Eight

When Lou Brockhurst arrived in town, Essex breathed a sigh of relief. We could stop worrying. This man would give us answers, would put our town back together again. Even though he wasn’t the typical law enforcement type, he emanated a quiet, understated confidence that was far more convincing in Essex than overwrought zeal. Most agents of SLED, the State Law Enforcement Division, were burly strapping fellows, former athletes and student body presidents. Brockhurst, at barely five feet with a slight limp left over from a childhood bout with polio, didn’t look remotely capable of overwhelming the bad guys. He also smiled too much, a crooked grin that challenged no one and put everyone at ease. His fellow agents continually wondered, we heard later, how a guy like that managed to maintain the best arrest record in the whole state.

The criminal mind had long been Brockhurst’s hobby. After finishing college, he tried to become a SLED agent but didn’t meet the height requirement, so he landed a job with a Charleston newspaper and worked himself into the police beat, a dead end studiously avoided by most novice reporters. Not Lou Brockhurst. He sat at the city desk day after day with one ear tuned to the police radio, always poised to strike out for the city lockup or for the police commissioner’s office. He won awards for his crime reporting but often forgot to go to the banquets to collect them. If a robbery or murder had taken place that day, he couldn’t be bothered. Most people didn’t know what to make of such a kind, self-deprecating man who thrived on violence and crime. Even in college Brockhurst had been pegged the All-American “nice guy.” Coeds who didn’t trust the men they dated always went to Lou for advice. He was someone few ever had a complaint against, much less a grudge. Now he lived in a world inhabited by pushers and thieves and murderers—but he was equally comfortable with doctors, housewives, and farmers. He was still, quintessentially, a nice guy.

And hated it.

Close friends said it was a woman who had made him a cop and a forty-two-year-old bachelor. In his senior year in college the incredible had happened to him: the most beautiful girl on campus fell for him. She reminded Lou of a delicate china doll, this wispy golden only-child of wealthy elderly parents, this flaxen-haired miniature with enormous aquamarine eyes and a wide sensual mouth. She changed Lou’s life. Her perfection made him bold. He began to do things he’d never done before, go places he’d never gone before, his diminutive size and slight handicap compensated when she walked beside him. He planned a career in advertising, worked out with weights and grew huskier, stronger, proud.

So he gave her a ring and a spring wedding was planned, right before graduation. All was right with the world. Until she changed her mind.

One morning, without warning or explanation, the beautiful girl got a yen to see an old beau who’d just come back from Vietnam with a chest full of medals. The only man who’d ever left her. And in the space of one hour, sixty interminable minutes, thirty-six hundred eternal seconds, Lou Brockhurst was cut down to size again. He didn’t protest her abandonment, didn’t call her dirty names or crash her wedding (to which she personally invited all her old boyfriends); no, he accepted her betrayal stoically, as he’d accepted his size, his limp, his life. But he did not recover. In that one year when he was twenty-one, his entire life was cast.

Upon graduation from college he tried to join the Army. He was turned down. He wanted to become an air marshall but was refused there too. His height and his limp automatically disqualified him with the law enforcement agencies to which he applied. Later he set his sights on becoming an undercover narcotics agent. Over and over again he was put off. In the meantime his reputation as the best crime reporter in Charleston grew. For years he detailed exploits he secretly admired. Those guys didn’t “take” anything. Time passed. Then a miracle occurred. By now Lou Brockhurst knew enough important people in South Carolina law enforcement that a position just happened to open up for a short guy with a limp.

The man who arrived in Essex had close-cropped black hair, alert green eyes, and a swarthy complexion undercut by a bridge of freckles spanning his nose. Broad and muscled through the chest, his shoulders dwarfed his small frame and skinny legs, his khaki slacks always hiked up in the back because his limp stemmed from a deformity in his right hip. He used no crutch or cane, just walked slowly, dragging the stiff shorter leg slightly. When stationary he always stood at military attention, his chest thrown forward, his legs spread far enough apart that they appeared evenly matched.

“I’m sorry, I just don’t agree,” he told Jim Leland, facing the police chief across his desk in the Essex Town Hall. “I don’t for a minute believe one old woman killed another old woman and then dumped sperm all over her.”

Jim Leland regarded the other man with skepticism. This was a big-city cop? The town could think what it liked but Brockhurst didn’t look capable of solving anything to him, much less a violent murder. This fellow looked like he ought to be in some school somewhere teaching kids or something. Damn those state bureaucrats. If Sarah Roth had been killed in Charleston or Spartanburg, they’d have sent someone else. Brockhurst was second string, no question.

“I’ve gone over the material evidence with the Ashton County sheriff,” Brockhurst said. He eyed Jim Leland and added, “Of course, if we’d been called to the scene, it would have been much better. Nothing replaces what you can find right after the murder. As it is, we have only the photos and the paperwork to go on. Next time I’d get in touch with our people right away.”

Who the hell did this shrimp think he was? Jim nodded. “So who do you think did it?” Let the smart ass answer that.

Brockhurst leaned back in his chair, tapped the file folder he was holding against his good knee. “Well, I had some blowups made of the victim. There were no hesitation marks, so suicide is out.”

Jim laughed out loud. “Suicide?”

“It’s not that uncommon, especially among the elderly; it’s the first thing we try to rule out. You’ll find shallow cuts, the initial stabs the victim made while working up his courage to kill himself.” Brockhurst paused and looked back at the folder. “By the way, I didn’t see the results here from the DNA semen test.”

