sun.”

“Sounds like astrology.”

“A distant cousin, I guess. God is the supreme being in voudou but there are many other gods—loas—and the voudouist interacts with these on a daily basis. Some are ancestral spirits, spirits of the recently dead, spirits of the natural world. Believers draw symbolic designs, called vèvès, to call out these gods. A mambo like Maum Chrish—if that’s what she really is—serves these lesser gods. Some of whom, they believe, live in the trees until called out.”

“That’s wild,” Anna said.

“Why are you so interested? Because these are the backward superstitions of unenlightened people?” Marian’s voice was cold.

Anna looked surprised, gazed across the table for a moment. “No.” Then she dropped the subject. They polished off the rest of their wine and drove back to Essex, where Anna let Marian off at her house. Marian waved, walked up her front steps, opened her door, and slammed it behind her. She wished she’d stayed home and done her laundry. For a moment she thought about calling Jordan Taylor, the black lawyer in Beaufort with whom she had dinner once in a while. When she first returned to Essex, she and Jordan had made it a point to be seen together publicly every so often, but she hadn’t seen him now in several months.

She had met Jordan Taylor at a lunch counter sit-in in 1968 in Columbia, the first of several civil rights demonstrations Marian participated in both during and after her graduation from the University of South Carolina. He was, at that time, a tall and slim pre-law student at Allen University, the Negro college across town. They sat side by side at the Woolworth’s lunch counter on Main Street, rode to the city lockup in the same van, and over time (and subsequent demonstrations and arrests) became fast friends. Seven years later he was a young assistant district attorney and she was a classroom teacher in charge of the Richland County School District pilot program to prepare the city schools for massive desegregation. One night they met for a drink and she found herself confessing the confusing romantic situation in which she was involved. Two days later for the first time Jordan invited Marian to his apartment to meet his lover of three years, a black male jazz musician with long elegant hands and fingers.

Sometimes it seemed to Marian that Jordan Taylor was the only black person she’d ever been close to. She’d never known her father, her mother had deserted her, and her association with Harriet Setzler always stood between her and the black community in Essex. So, when she went away to college, she joined the NAACP and got involved in the civil rights movement. But oftentimes the woman sitting beside her at a lunch counter or in the university administration building was white and it was to them Marian gravitated. Living with Harriet Setzler had changed her speech and often she talked more easily with whites. Finally Marian found herself in a group of Columbia teachers selected to prepare other teachers for massive school desegregation. She sat in an auditorium one morning and listened to the white program chairman, who spoke again that afternoon in a more intimate group discussion. No doubt about it, Marian decided, the woman was brilliant; she knew everything the books had ever said about child socialization. But she was wrong-headed just the same, the whole premise was wrong-headed. Later that day Marian raised her hand. “Excuse me, but aren’t we going about this all wrong? We’re spending all this time worrying about how to incorporate black children into our classrooms so they assimilate easily. Isn’t the way to do that very simple—we treat them like all the other students? We’re preparing for them as if they’re from outer space, as if they’re so weird we have to make special provisions for them. But our goal is to treat the black children as equals—isn’t it?”

Two months later Marian Davis was put in charge of the city’s entire program, at the instigation of the white woman. She became Marian’s assistant and was instrumental in garnering support for the black woman’s point of view. For the first time in Marian’s life someone believed in her, totally. Eileen Brook nurtured Marian with unequivocal acceptance. And became the love of Marian’s life.

A few months later Marian and Eileen moved in together. They ate at restaurants where white people ate, read the books white people were talking about. Marian’s few black friends called less and less often. One even accused her of being the only black activist in South Carolina who lived in a white world. Do it with whoever you want, the friend said, but aren’t there enough black women in the world to suit you? Gradually Marian became less active in NAACP activities; desegregation came and went and there were problems none of them had even remotely anticipated. Marian found herself having to tell white teachers that seating all the black children on one side of the room was discriminatory. She found herself going to some black homes to beg parents to stop instructing their children to stand up to the white teachers.

One mother, leaning in the doorway of a house without any heat or plumbing, eyed Marian with contempt. “And what kinda white nigger might you be?”

Eventually, Marian left Eileen. A year later she almost married a black doctor but she backed out at the last minute; somehow she knew it would end just like her first ill-fated marriage. The die was cast. Over the years she became involved with more women, including the woman in Charleston whom she saw most weekends. Who was as white as Anna McFarland but softer, more loving. Women like Anna always reminded Marian of the past. So many things, lately, kept doing that.

