Eleven

When anna started packing for her trip to Savannah, she had no idea she was embarking on a journey of seduction. She moved back and forth from the bedroom closet to the soft-sided nylon suitcase spread open on the bed like an unmade sandwich, absently stuffing a pair of jeans and extra rolls of film in its deep pockets. She crossed to the oak dresser and pulled open a bottom drawer and withdrew a tank top and clean underwear; then she went back to the closet and glanced inside at the hanging rows of clothes, her eyes fingering each item tentatively. Anna never felt secure when packing for a trip; she was always sure she would leave behind the one thing she would need most. About to pull the folding closet door shut, she abruptly noticed a black lace gown hanging at the very back, behind the bulk of the clothes, right next to the new silk gown Stoney had given her for their anniversary. He had also given her the black nightgown, on their second anniversary. She had kept it all this time, although she rarely wore it now. Black lace had not solved their problems. But she took the nightgown out of the closet and put it in her suitcase. What the hell, she might as well wear it sometime.

She was still packing when the doorbell rang. Half-asleep in the kitchen, Silas growled and Anna walked over to the bedroom window and peered out at the street. No car. In a moment she went out in the hall and down the stairs and opened the door.

Marian Davis stood on the other side of the storm door. “Hi,” the black woman said. “You busy?”

Anna shook her head. “Not really. Packing. You know, to go to Savannah. I shot those Daufuskie pictures last week. My meeting at the ad agency is so late this afternoon I’m staying overnight.”

Marian nodded as Anna waved her inside and asked what she had been doing all week.

“Not much.” Anna was leading the way to the kitchen when Marian stopped suddenly. “Anna, can I talk to you?”

The other woman turned around. “Sure. What’s up?”

Marian paced into the living room with Anna following. “It’s about that day we went to see Maum Chrish,” Marian said. Her voice wavered and she stopped and took a deep breath. “I discovered something out there and I’ve got to tell somebody.” She gazed down at the carpet beneath her feet. “Most people will think I’m crazy.”

Anna crossed and laid her hand on Marian’s arm. “What’s going on?”

“You know I came back to Essex to look for my mother?” When Anna nodded, Marian added, “I think I’ve found her.”

Anna’s eyes widened. “She’s come back?”

“She’s been back. God knows how long.”

Anna frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“She’s been here all the time.” Marian sat down on the sofa and told Anna about the granite amulet she had once given her mother. Anna sat down too, listened quietly.

“Suddenly I remember so many things I’d practically forgotten—how superstitious she was, how esoteric and mystical, how tall. I was so busy turning my back on everything I didn’t see what was sitting right in front of me.”

Anna stared. “You’re losing me.”

“It’s her. Maum Chrish.”

“Maum Chrish?” Anna said slowly.

Marian held out her hands. “Don’t you see? She’s my mother.”

“What?”

Suddenly Marian smiled, clapped her hands together. “Now that I’ve said it out loud, to someone else, it’s so real. I’ve found her.”

Anna started to raise several disturbing doubts but then Marian ran on again, her voice high and excited, “I know it sounds crazy. How could I have been here for five years and not found her before, just ten miles down the road? How come nobody else knew, and if they did know, why didn’t they tell me? I thought about all that, I’ve thought about nothing else all week. It’s incredible, but it’s got to be true. I’ve been here all this time but I don’t think I ever laid eyes on her until Sarah’s funeral. Very few people in town ever see her, she keeps to herself so much. It’s been decades since she left. She looks different now, just like I do. I don’t think she knows who I am at all. Or she would have come to me or maybe”—Marian stopped abruptly—“maybe she can’t, maybe she is out of touch with reality.” A pause. “Oh, Anna, don’t you see?” Marian reached over and took Anna’s hands. “I’ve found her.”

Despite her misgivings, Anna reached out and hugged Marian. “Have you told anybody else?”