Jim was quiet for a second. “We couldn’t have a test run. See, the county coroner was a good friend of Sarah’s family. When he took her over to the hospital for the autopsy, he was so upset he cleaned her up; he wasn’t thinking straight and he rinsed off the body. When Ed Hammond got there to do the autopsy, it was too late to do anything about it.”

“You mean to tell me the evidence was destroyed?”

The police chief shook his head. “I’m afraid so. Like I was telling you, though, the whole town is convinced it’s this black woman who lives in the swamp.”

“You’ve questioned her, I gather?”

“No, not just yet.” Jim didn’t look Brockhurst in the eye. “See, there’s been so much to take care of here, what with how stirred up everybody’s been. This is a one-man office. Buck Henry—he’s the county sheriff—did go out there but he never could find her. I thought you guys would want to be in on her questioning, anyway.”

“I’ll want to see her right away, of course,” Brockhurst said. “But what bothers me about her is the statistical improbability: over 95 percent of all sex murders, and this one certainly has sexual overtones, are committed by men.” He paused, then went on, “The massive facial injuries are our strongest lead. Usually that means the victim and the attacker knew each other. An act of revenge, for example, almost always involves facial injuries. However, none of this constitutes real evidence.”

Jim looked annoyed. What did it matter then?

The SLED agent went on, “I approach a case by trying to understand the psychology, especially when there’s so little physical evidence. A man who masturbates after killing a woman is likely a man who masks his insecurity about sex with exaggerated machismo—that’s my guess, anyway. He really feels threatened by sex, by women; sometimes he will feel his sexual responses are a power women have over him against his will. Power is what the whole thing is about anyway, or so our crime psychiatrist is always telling me. Many rapists actually hate women. Some will later attack that part of the woman which sets her apart as feminine—her breasts or vagina, for example. That’s the story behind cases of mutilation. He’ll think: she controlled me with these, now I’ve taken them away from her.”

“That’s crazy,” Jim sputtered. “Mrs. Roth was seventy-six years old and a widow. She wasn’t having sex with anybody.”

“That may be. But I feel like a sex offender could be involved.” Brockhurst opened the folder on his lap. “The guy would probably have a record of minor violations—Peeping Tom, obscene phone calls, breaking and entering. The excitement for the perpetrator is often the ritual he goes through, what he said, what he did, being in the victim’s home. I once worked a rape case where the rapist always wanted the husband in the house and always had a leisurely cup of coffee afterward in the kitchen. The act—of whatever nature—is least important. Everything leading up to the crime is more exciting to him. Stalking the victim, entering the house, that kind of thing. Anyone around here with a history of minor offenses, including sex offenses?”

“No,” Jim said. “You think it’s some kind of psycho?”

Lou Brockhurst stared at the other man. “That depends on your definition of psychotic. But no, I don’t think so.” The SLED agent looked back down at the folder. “I would guess our man is in his mid-twenties to mid-thirties. It might be a guy who’s never exhibited violent behavior before. If he is psychotic, it’s possible he’s lived a perfectly normal life up until now. Some pyschotics do, then they abruptly reach a crisis point and they explode.” Brockhurst’s voice was quiet and serious. “The problem is—once the guy’s exploded, it’s usually not long until he kills again.”

“You keep saying he,” Jim argued. “According to our doctor, Sarah wasn’t technically raped. This black woman in the swamp had a jar of semen in her house. She showed up at Sarah’s funeral and acted very odd. She is certifiably looney, all you gotta do is look at her. Then there was the goat who was cut up, scaring people to death. Voodooists sacrifice animals, use knives to kill them, I’m told. None of this means anything to you?” Jim stopped. It occurred to him more and more lately how much simpler things would be if Maum Chrish did prove to be guilty.

“It’s a convincing circumstantial case, yes, and I sure intend to check her out. I’m planning to do the same to J. T. Turner. Was this Maum Chrish ever seen with the victim, did they know each other?”

Jim nodded negatively. “Not that we know of.”

Brockhurst stood up. “Let me make a few calls and then we’ll pay Maum Chrish a visit.” He walked to the door, his good leg leading the way. “After that I want to talk to Turner. Oh, also”—he turned around—“I’ll need to speak to the fellow who found the victim. What’s his name? McFarland?”

Career day at Essex High, held later than usual this year to accommodate an almost-famous marine biologist from Beaufort, was almost over. Marian Davis stood at the rear door of the cafeteria. In front of her, teenagers lounged at conference tables as Anna McFarland walked among them holding matted black-and-white photo enlargements. Anna was electric when she talked about her work; her face glowed and her eyes radiated pure energy. She and Marian had not spoken, except perfunctorily, since that afternoon in Marian’s classroom, but Marian found herself listening intently anyway.

“Actually I think Walker Evans was the best distillation we’ve had yet of the work of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine,” Anna was saying, concluding her review of the history of photography. “That is, in giving us truth without too much sentiment. We now call it the documentary style and Evans’ pictures of the Depression set the modern standard for it.”

Next Anna talked about what constituted bad photography. She held up pictures of a barn, a cemetery, a white clapboard church. “There is no story in these. A great photo has vision, a good one has a concept, a poor one has neither. An old barn can be interesting but that doesn’t necessarily make it a meaningful concept, much less a vision. And it certainly doesn’t make it art.”

When Anna finished, several students raised their hands and asked practical questions; Anna advised them to study composition and to spend more money on a good lens and a good tripod than on the camera body. The questions tapered off and Marian went to the front of the room, thanked all the speakers, and dismissed the program. Knots of students formed around the adults whose careers interested them and Marian noticed two students a few feet away hanging on to Anna’s every word. The taller girl was a college-bound senior; she was the oldest daughter of the most affluent black family in Essex. She was leaning toward Anna, a small Canon camera in her hand, asking if she needed a larger format like a Hasselblad. Anna talked to the black girl enthusiastically, while the other student, Marynell Pittman’s younger sister, stood beside them silently.