Stoney and Silas jogged over to the housing development on the east side of town. Willowbrook Estates was Heyward Rutherford’s “planned community” which had neither streetlights nor sidewalks like the rest of the town, just four blocks of half-acre lots where sparse grass struggled against sandy soil in front of long carbon-copy brick ranchers. Stoney turned down a street named Partridge Drive, wiping sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. Silas had his nose to the ground behind him and Stoney called and the dog soon caught up.

At a house with gray shutters, Stoney stopped and turned and walked up the driveway. As he did so a side door opened and a taller man, a little older than Stoney, came out to meet him. Bill Jenkins owned the Essex Telegraph, a weekly paper devoted to local news which he had begun when he came back home after college. Large and lumpy as a bear, Bill had a monk’s haircut and wore thick wire-rim glasses. Perpetually overweight, he had started running with Stoney soon after Stoney moved back to town.

“You’re late,” Bill said, stopping to scratch Silas on the top of the head.

“I know. Silas is getting old.”

“Yeah, right. Silas.”

They began running, keeping an even steady pace. Stoney was clearly the better athlete, and he slowed down from time to time to accommodate the heavier man. “You talk to the Ashton sheriff this week? I don’t suppose they know anything new.”

“Not that I heard,” Bill expelled, breathing hard. “I can’t believe how Leland’s acting, like the whole thing will just go away. Even Heyward’s disgusted. Says we ought to fire him.”

“Has Heyward got his hands on the store yet?”

“How’d you know about that?”

“Harriet Setzler, who else?”

Bill slowed down, cast a sidelong glance at Stoney. “You thinking what I’m thinking? What I’ve been too chicken to say out loud?”

“You mean that Heyward stood to gain by Sarah’s death?”

Bill came to a complete stop. “That’s the one. You mentioned this to anyone else?”

Stoney stopped too. “Hell no. Men like Heyward don’t kill people. I like the voodoo theory myself—murder from a distance.”

They began jogging again. “Stoney, they’re serious. They really believe that stuff.”

Leaving the subdivision behind, they rounded a corner and turned onto a back road that led, eventually, to Savannah. “What do you really think?” Stoney asked.

“Well, the longer this goes on, the less I believe it was random, some stranger breaking in to steal. Sooner or later we may have to face the fact that it may be somebody right here.”

“I can’t believe that. Maybe I don’t want to believe it.” Stoney turned abruptly. “Silas, leave those squirrels alone!” When the dog rejoined them, Stoney said to Bill, “Funny thing, though, I saw Marian Davis this morning—she and Anna were going out to lunch—and I had the feeling she was thinking the same thing. But who? And why?”

The other man glanced at his companion. “If we knew why, we’d probably know who.” Bill Jenkins hesitated. “I got out my old hunting rifle the other day and cleaned it. Felt like a damn fool but I did it.”

“I’ve thought about doing the same thing,” Stoney said. “It’s crazy. But I worry about Anna when I’m not there. I haven’t touched a gun in years, not since the seventh grade when I thought guns were cool. I shot a bird and felt like shit afterward. A robin.” A pause. Then, “We’ve got to do something. Leland’s just sitting around on his can. You know, Mrs. Setzler told me something really interesting—did you know Sarah was always inviting strangers home to her house for a hot meal?”

“Yeah, she was like that. I saw her go up to an old drifter sitting in front of the barber shop one day, must have been five years ago, and she asked him if he was hungry. Eventually he went home with her. She took in stray cats and dogs and kids—God, the kids, every time somebody ran away Sarah’d let ’em stay with her until they cooled off and were ready to go back to their folks. Sally Wallerman, that Haigler kid, even Leonard Hansen when he came back to town that time. Sarah had a hell of a big heart.”

Stoney slowed down again. “Leonard Hansen?”

“Yeah. When he got out of the service. His parents had moved to Alabama by then. Rumor was he and his daddy still weren’t getting along, the old man made Leonard join up. You remember his daddy, dontcha? Anyhow Leonard came back to town fresh out of the Marines and he stayed with Sarah for a while, he didn’t have a job so he did stuff around her house to earn his keep. Then he left town again.”

“I can’t picture Leonard Hansen at Sarah’s house. Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. Why?”

“In those days Leonard was a real bruiser. I can’t imagine Sarah Roth having a kid like that in her house.”

Bill pointed at Silas. “Does that dog ever get tired?” The hefty man slowed to a walk. “Leonard’s changed a lot. Did you know his father opened an electronics store in Birmingham? Did pretty good, I hear. Apparently he and Leonard never made peace. Leonard’s mother must be dead because the old man left all his money to a guy who worked in the store, didn’t leave Leonard anything but that shack.”