“No. Not even Harriet. I wanted to tell you first. If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t even know. If you hadn’t kept asking me about her. If I hadn’t gone with you that day.”

“What will you do now?”

“I’m going to tell her who I am,” Marian said, getting up. “I haven’t been able to think clearly all week. But that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to tell her. Today.”

Before Anna could say a word, Marian was in the hall, heading toward the front door. Anna followed her, called out cautiously, “Be careful.”

Marian stopped and looked Anna squarely in the face. “You can’t believe she’s connected to Sarah’s murder?”

“No.” Anna swallowed. “What I mean is, she may not recognize you. She may not want to be found.”

Marian shook her head. “I know. I’ve thought about that too. But I’ve got to tell her. No matter what happens, I’ve got to tell her I know who she is.”

Five hours later and seventy-five miles away, Anna headed for the Savannah riverfront, and her room at the Hyatt, as late afternoon settled over the old Georgia city. She crossed to Lafayette Square and continued on Oglethorpe Avenue near Colonial Park Cemetery. The burial ground for Georgia’s Jewish colonists made her think about Sarah Roth, a woman she’d hardly known but whose death was like the circles Stoney made skimming stones on the McCloskey pond. Wider and wider those circles grew, changing the surface of the water until the reflection of the live oaks churned and scattered—reforming later, albeit altered.

Ahead lay River Street in its cobbled expanse of gentrified restoration, a village of shops and bars and restaurants housed in restored cotton warehouses fronting the Savannah River. She padded along Factor’s Walk, the iron maze of suspended stairs and walkways once trod by harried men bidding on cotton; then she climbed down the steep stone steps, worn slick in the middle, that led from Bay Street to the river. River Street itself, with its painted tavern signs jutting out above sidewalks paved with oyster shell tabby, was vividly alive this late afternoon with the sounds of shuffling shoppers and late lunchers or early drinkers. A mammoth ocean barge flying the Australian flag was making its way through the narrow channel fronting the street; beside it, a small red steam train whooshed down its tracks in the middle of the pedestrian street, carrying tourists from one end to the other. Anna usually enjoyed this carnival atmosphere but today it had little effect on her. She was too irritated about her meeting. Thinking of it, bristling, she walked all the way to the end of River Street. There she sat on a bench and snapped her portfolio open and thumbed through the glossy prints of Daufuskie Island. She thought these were perhaps the best photographs she had ever taken.

The voice of the ad agency president rang in her ears: “I’m not saying these aren’t good, Anna. They are. But they’re not right for the brochure. They aren’t what we discussed six months ago when you asked for the assignment.” The man in the pinpoint shirt regarded her as he might a confused child, then picked up one of the contact sheets. “I can’t put my finger on it exactly. They’re too … emotional, sentimental, something. They lack intellectual distance.” The man hesitated again, still staring at the contact sheets. “There’s also an exotic, almost erotic, quality here that I’ve never noticed in your work before. Like you didn’t have control over your material.” He turned and winked at Anna. “What were you thinking about out there? Not that I don’t find it personally appealing, you understand. But our client’s market is Yuppie families. Those condos weren’t meant to be love nests.”

Anna stared at the glossies again. There was something sensual in these pictures. Despite the commercial nature of the assignment, she’d deliberately emphasized the remoteness of the island, its primitive wildness. These photos were cousin to those she shot that day in the swamps with Marian. Frenzied pictures. Landscapes that were violent outbursts. As though she’d bypassed isolated light in favor of exposing its conjunction with matter. Sentimental? Who the hell did he think he was?