Marian ached for Amy Pittman. Who would give her a camera? Who would even notice she was interested in anything? And of course, Anna was talking almost exclusively to the other girl. Marian frowned. Anna tended her liberal reputation more fervently than Harriet did her garden.

The marine biologist stopped Marian, to say goodbye, and when she turned back around, she didn’t see Anna and the two girls. Then she spotted Anna and Amy over by a window. Anna was taking her expensive Leica out of a camera bag. She held it toward the girl, who seemed afraid to touch it. Anna put the camera into Amy’s hands. “Try it. Look through the lens. Get the feel of it. Come on, fire a few shots out the window.” Then Marian heard Anna tell Amy the story of Dorothea Lang, whose impoverished background had not prevented her from becoming a famous photographer. Soon Amy was giggling as she looked through the Leica’s lens.

In fifteen minutes everyone was gone and the cafeteria was empty, save for Marian and Anna, who was packing up her equipment. She didn’t notice Marian until the other woman stood in front of her.

“You were terrific,” Marian said. “I know Amy appreciated the attention.”

“I liked her.” Anna tied her portfolio shut and picked it up. “Well, I’ll see you.”

She was almost to the door when Marian’s voice stopped her. “Anna, wait.”

Marian walked toward Anna. When they stood within touching distance, Marian said, “Thanks again.” She paused and added, “You know, if you’re still interested, I’ve got a book about African voudou I’d be happy to lend you. Why don’t you come by and get it sometime?”

Anna studied Marian’s mahogany eyes for a second. Then she smiled.

Lou Brockhurst and Jim Leland stood in front of Maum Chrish’s cabin and stared at each other helplessly. The large black woman on the porch glared down at them, impassive as a statue. The policemen had been there for half an hour and still Maum Chrish had said nothing which made sense.

“Ma’am, we have to know where you were the night Sarah Rothenbarger was killed,” Jim repeated, his voice as monotonous as a child reciting memory work. “That was April 12th.” A pause. “I don’t think you realize the position you’re in. I suggest you cooperate this time. That’ll make it easier on everyone, including you.”

The dark woman opened her mouth. “It came the night of the Dark Satellite,” she intoned, her clear musical voice filling the clearing. “Not evil, but the absence of light, statis, the failure to ascend. When the fire of heaven and the water of earth mix without the air to reconcile, the absence of their mediator.”

Lou Brockhurst studied Maum Chrish closely. Maybe she was crazy and maybe she wasn’t. One thing was interesting, which had apparently eluded everyone else. This was not an uneducated woman. She hadn’t been in this swamp forever.

Maum Chrish spoke again: “Who walked the night of the Dark Satellite will be felled. Will descend to a place, fouled, filled with countless forms like beasts. There will unfold scenes of infamy but this one cannot be with it now. The lack of a physical body is a tormenting viper. This one is forever tantalized, constantly seeks that which can never be attained now. Punishment by the sin.”

Jim Leland shook his head and muttered under his breath, “She’s a fruitcake.” He cleared his throat, said more loudly, “Once again, ma’am, can you tell us where you were the night of April 12th? Why did you attend Sarah Roth’s funeral, did you know her? How often do you and—your people—kill goats? Can you tell us why a jar of male semen has been found in your house?”

The woman said nothing. Brockhurst turned and looked in the direction Maum Chrish was staring. A murky mist shrouded the swamps, an extension of the overcast skies above. Something moved in the woods and instinctively he felt for his revolver. Then something else moved, on the other side of the clearing this time. Brockhurst squinted. A black man wearing nothing but a pair of white shorts stepped out of the dark thicket and moved slowly toward the house. On the other side of the river a black woman wearing a long white caftan also stepped forward. Leland was talking about Maum Chrish but Brockhurst kept his eyes on the two black people moving toward them. Trouble? In a second he saw two more blacks step out of the woods; they were wearing red, both males, boys of eighteen or so, who also edged slowly toward the cabin, keeping a ritualistic distance between the other blacks dressed in white. Brockhurst tapped Jim on the shoulder and nodded toward the yard below them. Jim’s eyes widened as he saw the four black people advancing.

Maum Chrish was still peering into the woods and Brockhurst had the eeriest feeling that she had summoned these people. The man and woman in white reached the edge of the shack and stood at separate corners of it like military sentries, backs perfectly straight, eyes distant and noncommittal. As Brockhurst and Jim watched, the young men dressed in red crossed behind the older blacks and took their places at the other two corners of the house, affecting the same posture.

“They’re guarding her,” Brockhurst said in a terse whisper. “At least I think they are. But they don’t have weapons.”

Jim Leland, who had grown up around tales of voodoo, shivered. “They may not need any.”

Brockhurst counted to twenty, and waited. Nothing. The four people at the four corners of the house remained immobile. He took a deep breath finally, withdrew a document from inside his coat pocket, and turned back to Maum Chrish. “This is a search warrant, ma’am. It gives us permission to search your home.” Sweat rolled down Brockhurst’s temples. He did not like being outnumbered. “If you won’t cooperate with us, we have no alternative but to exercise it.”

The SLED agent nodded at Jim and started up the wooden steps. When Jim didn’t follow, Brockhurst pivoted and frowned at the other man until Jim moved forward.