“Why did Leonard’s father make him join the Marines?”

Bill Jenkins rolled his eyes. “How would I know? That was a hundred years ago.”

Having come full circle, the two men were nearing the entrance to Willowbrook again. “Maybe Leonard killed Sarah,” Stoney said, half in jest.

Bill laughed aloud as he came to a stop in front of his house. “She was nice to him so he knocked her over a coupla decades later, huh? That’s almost as good as Maum Chrish. Go home, McFarland. And take that dog with you. It should be illegal to have that much energy.”

Stoney waved and he and Silas peeled off again. After a few blocks they stopped and Stoney checked the black sports watch on his left wrist. He set the timer and said to the retriever, “Okay, boy, now it’s for real.” Each week he took a different route home and increased his distance by a half-mile, at the same time trying to shorten his time. Stoney took a deep breath and then shot out onto the highway; Silas jumped, realized the change in tempo, and broke into a canter to catch up. Air filled Stoney’s lungs and he could feel them expand, in and out, in and out; he could see the tension in his quadriceps as each thigh rose up in front of him.

Sweat soon soaked Stoney’s T-shirt and ran down his legs. His side hurt but he ran harder. Then harder still. Silas fell behind but they were only six blocks from the McCloskey house and the dog knew the way home. Stoney’s legs hurt but he couldn’t stop. He swallowed air hungrily. Then he sprinted all-out as fast as he could, panting, gasping.

Until he collapsed on his front steps in a heap, satisfied, sated, one minute ahead of his best time.

That night Anna woke up sweating. She sat up, stared blankly at the naked shoulders of the man sleeping beside her. Now she could escape, she could sneak out of bed and put on her clothes, slip out of the apartment before he knew she was gone. This time she’d get away. She searched the darkness for her underwear. Where was it? She lifted the bedcovers carefully, then stopped suddenly, refocused. Her heart slowed. She was wearing a nightgown. It wasn’t him. Instead, Stoney lay sleeping with his fingers laced together under the back of his head, elbows akimbo, a slight grin on his lips. Anna relaxed, smiled with relief. How on earth could anyone sleep that way?

She lay back down. It was all right. Darkness bathed the four-poster in winnowy shadows, the only light the half-concealed moon outside the window refracted on the mirror above her dresser. Pulling the covers up around her chin, she gazed over at Stoney again. He always slept soundly but she was a frequent insomniac. Night made her available for haunting; she was a house full of spooks. Tonight, for the first time in years, she’d been visited by the first man she’d loved, the slick older man who’d opened her sixteen-year-old thighs and whispered, “You are mine now,” as he planted the flag of imperialism between her legs.

The year was 1967. Anna Reston was a bookish high school junior with little experience with the opposite sex. Her best friend was a girl named Maria who was soft and curvy and maternal; Maria wanted to be a writer and so she dragged Anna to poetry readings all over Atlanta. One reading took place in a huge bookstore in downtown Atlanta, a new store that was so large it resembled a library. When she and Maria arrived, Anna wandered around in awe: the place had so many books. In one area of the store was a podium with folding chairs arranged around it in half-moons. As people began to gather there, Maria rushed over to get a good seat, but Anna lagged behind, still admiring the oversized art books. She pulled out a volume on Van Gogh and flipped through it to Starry Night. Her favorite painting, it symbolized how she often felt at sixteen, as though all the lines of her life swirled endlessly.

Then she heard his voice, a voice so strong and resonant it seemed to emanate from the Van Gogh. It crashed and whorled with the same passion: the hair stood up on Anna’s forearms and she turned around, the book still in her hands. She couldn’t see the speaker, so she stood on tiptoe. To stare.

He walked out from behind the podium, to be closer to the audience. He stood just a few feet from the first row, leaning toward the spectators, demanding that they listen. Not one of them looked away or even yawned; they seemed to acknowledge the speaker’s power to control. If Anna noticed this, it didn’t register. All she saw was a slender man of twenty-four with narrow shoulders and a long torso, a body of beguiling fragility. Hair the color of iridescent black ink fell over his forehead and over his ears. His face was long and narrow like his frame, dominated by high cheekbones and the sharp arrogant chin of a man used to getting what he wanted—in art and in life. His stare was penetrating; it caught Anna across the room and willed her to join the others. His eyes were blue-black; one color watched her, the other kept everyone else in sight, like a ringmaster with two souls. Anna had missed his introduction but she would hear it later. Philip Randolph Ayres, called Rand, was the son of one of Atlanta’s leading lawyers; his renegade’s black leather jacket and riding boots had not come from Goodwill, despite the ragged state of the tight jeans between them. He had defied his family tradition, Anna learned later, by refusing to study law, by taking to literature instead. He had earned his M.A. in English at UCLA and had now come home to write his first novel. Meanwhile, he was treating Atlanta to his skills in poetry.