She put the photographs back in her portfolio and snapped the case shut. Then she barreled back down River Street so fast that she almost collided with a teenage boy in baggy jams. Next she passed an old man with a three-day-old beard, a suitcase in one hand and a carved walking cane in the other; he wore a T-shirt which read I CAME, I DRANK, I OFFENDED. At the first outdoor café on the street, Anna sat down under a multicolored umbrella and ordered a glass of chardonnay. Of course, if she wanted to make a living taking pictures, she couldn’t afford to screw up big-ticket assignments. When her wine arrived, she turned to stare out at the river. Wavy sunlight lay across its surface like a gold racing stripe painted by a drunkard. Just across from Anna’s café was a small concrete plaza built out over the river. Several tourists lolled comfortably on benches watching ships come in and out of the harbor. One man had his arms crossed and his loafered feet stuck out in front of him like long stickpins. He was so attractive she stared. Corporate type, a little roguish with long curly black hair, some Italian in there somewhere, Brooks Brothers suit worn with crafted carelessness, silk tie loose, black eyes fastened directly on her.

She looked away. Glancing in the other direction, she studied the eighteenth-century wooden ship which had been converted into a floating restaurant, watched it rock back and forth. The wine, now her second glass, made her feel equally afloat. She uncrossed her legs, lifted her tie-dyed silk skirt slightly to feel the breeze, and signaled the waitress for another glass of wine. The heat and wine and frustration of her meeting crowded in behind her eyes and she leaned back in her chair, letting Savannah’s languid slowness wiggle up between her sandaled toes like a fever, spreading itself along her calves and thighs.

“Want company?”

Brooks Brothers stood at full tilt, over six feet as lithe and winsome as a ballet dancer. He pulled out the chair opposite Anna and slid into it, his movements consistently graceful. He introduced himself, then said, “It’s too nice a day to drink alone.”

Anna smiled. He was incredibly beautiful, almost feminine. Gay? Even his eyelashes were long and silky. They talked for a few minutes about the continuing restoration of River Street; by tacit nonverbal agreement they didn’t exchange backgrounds or vital statistics, almost as though they knew this was a one-reel movie. Like an adolescent on her first date, Anna flushed with the novelty of being alone with a strange man and suddenly remembered what a friend in D.C. had once said—“The best sex in the world is with a stranger.” Anna had thought such a claim perfectly ridiculous, having slept with a few strangers in college. But now she wondered.

“The renovation’s really coming along,” he said, leaning over the table toward her. “I live right up there.” He pointed above them, to the right. “They’re converting the upper stories into lofts. Finally. Gives you a terrific view of the river and the marshes.”

The musk of the river water combined with his aftershave and she breathed in both. A part of her still loved drama and mystery and men who embodied them. The stranger watched Anna intently and she knew that he was trying to decide when—and how.

“Another glass of wine? Upstairs?”

She looked at him for a long time and then, without thinking about it, she was walking down River Street beside him. They stopped at a building two blocks away, beside a service elevator marked RESIDENTS ONLY. His loft was a long open room with exposed brick walls and a stark white ceiling above heart pine flooring recently refinished. A brass and glass table with four cane chairs sat in the front bay window that overlooked Bay Street, while a papazan sofa surrounded by large throw pillows sat atop an Oriental carpet in the center of the room. At the other end, beneath the open windows that admitted the setting sun and the sounds of the river, was a king-sized brass bed. No kitchen at all.

He was behind her when he closed the door. “I wanted you the minute I saw you,” he said quietly over her shoulder.

She turned around and looked at him. Where did men get such sexual confidence with women they didn’t even know? She couldn’t imagine herself saying anything like that to Stoney, to anyone. Even when it was true.

“Would you like more wine?”

“No.” The only thing she wanted was for him to take his clothes off.

Obligingly, he moved toward her, smiling confidently. He did not kiss her, did not reach for the buttons on the front of her blouse. Instead, staring her in the eyes, he just leaned down and raised her skirt with practiced ease and slipped his hand beneath it.

All the way out to Maum Chrish’s cabin, Marian thought about Anna. Inadvertently, Anna really was responsible for her finding her mother. What could she do for Anna? What could she do to make Anna feel more at home in Essex? Then, as the woods thickened around her car, Marian thought only of her mother.