Maum Chrish shrank back against the doorway of her cabin. “Sacred,” she hissed. She spread her arms wide. “The cemetery, the crossroads, and Grans Bwa, there will happen.”

Brockhurst said, “Stand aside, please.”

The black woman didn’t budge. This time her voice was low, murderous. “Oum’phor sacred.”

Both men surveyed the corners of the cabin. None of the blacks had moved. Abruptly Brockhurst jerked around, angled full-circle. Out beyond the house more black people were now standing in the yard, mostly women and children, some in rags, some in white cloth, just standing there staring. Where did they all come from? Even the children were motionless, silent effigies called upon to witness the moment. Brockhurst perspired harder and recalled the case in Rhett Cemetery in Beaufort. He stared into the faces of the women and children; none of them contained anger or aggression. It was a psychological scare tactic, he decided. And a damn good one.

“Take her arm,” he ordered Jim. Brockhurst grabbed the other arm and together they physically forced Maum Chrish away from the door of her house. The black woman walked down the steps and was immediately encircled by the women and children.

The white men entered the cabin. For a few minutes neither said anything, just gaped at the post, the floor designs, the drawings on the walls. Then they heard footsteps. Jim looked up in terror and Brockhurst tensed. The two men in white marched inside the front door. They separated, then went and stood in the two front corners of the room. In a second the men in red entered the room by way of the back door and took up their posts in the rear two corners.

“Jesus Christ,” Jim whispered. “I don’t like how they’re watching us.”

Jim and the SLED agent stood close together near the post in the center of the room. “I thought maybe it was just talk about her and voodoo,” Jim added sotto voce. Brockhurst walked over to one side of the room. The Essex police chief followed quickly, one eye cocked on the teenager in the corner. The Columbia detective stopped at each drawing and examined it. At one set of symbols his right eyebrow shot up. He lingered there for a moment. Then the white men moved in unison to the table on the other side of the room.

Brockhurst stared at the collection of knives. He touched the only knife that was serrated on one side, with a seven-inch blade. “Why would a woman keep a hunting knife like this?”

“To butcher animals—like chickens and goats,” Jim said. “The serrated side will saw through small animal bones.”

“We need to take this in,” Brockhurst added. He walked over to the man in the front right corner of the room, the oldest of the blacks in the house, and explained that he needed to confiscate the knife for evidence, that it would be returned later if the suspicion about Maum Chrish proved groundless, that it would be well taken care of in the meantime. Jim waited for the black man to make Brockhurst disappear or turn him into a toad, but the sentry merely inclined his head ever so slightly, as though he understood and accepted the policeman’s explanation. Brockhurst crossed back to Jim and slipped the knife in a clear plastic bag. Then he went into the back room of the cabin, Jim shadowing, and searched the bed and an old trunk that contained nothing but white pieces of cloth. There was no sign of Sarah Roth’s silver, nor anything else taken the night of the murder. Finally Brockhurst sat down on the rope bed and said, “Not much here.”

In a few seconds they walked back into the front room and Brockhurst deliberately crossed to the opposite wall and stood looking at it for a moment. Jim stared at the black people in the corners and wondered if he and Brockhurst would yet be hexed. Or worse. When Brockhurst nodded, they went back outside and looked around. The yard was empty now; even Maum Chrish was gone. Brockhurst paused for a moment and stared into the burning fire near the edge of the swamp, glancing back at the house from time to time. The live oaks around it stood like tenacious centurions whose armies had fled; only they remained behind to guard this enclave.

Walking back through the woods toward the car, Brockhurst asked the Essex police chief, “Sarah Roth was really Sarah Rothenbarger, right? She was Jewish?”

“Yeah. People dropped the end of her name years back.”

Brockhurst came to a stop and gazed at the other man. “Answer me something: why would a black woman who practices voodoo have the Hebrew alphabet on her wall?”

It wasn’t until Stoney tried to tell Lou Brockhurst about finding Sarah Roth’s body that he realized he had no conscious memory of that night. Even in the Ashton sheriff’s report Stoney’s statement was garbled, nearly incoherent, and his attempts to recount that night for the Columbia detective were even worse. Stoney talked at length about the phone call from Harriet Setzler, his walk to Sarah’s house in the moonlight, finding Sarah’s front door locked and the back door open. But once he stepped over the threshold he went blank; he could remember almost nothing upon entering Sarah’s house. “I opened the door and went in and …”

“And what?” Lou Brockhurst, seated behind Jim Leland’s desk in the police chief’s absence, leaned forward. “What did you see first?”

Stoney’s eyes were fixed on a distant planet. He blinked. “I don’t know. I found her.”

“Right away? Or after a while? Did you notice anything, hear anything?”

The engineer held up his palms uselessly. “I don’t remember.”

“Good God, man, you must remember something. She was on her bed covered with blood. You couldn’t forget that.”

Stoney closed his eyes. There was the door, the back door of Sarah’s house; he saw the doorknob, saw himself turn it, saw his reflection, the moon behind him, in the window panes of the door as it opened. Then—darkness. Nothing. Like a “Twilight Zone” episode, in which someone steps over the boundary of a different world. Nothing there. No blood, no dead woman, no smell, nothing. He looked back at Brockhurst. “I don’t understand it, but I just can’t seem to remember.”

The SLED agent took out a pack of chewing gum and stared at Stoney as he unwrapped a stick. “You ever see a murder victim before?”

“When I was real young, once. In D.C. An old drunk someone had rolled: they hit him on the head and left him in a ditch.”

“Do you remember that?”

“Vividly.”