Mesmerized, Anna sat down in a seat on the last row. The poet kept his eyes trained on her. She couldn’t stop staring back and she felt his magnificent voice swirl around inside her, encircling her internal organs like Van Gogh’s brushstrokes making love to the moon. He looked only at her. Deliberately. Even Maria would comment on it later. But it would be years before Anna would understand why—because she had dared to linger in the stacks while he performed.

When he finished reading, the crowd just sat for a moment, somehow waiting for his permission to leave. Finally he gave it, with a slight nod and a handshake to the manager of the bookstore, and people got up and milled about. Almost everyone went up to speak to him and he stood at the podium, resting against it casually like a conquering chieftain receiving his minions. He seemed glad to see each admirer but one eye remained fixed on the two teenage girls in the back.

“Isn’t he super?” Maria whispered. “Let’s go talk to him.”

Anna followed her friend to the front of the room. Maria asked Rand Ayres endless questions but Anna stood there quietly. She didn’t trust herself to ask him anything, even to speak. But as Rand Ayres patiently answered her friend, he looked at her.

A half hour later, to Anna’s amazement, she and Maria were having coffee with Rand Ayres in a seedy bar that smelled of something that might have been marijuana. The poet ordered coffee for the two girls, coffee and brandy for himself, and talked to Maria about his writing. When Maria had talked herself out, she rose to go to the restroom. Rand Ayres just sat and stared at Anna. Then he asked, “If you were going to write a poem, what would you write about?”

“My father,” she blurted out without thinking. Then she blushed. She must sound about ten years old.

The poet leaned toward her and she could smell the fine leather of his coat. “What about your father?” When she hesitated, he coaxed her, “If you don’t talk about it, you’ll never be able to write about it.”

Under the man’s spell, Anna answered honestly, “I’d write about how I don’t really know him. My parents divorced when I was little. I only saw him weekends; we had to start over again every Saturday.” Anna heard the anger creep into her voice but she couldn’t control it. “He remarried last year and moved to Arizona and now it’s too late.”

Then Maria returned and she and Anna prepared to leave. Maria thanked Rand and he gallantly took her hand and wished her luck in her writing career. She stammered in embarrassment; Anna knew she had only written two poems ever. Then Rand took Anna’s hand and moved his index finger in a circle in her palm as he said, “Come to my reading next month at the library. I’ll be reading a poem about my father. I’d like you to hear it.”

For months Anna attended Rand’s readings, sometimes with Maria and often alone. From the main library to branch locations to bookstores to meetings of literary clubs, she followed the man who became her best friend. After his readings they had long conversations about life and art and Anna often talked about her difficulties at home, how she missed her father and felt her mother regarded her only as a burden. For the first time she talked freely about her parents’ divorce. Rand drew confessions and confidences out of her, a diviner who gave none in return. Instead he would recite poetry to her. One evening after a reading, sitting in his MG sportscar talking about the day her father left Atlanta, Anna burst into tears and Rand leaned over in the darkness and traced her tears with his index finger and quoted:

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind.

When he opened his arms to crush her to his chest, Anna felt so safe, so understood. This passionate man in his passionate struggle to express his feelings had become her first confidant in life, the first person she truly trusted. Unlike the insipid high school boys Anna knew, whose conversation was confined to cars and sports, Rand wanted to know who she really was. Unlike them, he never tried to get her clothes off or move his hand up under her skirt.

By now Anna was hopelessly in love with him and she began seeing him between poetry readings, lying to her mother because of his age. She would wait for him on a street corner not far from her house. One twilight he swooped up on a motorcycle and took her for a windswept ride so dangerous she never forgot it. He took her to movies minors weren’t allowed to see, treated her as though she were his equal in age and sophistication. But he never touched her, except to comfort and console her. Always he talked to her about her problems, tried to gain her confidence emotionally, and Anna adored the attention. Finally one night they met at his sparsely furnished apartment (which he kept solely for social purposes, as he still lived on his parents’ estate). Drinking wine for the first time, Anna was talking about her father again when Rand took her hand and slowly began to trace the lifeline in her right palm. His touch was different, she noticed. So were his eyes. Each time his fingers moved across her skin her flesh quivered; she felt the sensation in her legs, her shoulders, her stomach. “If you were my daughter,” he whispered close to her face, “I’d never let a day go by that I didn’t see you, talk to you. The same if you were my wife. Or my lover.”