What would she say to her? How should she put it?

Marian parked her car and plunged into the woods, too excited to be nervous about the perennially dark interior. It was hot and the dead brush under her feet crackled from the lack of rain, as she passed several cypress trees and a row of live oaks. She thought for a moment about the tree spirits of the voudouists, which she had always dismissed as unenlightened. Trees were just trees, products of the nutrients in the soil from which they sprang. The same soil into which dead bodies were placed. Briefly Marian remembered her mother saying she wanted to be buried in a pine box when she died—and especially not in a concrete vault underground like Mr. William. Abruptly Marian stared at a live oak in front of her. The earth absorbed nutrients from everything placed in it. Bodies decayed and became a nutrient, helping to produce new trees. A scientific fact. Thus, to the voudouist the spirit of the dead resided in the tree their body nourished. Lonnie had feared being trapped in a metal casket or concrete vault, her spirit unable to get out. Who was to say this wasn’t as valid as Christians who were buried facing East in order to see their Maker on Judgment Day?

When Marian reached the clearing, Maum Chrish was standing at the fire in front of her house, wearing a white caftan with a white agouéssan scarf draped across it. Marian thought the older woman looked as though she were waiting.

For a moment they stared at one another, neither woman saying anything. Finally Marian approached the larger woman and said, “I need to talk to you. I know who you are now.”

“You are the one who’s been sent.”

The voice was not familiar to Marian but she could scarcely recall her mother’s voice anymore; this, however, was the most mellifluous sound she’d ever heard issue from inside anyone.

“I’m Alma.”

Maum Chrish did not say anything, just looked at Marian as though memorizing her.

“Don’t you recognize me? Don’t you know me? Alma. Your daughter.”

“You are the one who’s come.”

Marian’s eyes filled with tears. “Please,” she cried. “You must remember me. You have to.” She stared at the ground for a second, then raised her head. “The rock. You have a rock. With a cross on it. I gave it to you. I found it in the yard. In town. Remember?”

When Maum Chrish did not respond, Marian whirled around and ran toward the house. She took the steps two at a time, burst into the cabin, and scrambled into the bedroom. She shook the Bible and the rock on its string fell out and hit the floor. A small shard of granite broke off on impact but Marian didn’t stop to pick up the extra piece; instead, she careened through the house and back down the steps. She held the broken stone in front of Maum Chrish. “I gave you this. You said it was your good luck rock.” Marian held the string wide and slipped the amulet over the older woman’s neck.

Maum Chrish stood very tall and crossed herself on the forehead, then crossed herself over her breast. Her hand made a cross on her left shoulder. She paused for a moment, then she cried “Hévio-Zo,” joyfully, crossing herself on her right shoulder. She stepped back and prayed fervently and Marian was suddenly sure the other woman prayed for someone’s gross bon ange, the part of the soul irrevocably lost at death. Mesmerized, Marian watched and tried to understand. Then Maum Chrish walked over and touched Marian’s forehead and sang aloud:

Ma’p di ou bonjou,

Papa Legba Ati Bon Katarouleau

ma’p di ou bonjou

Papa Loko Ati Dan Poun’goueh Ibo Loko

ma’p di ou bonjou,

Papa Danbhalah Wédo.

Maum Chrish stopped and took off her agouéssan scarf and draped it across Marian’s chest and right shoulder, knotting it at the opposite hip. And Marian realized the older woman was singing the voudou initiation ceremony.

Marian became a child again. Maum Chrish led her inside the cabin and around the room, speaking to her in whispers as they passed each symbol on the walls of the house. Together the two of them stood in front of the poteau-mitan, as Maum Chrish talked and Marian listened. From time to time Maum Chrish sprinkled water on the center post and once she left some rice at the crossroads of the vévé drawn in front of it. All the while the younger woman felt as though she moved in a dream, a somnambulant consciousness she had known only a few times in her life—during sex sometimes, when communication was so entirely physical and telepathic that hours were crammed into minutes and minutes loomed longer than years. Maum Chrish held Marian’s hand and Marian was content with that; in the soothing hypnotism of the other woman’s voice she didn’t demand the answers she needed—why did you leave me, why are you living like this, why haven’t you tried to find me, why does no one know who you are. Rather, Marian merely received what she was given, became a vessel of transfer.