When Stoney refused his offer, Brockhurst put the pack of chewing gum back in his shirt pocket. “Sometimes the mind will block these things out. It’ll probably come back to you. What I’d like to do—”

The door opened and in waltzed Heyward Rutherford. He crossed to Brockhurst and put out his hand. “I’m Heyward Rutherford, president of the Essex Town Council. I just wanted to welcome you to town. You need anything, you let me know. I’ll see that it gets done. It’s great to have you here and we’ll sure be glad when this whole thing is settled.”

Brockhurst got to his feet during the obviously rehearsed speech and took Heyward’s proffered hand. “That’s very kind of you. I’ll be glad when the case is cleared up too.”

Heyward said hello to Stoney, then turned back to Brockhurst. “Jim tells me you questioned Maum Chrish. Any theories about her yet?”

“It’s a little early to start speculating about anyone,” the SLED agent said. “I prefer not to discuss suspects until I’m sure of my facts. When that happens, there’ll be an arrest. You can count on that.”

The taller man clapped the detective on the back. “Well, good to have you here. Let us know if you need anything.”

After Heyward left, Brockhurst sat back down and said to Stoney, “Nice fellow. Sure is eager to help.”

“That’s Heyward all right. Eager. He is Real Estate around here. I hear he’s buying Sarah’s store, seems he’s wanted it for a long time.”

Brockhurst looked up. “That so?” He surveyed Stoney’s face, wondered if the other man was trying to tell him something. Stoney’s face was inscrutable. All the same, Brockhurst decided, it was worth checking into later.

Stoney again tried to remember what he had seen at Sarah’s house the night of the murder and Brockhurst egged him on by reading the Ashton sheriff’s report aloud. They were halfway through it when someone else knocked on the door. “This is a busy place,” Brockhurst said. He called out louder, “Come on in.”

The door opened and Jim Leland walked in followed by Leonard Hansen. Jim waved at Brockhurst, whom he liked better since the trip to the swamps. “Thought you two might want some coffee.” He set two steaming Styrofoam cups down on the desk. Then he introduced Brockhurst and Leonard.

Brockhurst stood and shook hands a second time. Leonard Hansen had unforgettable eyes, he thought, almost purple, the right one a deeper shade than the left. His face was broad and flat, with bushy eyebrows and a large nose. Above his upper lip was a slight split, remnant of either an uncorrected harelip or some childhood injury, and it gave his face a slight vulnerability that stood in sharp contrast to his small, cruel mouth. Altogether, though, he had the Elvis-style brutishness women always loved.

Leonard pumped Brockhurst’s hand. “Nice to have you in town. You need any help, I’m pretty used to handling a gun, being in the Marines and all.”

Stoney studied Leonard carefully. The other man looked perfectly sincere. He and Brockhurst talked about the firearms used in Vietnam for a moment, while Jim fumbled through his desk looking for something. Once or twice Leonard glanced at Stoney, as though trying to include him in the conversation. When Jim finally found the document he was searching for, he said he’d be back in a second and left the room again.

“Don’t wanna keep you,” Leonard concluded, his eyes on the Columbia detective. “But if you need anything, just give a yell. I’m around all hours.” He nodded at Stoney, brushing his blond hair out of his eyes. “How’s it going, McFarland?”

“Okay, Leonard.”

When Leonard left, Brockhurst eyed Stoney thoughtfully. “This is a very helpful town, ’though I don’t expect to have to form a posse.” A silence. “He work for the town too?”

“No. He did live with Sarah once, by the way.”

“He lived with the dead woman? How old is he?”

“It wasn’t like that.” Stoney smiled. “It was years ago, when he got out of the service. His parents had moved away from town and he came back here and Sarah took him in for a while. He didn’t have a job and she had a real soft spot for those down on their luck. But it seems Leonard stole some money from her before it was over.”

“How do you know that?” Brockhurst sat forward; most smalltowners didn’t gossip about their own to the law—unless there was a good reason for it. After Stoney explained, Brockhurst said, “Sarah Roth’s penchant for taking in stray people really bothers me. Anybody could have killed her.”

Stoney agreed and rose to leave. That the murder had been a random incident by a stranger Sarah befriended truly made more sense than Leonard or Heyward, if you discounted the goat incident. No stranger would stay around town to play tricks to make Maum Chrish look guilty. Unless, of course, the town was right and Maum Chrish really was the killer and the dead animal was her own handiwork. Stoney sighed. He had also told Brockhurst about J. T. Turner’s proclivity for jewelry and the SLED agent would be questioning him in a day or two. Sometimes the nervous stranger did seem the most likely answer.

Out on the street Stoney headed toward his office. Near the post office he saw Leonard Hansen again, leaning against the brick wall talking to a woman Stoney didn’t know very well. Stoney was almost past them when Leonard called out, “So what’d you think of the big-city detective?”

The woman smiled at both men and headed for her car. Stoney stopped and faced Leonard. If this was a man who’d committed murder, he sure was cool. “I think he’ll find out who killed Sarah and lock him up.”

Leonard’s eyes flickered. “Him. So you don’t buy the swamp woman theory?”

“Do you?”

“Naw, not really.”

“Who do you think did it, Leonard? I mean, you stayed with Sarah for that time way back, you know how she was about asking strange people home for dinner. Think maybe that had something to do with it?”

Leonard leaned in closer, his voice conspiratorial. “You know, I really don’t. I think it was somebody here in town. Somebody with a score to settle. That’s what I think.” Leonard smiled. “I better get going. See ya later.”