Lover. The word reverberated in Anna’s brain. Not because of what it meant but because it was such an adult word. Heathcliff and Cathy were lovers, Eustacia and Wildeve, Rochester and Jane.

Still he held her hand. They were sitting on the carpetless floor, listening to a Rod McKuen record. Rand’s fingers stroked her forearm and she swallowed, drunk as much on his eyes as the wine. “You’ll probably have a lover before long,” he said, his voice huskier. His face was now so close to Anna’s she could taste his breath. Gently he pushed her onto her back and kissed her. All she could feel was his tongue moving in and out of the dark corners of her mouth. That, and an odd new tightness between her legs.

In a second he had her skirt off. He moved her legs apart, his body as insistent as his eyes had been that first night. “I want you,” he demanded. “You are mine now.” And he pushed himself against her long before she was ready, met resistance and then pushed harder, backed up a second, and rammed his way in.

Pain shot through Anna, as he bucked and grunted above her. Afterward he told her that he loved her and drove her home, stopping two blocks from her house to let her out. He patted her hand reassuringly, kissed her lightly. Then, as she was getting out of the car, he said, his eyes separated again, “Meet me here on Thursday. About six. I want to fuck you again.”

Anna gaped at him, as she stared into eyes that did not take no for an answer. Abruptly he reached out and stroked her chin, like the old Rand. “You’re a woman now. Remember, I love you.”

For the next two years he ordered Anna to sleep with him whenever he wished. He began telling her how to dress, how to talk, how to walk, which of her ideas were silly. He always did so with kindness, in the manner in which he’d initially captured her trust: “I just want you to grow into the woman you’re meant to be.” She saw Rand whenever he decreed; she gave herself up to the sexual slavery that trust and love had somehow wrought for her.

Penned in by the prevailing morality of the day, Anna was tied to Rand Ayres. Hadn’t she given him the only thing of value she had? Although she felt no earth move, the lovemaking made her feel close to him and since they were in love it wasn’t really wrong. Theirs was, as Rand said, “a passion beyond morality,” which meant she could sleep with him and still be a good girl. But she was shocked when Rand would throw her on the bed the minute they walked into his apartment and say, “Pull up your skirt and open your legs.” She would hesitate, wanting him to talk to her tenderly as he usually did or at least kiss her, but he’d only shout, “I said, spread your fucking legs.” Then he would reach down and jerk her legs apart, taking her without foreplay, without speaking, without even removing his leather jacket.

At other times he was gentle, brought her flowers, let her read part of his novel. But he withdrew his kindness whenever she did something he didn’t like, kept her continually off-balance emotionally. He told her not to apply to the University of Maryland where her father had gone to school; he wanted her at Emory or Agnes Scott. For months Anna didn’t tell Rand she’d won a scholarship to Maryland. She yearned to escape from his sexual bondage. When Rand learned of Anna’s scholarship, he acted pleased for her and she almost regretted her decision to go away. That night, her eighteenth birthday, he took her out for an elegant dinner and made love to her so savagely she was exhausted afterward. The next day, however, when Anna came home from school, his car was pulling out of her driveway. It was the last time she ever saw him.

Rand Ayres never yielded control. He had told Anna’s mother everything—that Anna had chased him for months and had finally worn down his resistence, that he was tired of the lies. He gave her mother dates and times, even down to excuses Anna had given the older woman in order to see him.

This revelation ruined the already-shaky relationship between mother and daughter forever. Anna went off to college more alone than ever before. Chafing from Rand’s virtual ownership, she spent the first two years of college sleeping indiscriminately with whomever she ran across. She became the kind of woman her mother, who never questioned Rand’s honesty, already said she was. She let other men sleep with her but she would not let them get close. Her desire for sex and her desire for love never shook hands again until she met Stoney McFarland.