Night had overtaken the swamps but Marian wasn’t afraid: if anything, she felt inordinately peaceful as Maum Chrish led her outside again, back beside the fire. The older woman left her beside the fire and went to the edge of the river and leaned over the spot where Seth fished and she cupped her hands to capture river water. “Manman Bagaille-là. The water to Ilé in Africa,” she said slowly, her back to Marian. “Djo-là-passée.” Marian knew the water had been passed through. Maum Chrish turned around and crossed to the other woman, put her hands out, and framed Marian’s face with them as the river water dripped down the younger woman’s cheeks. An abrupt breeze blew between them; it crossed Marian’s visage with force, migrated from the house to the river to the giant woman to Marian’s forehead, an electric charge that made her flesh quiver. She stiffened, almost cried out. Finally she fell to her knees, covered her head with her hands to protect herself from both the power and the responsibility. She felt the current move through her until she jerked and cried out again, her hands on Maum Chrish’s feet as the other willed the power complete, forced it into Marian’s sacred regions, until it penetrated her cerebellum and took its place inside her consciousness.

In a moment Marian stood up again, shaky, disoriented. She focused her eyes several times, then she picked up a stick and walked beyond the fire and drew another symbolic vèvè in the loose dirt. Inside her hand another hand moved and when the drawing was completed, she stared down at the vèvè for Maum Chrish. Within it was a smaller design, derived from the larger but clearly distinct, and Marian knew—instantly—that it belonged to her. Her birthright and her inheritance.

It was almost dark by the time Lou Brockhurst left the Ashton County Law Enforcement Center. He had been there most of the afternoon—arguing the greater part of it. Shortly after lunch, when he got back from checking out Leonard Hansen’s alibi for the night Sarah Rothenbarger was killed, he had questioned J. T. Turner again—this time with the man’s court-appointed attorney present. Ben Estes, who was so fresh out of law school his diploma probably wasn’t framed yet, had obviously instructed his client not to open his mouth.

“Look, Turner, you’ve been caught ripping off people before. My guess is that’s your career goal. You any good at it or do you always screw up and get caught?”

Nothing. The chubby little greaser didn’t even look angry.

They sat in the same examination room, a windowless box, and the stench of the incarcerated man reminded Brockhurst of a drug case he’d once worked, dopers who’d lived in an abandoned farmhouse and didn’t bathe for weeks or wash any clothes or even empty their garbage. Turner smelled just like that, a combination of filth and sweat so pungent it was worse than a day-old corpse. Brockhurst got up from the table and walked around behind it to clear his head and olfactory passages, wondering what the wet-behind-the-ears lawyer thought about his client’s hygiene.

“You’ve admitted being in Essex before Sarah Rothenbarger was killed and—”

“Mr. Turner didn’t quite understand when you asked him about that,” the young attorney interposed. “He thought you were referring to the night of the murder. To me, quite honestly, your question almost sounded like entrapment.”

Brockhurst smiled. “Mr. Turner didn’t understand then, and now he’s gone completely deaf and dumb. That the size of it?”

“He has explained his whereabouts the night of the murder and he’s cooperated with the authorities on every count. You have no justification for holding him any longer.”

The kid was right but Brockhurst ignored that fact for the moment. “But can Mr. Turner deliver anyone who can verify what time he left Essex that night or where he spent the remainder of that evening?” Brockhurst sat back down at the table. “Mr. Turner is a man with a record who happened to be in the right place at the right time and can’t prove what he was doing there.”