Stoney stared as the other man walked off. It couldn’t be Leonard, nobody had balls like that. Stoney started for his office again, thinking about a summer day over twenty years before.…

It started at the McCloskey pond. A game of ducks and drakes. Everyone else eliminated, only Stoney and Lenny Hansen left in. The kids usually let Lenny win, they knew what happened when he lost. But today everyone stood around shouting at Stoney, “Get ’im, Stone. Beat ’im.” Lenny pitched a flat rock across the pond; it bounced across the surface but then fell out of sight a few feet from the opposite shore. The tall blond kid rocked back on his heels, turned to Stoney, and sneered, “Beat that.” Stoney walked over to the edge of the pond. Once or twice he’d thrown stones that actually jumped across the water and landed on the other side. He took aim at the opposite bank, leaned in, and sent his rock sailing. Cheers rose as the stone tap-danced on the flat surface of the water—boink-boink-boink-boink—and then came to rest with a final plop. On the other bank.

Stoney never knew what hit him. It came from behind, an elbow around his neck pulling him backward, a hard fist flying into the small of his back. Then he was pinned to the ground, straddled by a heavier body. Over and over again a fist slammed into his jaw, slapped at his head, as someone shouted at him, “You Yankee prick.” Another fist to the face and blood gushed from Stoney’s nose, he could taste it in his mouth. What was that hard thing? A tooth?

Stoney reared up as hard as he could, arms flailing, legs kicking. The weight riding his stomach overpowered him again. A fist slammed into his belly. Enough already! Suddenly Stoney arched his back and took Lenny by surprise, managed to connect with the larger boy’s right shoulder. Lenny sat back. The blow had barely grazed him but he had a surprised look on his face. He hadn’t expected Stoney to fight back.

Defiance galvanized the troops. The other boys had been standing back but now they rushed forward and surrounded the two on the ground. “Kill him, Stoney!”

“Yeah, show him. Hit him for a change.”

Lenny glared at the group and that was Stoney’s second advantage as the smaller, lighter man. Hesitation made them equals, if only for a moment. Stoney scrambled from underneath Lenny and wriggled free. Lenny caught Stoney by the legs and threw him back down on the ground. Stoney punched Lenny in the nose and blood splattered all over them both. “You prick!” Lenny yelled, his eyes glazed. He grabbed a rock from the pile on the ground and slammed it into Stoney’s chest as hard as he could. Then Stoney blacked out.

For several days after the Career Day program, Anna had sequestered herself in her studio. She had an assignment on Daufuskie Island due to a Savannah advertising agency soon, but it was old work she studied as she leaned over her desk. Spread out in front of her, in five rows, lay all of her favorite photographs. Street scenes in D.C., sunsets and sunrises on the Potomac, inaugurations and senators whispering to each other in the halls of the Capitol, the black men hawking oysters in the Lexington Market in Baltimore, a Chinese man touching Abe’s foot respectfully at the Lincoln Memorial one winter dawn, the old Agnew pictures and the anti-abortion picketers outside the gates of the White House with their miniature coffins, Stoney in a white T-shirt with huge headphones over his ears crooning to himself beside the stereo in their Georgetown apartment, her father in front of his house in Phoenix a month before his heart attack.

Her own voice echoed in her brain: “A great photo has vision, a good one has a concept, a poor one has neither.”

She looked at the more recent pictures. The successive study of a live oak as evening shadows moved across it, the herons feeding in the marshes near Hilton Head, the cornfield she’d shot from a water tower to replicate its endlessness, the women under helmet hair dryers through the plate glass window of the Essex beauty shop. Only the last one interested her at all. Anna leaned back in her chair and sighed, closing her eyes. Maybe she was too devoted to Walker Evans’ long lens—to its distance. If only she could photograph what she felt these days—you could use the camera to expose or enhance but you should not use it just to record. The camera should deepen experience, reality. She got up and walked into the kitchen and looked out at the back yard. For several minutes she studied the live oaks. Sturdy, strong, suspicious, stunted. They mimicked human nature. Concept become vision. Anna blinked and for a second she saw Maum Chrish in the trunk of a live oak. At the oddest moments, when she was daydreaming or just staring into space, the image of the riverbank would crawl in front of her eyes and she’d see the naked woman singing to the skies, follow again the erotic pull of the couple on the wall of the cabin. But she had not been out there again. She was afraid now. Perhaps of more than whoever took her camera.

Anna had almost abandoned photography once. But who would she be without a camera, she asked Stoney. “I don’t want you to quit,” he said. “But I think it’s a mistake to cling to a profession because you think it defines you. You assume that what makes you special, what makes you interesting, is your work as a photographer. I don’t. You were special first. The camera only added to the picture.”

He was so wise, but he’d been wrong. He had been talking about himself, even if he didn’t realize it. Anna walked back in her studio and stared down at her best pictures. She had always defined herself through them. It was far easier.

Depressed, she walked back into the kitchen and got her keys and headed out to the Subaru. The next hour she spent at the ancient Piggly Wiggly downtown. When her groceries were in the trunk, she started up her car and pulled away from the curb, not at all anxious to get back home to the pictures on her desk. To avoid them, she turned onto Aiken Avenue at the fire hall and drove past the telephone company and the water tower. A few minutes later she stopped in the unlikeliest place of all for her—Harriet Setzler’s house.

Harriet’s eyebrows kissed her hairline when she saw who was standing on the other side of her door. Anna, unsure, mouthed something about the azaleas around the McCloskey house dying, how Stoney said the other woman would know how to save them. Harriet gazed at Anna for a second. So, Mrs. High-and-Mighty wasn’t too proud to come begging when she needed something, huh? Well, no one would ever say Harriet Youmans Setzler was rude to a neighbor. No matter who the neighbor was.