Completely awake now, Anna padded over to the window to look at the moon, then she tiptoed out into the hall and down the stairs to the first floor. At the bottom of the landing she paused and stared into the living room, her eyes resting on the Aztec design of the rug in front of the fireplace. She’d put that rug there, with a thick pad underneath, thinking it would be a nice place to make love. But it had yet to be used for that purpose. Anna headed into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of wine. Silas stirred and ambled over to her sleepily and she knelt down to hug him; the huge dog felt like a warm teddy bear. She walked through the kitchen to her studio at the rear of the house. Originally built as a porch, before the McCloskeys enlarged that side of the house, the small room was centered around a large oak desk; originally Anna’s father’s, it was the one piece of furniture she had brought from her home in Atlanta. Adjacent to it sat a pine worktable piled high with photographs, above it was a bulletin board with more photographs tacked to it haphazardly, and inside a nearby closet that had once been a bathroom lay a fully equipped darkroom. Anna sat down at her desk, clicked on the swing lamp. Two signed originals by Ansel Adams were framed on the wall opposite her. Through the bank of windows on her left, she could also see the live oaks that encircled the pond in the back yard. They blocked off her sanctuary from the prying eyes of the rest of the town. Sometimes she worked when she couldn’t sleep—brought her journal up to date, selected shots she wanted to submit, studied others she felt were flawed, read the photography magazines. But tonight she surveyed it all with disinterest. Instead, she just stared at the outline of the trees. What had made her dream about Rand tonight? She leaned back in her swivel chair and her eyes narrowed. Maybe the lunch with Marian, that speech about being used.

In a moment, on impulse, Anna unlocked the bottom drawer of her desk, pulled it out, and reached far in the back to withdraw a sealed envelope. She slit the envelope open and took out a set of photographs she hadn’t looked at in a long time, black-and-white enlargements of a nude woman on a bed. Thirty or forty pictures in all. In some the woman’s eyes were half-masted, veiled. Tension stood out in her facial muscles and her eyes focused in intense concentration above tightened lips. In the later photos the lips became noticeably softer, the cheekbones relaxed, and the eyes took on a suffused dreaminess, as though a light were shining through them.

“I love to watch your face at the end,” Stoney had told her in bed a year after they were married. “It’s like I can finally see inside you.”

She’d begun taking the pictures sometime after that. Tripod and time lapse. He knew what she looked like but she didn’t. She knew what he looked like, the way his eyes closed and his shoulders shook. Did women and men look the same? What right had he to know something about her she didn’t know? Anna studied her younger face, unfettered and unprotected. Was that woman her? Had it ever been? She put the photographs back into the envelope, shoved them into her desk, and locked them away again. To this day Stoney did not know about them. She knew he’d enjoy seeing them. She also knew, sadly, he probably never would.

Women envied Anna McFarland for her marriage. Friends said she and Stoney were perfect complements: he was calm and intelligent where she was artistic and tempestuous. When they still lived in Washington, Anna would sometimes tell a friend about the three hours she and Stoney spent over a bottle of wine discussing politics and the friend would roll her eyes and exclaim, “Jesus, I can’t imagine Steve spending three hours talking to me. About anything.” Then the friend would complain that all Steve ever wanted to do was fuck, that he seemed to think that was the way to make their marriage work. Anna would sympathize and then would remember that after she and Stoney had talked for three hours she would have given anything if he’d also seduced her.

What had drawn Stoney and Anna together was intellectual compatibility, laced with enough sexual attraction to keep it interesting. She liked the way he smelled and his athlete’s build and he liked her husky voice and the sight of her long dark hair splayed across the white pillow beside him every morning. In their early days they made love often, eagerly, unself-consciously. They experimented with positions and technique and Stoney showed her that sex, like life, need not always be as serious as she took it. Eventually, though, their lives settled into a routine; they slept together and enjoyed it but it did not figure as vitally into their daily lives. After several years, like many married couples, sex became something brought out for weekends and special occasions. As such, it drew attention (and pressure) to itself. Infrequency bred insecurity and gradually their physical love became a question of improved performance; not an expression of feeling or pleasure, but the mechanical execution of an idealized goal.

For Anna, it also began to feel like a command performance, something she owed Stoney, and she began to remember Rand Ayres. Was sex ever beyond power? Then she would rebel at the idea that anyone “owned” her like that and say no to Stoney’s overtures (as she had never done to Rand). At the same time she yearned for the great art of seduction and thought the way to get it was to complain about it. Stoney thought she had elevated sex to the level of religious conversion and wished she would just once lie back and open her legs temptingly like she really enjoyed it. Neither told the other any of these things, and their physical love lost that which created it—natural instinct.

Most of their married friends were drifting apart emotionally but still having sex on schedule—and this knowledge did little for Anna’s confidence. Or her sense of isolation. She had always been so sure she and Stoney were invincible, that because they communicated intellectually (who else spent hours trading ideas on religion and art and why the twentieth century made people so pathologically unhappy?), the rest would follow. What could harm two people who could really talk? Which seemed a reasonable assumption until the sex went bad. As it gradually worsened, Anna wondered if her marriage of intellectual compatibility, of shared values, was too thinking-oriented. Everything she and Stoney did was thought through so thoroughly—it once took them six months to decide to move to a new apartment—that little energy was left over at the end for spontaneity. Anna listened to other women and searched for a theory to explain why her best of all marriages had soured physically. How did she and Stoney start off so well and still end up here? She found no answer. What had brought the two of them together so perfectly that one afternoon in Maryland had been pure mystery, and now again, what was pulling them apart was shrouded in its own mantle of myopic arcanum.