Presently Harriet took Anna on a tour of her garden and pointed out at great length how well her azaleas were doing. Anna nodded her head in agreement; the yard was spectacular. “Your flowers really are wonderful,” Anna said. “I don’t understand gardening, I guess. We never had to do any in Washington. What I mean is, you can work so hard on it and yet if it doesn’t rain or gets too hot, it’ll all die anyway. No matter what you do.”

The older woman looked at Anna as though at a child who had yet to learn self-discipline. “You must be patient, diligent. I enjoy working out here. I’m more at home in my yard than anywhere else,” she said, glancing up at her house. “I like to see beautiful things grow up around me. You might say”—she paused for a second—“it’s an art. You put everything in the right place and tend it carefully. My garden belongs to me. When I got married, there was nothing here but grass. Now there’s this. And I created it all myself.” Harriet reached down and broke a dead stem off a gardenia bush. “We do need rain though.” Then, “I had to start from scratch twice.”

Anna was staring at the old lady. Behind her was a huge live oak. Impulsively Anna asked, “Mrs. Setzler, could I take your picture sometime?”

“My picture?”

“Yes. I’m a photographer, you know. I’d really like to sometime, out here, with the live oak behind you just like this.”

“Oh I don’t know.” Harriet was actually thinking which dress and hat to wear. “Maybe, if it means that much to you.”

Anna smiled. “I’ll call you and bring my camera over one day.” She had almost forgotten the azaleas now. “What was it you were saying about having to start your garden twice?”

“They ruined it,” Harriet exclaimed sharply. “Stoney never told you about the trouble we had with the Nigras? Oh I guess he wasn’t here then but I thought certain he knew about it.”

Can I photograph that too? Anna wondered. Can I get her pronunciation of that word on film? Nigra? She voiced Stoney’s wisdom on the subject absently: “There wasn’t any racial trouble in Essex, I thought.”

“That’s not so.” The old lady put her hands on her hips. “We had our share of bad days for a while. When those outside people came in and stirred everybody up. About changing the schools over. I’ve always gotten along with every color in this town but I’m not one to pretend even now: I was against it from the beginning. Anyway, one night a group of them got liquored up and came in my yard and hacked off every shrub, every flower, every bush.” Harriet trembled, remembering. “Most of the small plants died; even those that lived didn’t bloom for two or three years afterward.”

That hardly sounded like racial trouble to Anna. Maybe an extreme response to Harriet Setzler’s basic personality, but not much more. “You didn’t have real riots here?”

“No, nothing like that. Course there’s always been that question about ole Monkey. Black man, worked for me a long time. Those outside people got hold of him and got him all steamed up and the coloreds went along with it, listened to him, made him their leader in a way. Then one day Monkey just up and disappeared. Nobody ever saw him again, nobody has since. After he was gone, things settled down; the coloreds went about their business like before. He was the starch in their sheets.”

“Are you implying what I think?” Anna’s eyes were wide. “That someone got rid of him?”

“All I know is we never saw Monkey again. Last time anyone ever saw him, he was arguing with a group of white men downtown about being served in the diner. Next day he was gone.” Harriet’s voice quavered slightly. “He never said goodbye to his family and his things were still in his house.”

“You think he was killed?”

Despite Anna’s urging, Harriet would say no more. She took Anna around to the back of her house, to the toolshed where she kept the fertilizer she put on her azaleas, a concoction she mixed up herself. She gave Anna some of it in a plastic garbage bag. “Try that,” she said. “It oughta perk them up, even in this heat.” Anna, holding the pungent bag at arm’s length, thanked the old lady and they walked back around to her car.

“I better get my groceries home before everything spoils,” Anna said then. She thanked Harriet again and got in her car. The older woman walked up her steps slowly and went over to sit in her porch swing. As Anna started her car, Harriet was scanning her yard protectively and against the backdrop of the bountiful, fecund property, she looked for a moment like a feudal lord, powerful and secure. Anna focused on the other woman, using her eye as lens. But as she drove away, she took the lens off. Her naked eye looked back and caught a glimpse of old eyes. Old eyes unveiled. Old eyes looking down the street, wondering what would disappear next. And for just an instant—despite herself—Anna felt for the lonely despot bereft of all her retainers.

It was the first day of June and that night was hot, thick, and heavy; smells and sensation hung long and low like gorilla arms. The groceries were safely consigned to the pantry and Anna and Stoney sat at the trestle table in their kitchen. She picked at her salad and from time to time smoothed a hand across the polyurethaned beech tabletop; it was as cool and slick to the touch as chilled apple skin. The back door was open as well as the windows, and outside the coming night descended on the yard with clouds of violet steam. Anna yearned to go over and stand at the back door alone, to give in to that dark warm air rather than fight it, to let it take her. Every so often Stoney said something about the music wafting into the kitchen from the living room stereo. Anna agreed vaguely to whatever he said, without hearing, and watched him. He wore a yellow chambray shirt, bright and loose, tucked into white jeans and he was already tan; his arms below his rolled shirtsleeves were the color of honey and she liked their strength, how the thick muscles rode the length of his forearm.

He moved his arm suddenly and grinned and beat out the rhythm from the other room on the table. Music had always been a ballast in their relationship and tonight Stoney had selected a recording of Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven playing the blues in the late twenties, without orchestration, just the naked lowdown exhilaration of the jazz instruments. “It’s hard to believe,” Stoney said suddenly, “that the blues consisted of only three chords in a twelve-measure frame—God, what they did with those three chords.” He stopped and listened to the New Orleans-inspired trumpet solo. The raw and searing sound took flight again until they both sat still listening, held captive in its emotional power, dinner all but forgotten.

Our relationship is like music, Anna thought. It sounds so good but the chords beneath the harmonic structure may be flawed after all. She was about to suggest as much when Stoney picked up his glass of wine and said, “Let’s go listen in the living room.” He got up and turned away, beating out the rhythm against his leg with his hand.

By the time Anna joined him, he had changed the record, was sitting on the floor beside the stereo reading the back of an album cover. She was about to say something again, about what she was feeling about them, when he laid the album cover down and said, “I keep thinking about the other day, about Leonard Hansen and Heyward Rutherford both showing up to meet Lou Brockhurst. I know it doesn’t add up, but I still think Leonard may have killed Sarah. Despite what he said to me on the street—the guy’s so damn brazen.”

Sitting on the floor, leaning back against the sofa, Anna wanted to scream. She was sick of Sarah Roth’s murder, sick of the town of Essex, sick of Stoney’s incessant obsession about both, sick of all of it, sick of being here, of feeling so …

“It’s just a matter of proving it,” Stoney was saying.

She wondered if he knew why she’d put the Indian rug beneath them in this exact spot, whether he could smell the gardenias blooming across the street, why he needed music and murder to express his emotions.

“But why do you have to prove it? That SLED agent is here, can’t you just leave it up to him?”

He gazed at her over the rim of his wineglass. “This time, Anna, I have to do something—instead of just letting things happen.” He thought for a moment about what his father once said to him: You just coast along, son, and you are never going to have much of a life if you keep it up. The argument, that sleeting winter day in Virginia, had been about Stoney’s college plans: the boy wanted to go to a jock university and major in physical education, become a coach or trainer or sportswriter now that professional baseball was out. The father wanted the child to take life more seriously: a man couldn’t play games for a living. He also wanted his son close to home where he could keep an eye on him. And Stoney loved his father, so his father won.

“Stoney, Sarah Roth’s murder really has nothing to do with you.” Anna’s voice was tired. Would he talk so eagerly about the things that did have to do with him, with them?

The music ended and without it the room lost altitude like a damaged plane. Anna knew she should stop but she went on anyway, “Isn’t Leonard Hansen just a scapegoat? Someone you can blame for the fact Essex really isn’t the paradise you remember?”

He glared at her. “I need more wine.” He got up and walked out of the room.

Anna followed him. He was at the counter pouring more wine in his glass. Couldn’t he sense she needed him to be with her tonight, not trying to repair this damn town? “You’re all wrong about Essex, you always have been. Did you know that during the sixties a black man working for desegregation here was probably murdered? A man they called Monkey!”

Stoney flinched. He jerked around. “What?”

“Harriet Setzler more or less said a black man was killed here during the Civil Rights movement.”

Stoney’s lips trembled and his voice was flat, came out one word at a time. “Monkey was killed?”

“The last time the guy was ever seen, he was arguing with some white men, over whether he could be served in that horrible diner downtown. You always said there was no racial trouble here and I guess there wasn’t—not after they murdered the first black man with guts enough to speak up.”

Stoney grabbed Anna by the shoulders. “Why are you doing this?” He released her abruptly, turned away, and leaned over the kitchen counter. “My God. No wonder no one talks about him anymore.”

“I didn’t know you knew him.” Anna stared at Stoney, then her eyes narrowed. “Oh no—he was the baseball guy? I didn’t realize.”

Stoney whipped back around. “Would it have made any difference?” He stared at Anna with black ice in his eyes. “Since when did you ever yield your fucking principles for the sake of not hurting someone?”

He turned and slammed out the back door. She went after him as far as the storm door, leaned against it, and watched him stalk down the sidewalk toward the pond. Spanish moss loomed low over his head at the end of the concrete path and he reached out and angrily pushed it aside, yanked a strand of it loose, and threw it on the ground behind him. Then Anna couldn’t see him anymore, he disappeared among the live oaks. Had she finally pushed him away for good?

The tears were hot on her face. When had she realized theirs wasn’t the perfect marriage, when had she drawn back—literally, physically—almost as if to say, well, this can’t possibly be my fault? The alternative, the truth, had been too painful. Admit that intellectual compatibility had failed them? Acknowledge that she had only trusted him with the safe stuff: her ideas and opinions. Never with her weaknesses, her frailties, her deepest fears.

Abruptly she remembered once when they were making love, years and years ago. They had spent the evening with friends and after the other couple had left, she and Stoney stayed up until two in the morning arguing in good humor about abstract expressionism. Then they fell into bed and made love as they usually did in those days, very simply, some foreplay, missionary or her on top, mutual orgasm or close, sleep. That night, however, she lay awake a long time afterward. All that intellect, the sex, their obvious love for each other, and still something was missing. She yearned to roll over against him and tell him how she sometimes worried she preferred being on top too much, her fear that she needed to be in control of sex to enjoy it, that she could relax only in a position Rand Ayres had never used. She was neurotic, yes? She ached to have Stoney reassure her—as she felt certain he would—that she wasn’t sick, that she didn’t need to emasculate men, that sometimes the apparatus worked better one way than another, and why worry about such a good thing anyway? She could tell him so much, but she could not tell him this. And this was far more important.

They did not talk about Essex any more that night. Rather, Stoney stayed outside until long after Anna went upstairs, alone, to bed.