The eighth year they were married they went for six weeks without making love. Everything else between them was okay, despite the minidramas caused by in-laws and who did the dishes. They still shared ideas and feelings but that year Anna knew something was seriously wrong with a couple just turning thirty who had sex so seldomly. But she discussed it with no one. Because of her free-lancing, their budget was too skimpy to allow for a therapist, and she was too much the anarchist for therapy anyway. To no one would she confess that her husband no longer seemed to want her. The truth was, of course, that he did want her. But having been often rejected now, he did little about it. So he and Anna lived more like tender siblings, emotionally close but physically constrained.

Frightened that she might become as asexual as her mother, Anna began to bring up “their problem” from time to time. She and Stoney sat in the small living room of their basement apartment in Georgetown one evening listening to Miles Davis and she asked, “Don’t you wonder why we don’t make love more often? Don’t you think there’s something wrong?”

He wouldn’t look at her. “There are lots more important things in marriage than just sex. We understand each other better than most people ever will. Maybe we’re not highly sexed.”

“You sound like you’re giving up. You can’t believe that. What good is love if you don’t have emotional understanding wedded to good sex?”

His voice was angry. Half the time she said no and now she was complaining? “I don’t see what the big deal is.”

In short, they did not understand each other nearly so well as they thought. He missed the point that in the South women are conditioned to define themselves through their ability to attract men, that a sexually insecure woman is likely to be even more unraveled by the suspicion that she’s lost her sexual allure, the very thing which frightens her. So Stoney would kiss Anna lovingly when they went to sleep but he no longer slipped his hand playfully between her legs. Anna came to miss the gesture that had once seemed an act of sexual proprietorship: he owned her there, like Rand. No one did these days and she wasn’t happy now either. For months she and Stoney would live like platonic friends and then, after weeks of abstinence, their passion would suddenly erupt in the middle of the night. The next morning they would not mention the sex and the physical distance would set in again. Lovemaking became a dirty little weakness they gave in to once in a while. If Anna was angry, Stoney was saddened by what had happened; after all, it had been Anna’s free spirit which first attracted him. Her zest for life—for college, for ideas, for photography—had always been a sexual high to him. But now sex often felt like just too much trouble, fraught with too many pitfalls (Was it always his fault when she didn’t make it?); when he felt the urge, he usually talked himself out of it. He had said he would never beg—and he still wouldn’t. She would come to him because she wanted to; he would not force her.

The problem, he thought, was a matter of lust. Anna always wanted an out-of-body experience, sometimes he just wanted to get laid. Occasionally he felt lust for his wife that was separate from his love for her and he got the feeling from her that he shouldn’t. She never initiated sex, she was at her most amorous when slightly drunk, and all too often he felt like she was doing him a favor. Their infrequent sex had once driven him astray. When they were in Washington and he was doing field work in a rural West Virginia county, he had to measure an abandoned farmhouse with a female appraiser who had short blond hair and a silly laugh that made him feel about eighteen. They took a lunch break, drank too much beer, and returned to the house all giddy in the summer sunshine. Soon she was kneeling in the grass and her blouse was open to naked breasts and she looked up at him and said, “Please fuck me.” A schoolboy’s wet dream come true. But when it was over he regretted it; screwing around on Anna was an unnatural act for him. Love in one corner, lust in another, it was too much like high school, good girls and bad girls, you married a good girl but then you wanted to fuck her like a bad girl and both of you knew you should be beyond this prehistoric garbage but there it was, burned into your fanny like a birthmark. Little by little Stoney concluded that the intellectual symbiosis he enjoyed with his wife was more important than the best sex in the world. She gave him a sense of self-worth that no one else had ever provided. All his life he’d wanted a friend like Anna; even without sex, she was the primary focus of his life. She was, in fact, the only woman he’d ever been able to talk to. If he was just patient, this would work itself out.

Since their move to Essex little had changed: Stoney and Anna kept on having intimate moments that should have led to sexual intimacy yet usually didn’t. But the new location did affect them differently. Rural South Carolina, so close to earth and water, was inordinately more sensuous than the steel and concrete of Washington. The air in Essex seemed more primordial, the nights hotter, the rhythms of nature more invasive. Here physical sensations felt more overt—colors, sounds, smells were all closer. Anna usually realized when she was ovulating now; before, she’d been too busy or distracted to notice. And the aroma that permeated Essex—that thick musk of loam, of fertilization—always reminded Stoney of the deep smell of a woman.

On a Friday night a week after Anna’s lunch with Marian, the McFarlands relaxed on the balcony of the Hilton Head condo they had rented for the weekend and sipped Beaujolais and listened to the surf. They sat at a round café table, in two director’s chairs turned sideways from the table to face each other. Below them, on the beach, a couple walked hand in hand in the darkness, a small terrier and two children trailing behind them. Anna glanced at Stoney; he looked more peaceful than he had in weeks. For once he seemed to be thinking about something other than Essex and the murder. Anna gazed back out at the now empty beach. “I wonder why the ocean has such a regenerative effect.”

“It’s mystical,” he suggested. “Unexplainable. Like the moon which governs it. And keeps it always changing, like a woman. Biologically, you and the ocean are both governed by cycles of the moon. That’s what makes women fascinating to men—that you’re never static, we can never quite catch you.”

It was the kind of conversation that had made her fall in love with him. But she said, teasing, “Meaning we’re flighty?”

He smiled, caught the challenge. “Meaning you’re always tempting. Letting us come close, backing away again like the tide. Your nature is to keep moving. I sometimes think ours is to stand still—like a mountain.”

“Unyielding, hard, and implacable?”

His eyes took on a definite twinkle. “Well, maybe one out of three.”

They had had sexy conversations in the past but they were usually more abstracted now. He watched her face. Her eyes were soft and sensual. Her hair was tangled by the wind, a mass of wildness, like unchecked vines in a swamp, and her blouse was uncharacteristically low on her breasts. He followed their curve with his eyes. She laid a hand on his arm absently and without thinking he moved his right foot and hooked it on the bottom hinge of her chair, between her bare legs. He wiggled his foot around to get a better grip and accidentally brushed her thigh. Their eyes met.

She closed her legs tight around his and held them there.

Stoney swallowed. He could feel the heat of her legs against his. His pulse hammered. All that existed was the increasing pressure of her legs. He moved his leg slightly. The shift put his leg deeper between hers and he could feel the softness of her thighs against his calf. He leaned over to kiss her and she met his tongue, wet and aggressive. Filled with relief that he had not misread her, he drew her shoulders toward him, ran his tongue down her throat and back up again to encircle her right ear and plunge inside it. He thought of how she would taste and her smell filled his head; he wanted to push her backward across the table and open her legs right there. The thought made him shiver so he forced himself to think about condemnation hearings, anything, to try to keep from going too fast. She always left the pace up to him, almost indifferently, and he never knew whether he was moving too fast or too slow.

She often left too much up to him. In a few moments they were inside on the king-sized bed, their clothes on the floor beside it. The full-length touch of a man turned Anna’s skin electric, she wanted to yell at him to hurry up, to fill her up. His hand was between her legs and it was a fraction off but she tried to concentrate anyway on how good it felt. She shifted, hoping to throw Stoney in better position, but he took it as an invitation and quickly drove inside her.

Their bodies collided and the synchronization better familiarity would have provided eluded them. Anna wasn’t excited anymore; now the offbeat rhythm was just making her sore. Her mind wandered and part of it saw Rand Ayres above her. Rand buried deep within but never speaking, she enjoying the initial stimulation and then losing it, thinking there ought to be more. But he never cared how she felt; he wanted nothing of her but that she should lie there, passive as dirt, and comply. When Rand stopped, she did not feel completed, filled up. She felt depleted. The more of him she took in, the more of her she lost.

“God, Anna, I can’t—”

In a second Stoney thrust his pelvis toward her and she arched up to meet him and he cried out. She felt herself buck with him and thought she was ridiculous at best and a hypocrite at worst. Afterward he held her in the darkness for a long time. They didn’t speak. Soon he fell asleep.

When his breathing was regular, Anna got out of bed and walked back out onto the balcony, stood naked at the railing and watched the ocean. The wind played across her, and the hair on her arms, as well as on her breasts, stood at attention. She imagined hands on the insides of her thighs and she closed her eyes and held on to the railing for support as they made their way up her legs. The hands belonged to a shirtless man working on a telephone pole they’d passed on their way to the beach. He had no face, only those massive hands reaching up inside her from behind. Faster, higher. Then Anna collapsed into a chair on the balcony, and for him, she eagerly spread her legs.