Turner shot Brockhurst a derisive look. Brockhurst saw it and stared back. “Easy to kill an old lady, I guess, hefty guy like you.”

Turner opened his mouth but Ben Estes’ hand on his arm stopped him. “Don’t answer that.” The attorney gazed at Brockhurst. “You’re not going to get anywhere by badgering him.”

And in the end Brockhurst didn’t. Later Turner was released and Brockhurst watched him shuffle out of the lockup. When the suspect stepped outside and started down the road toward Ashboro, the detective moved to a window and continued to stare at him. Watching to see how Turner acted, what he did, upon being released. But the obese man did nothing unusual, so Brockhurst left his window perch and went into the file room to again study the post-mortem report on the dead woman, along with the initial statements given by Stoney McFarland and Ed Hammond. There had to be something everyone was overlooking. Something that would make the difference between seeing this case from the outside, as a detective, and seeing it from the inside, from the vantage point of the killer. Think like him, find him.

He sat down and studied the reports for another hour, chewing gum to keep from nervously biting his lips. After a while he looked up and rubbed his eyes, alone in the small room. He pushed the files on Sarah Rothenbarger away and thought about his interview that morning with Ricky Gibson, who ran a one-man auto repair garage in the small town of Belton some fifteen miles from Essex. White concrete building with two bays, odd parts of a Chevrolet engine spread all over the floor of one side like a jigsaw puzzle. Sixties Corvette parked outside, missing a door and fender, several VW bugs, and what looked like an old Army jeep.

Brockhurst found Ricky Gibson underneath the Corvette, in dark green workclothes smeared with oil and grease. The detective identified himself and saw the immediate antipathy in the other man’s eyes. A guy who didn’t like cops. “I wonder if you could tell me what you were doing on the night of April 12th.”

“How come you wanna know?”

“I’m checking the whereabouts of various people that night. Strictly routine. But one of them claims to have been with you.”

“Hansen, right? Yeah, he was here; he helps out once in a while for extra cash, good man with transmissions.”

“Was anyone else here?”

Ricky Gibson put down his wrench. “No. Why?”

“What time did you two finish that night, what time did Mr. Hansen leave?”

“About midnight, I reckon. We worked late. We put a new muffler on this baby.” Gibson indicated the Corvette.

Midnight, Brockhurst thought as he walked out of the law enforcement center. Sarah Rothenbarger was killed between eleven P.M. and one A.M. Around midnight Hansen was leaving Belton, presumably driving to the other side of Essex, where he lived. About midnight Turner was hitching a ride out of Essex and, failing to find one, walking toward Ashboro, finally stopping to sleep in an old barn. If Gibson was telling the truth, Hansen hardly had time to get to town and kill Sarah Rothenbarger before Stoney McFarland showed up. Turner, on the other hand, was already there at the right time.

Brockhurst got in the Chrysler and started back to Essex. He needed to question Maum Chrish again. Finally he turned on the radio to take his mind off the case. He fiddled with the dial and settled on a rock station. The DJ was talking about a “Blue Moon Party” along River Street in Savannah that night, how the second full moon in a month was so odd clairvoyants believed it portended change and upheaval. Brockhurst wondered, briefly, if he was going to need a clairvoyant to solve this case. He didn’t really believe in them.

He was tired by the time he reached the Essex Motel, which sat forlornly along Route 321 and featured a string of one-story stucco cabins painted a garish yellow. In the center of the wagon train of rooms was a small office with a neon sign blinking VACANCY in its plate glass front window. Brockhurst noticed that the elderly manager had closed up and gone to bed. He maneuvered his car around the cracked blue swimming pool whose slightly stagnant water completed the general aroma of neglect. Better days clearly weren’t expected here.

The only guest, Brockhurst climbed out of his car and headed for his room.

Anna did not drive back to Essex until the evening of the following day. She almost didn’t go home then. Had there been anywhere else she truly wanted to go, she’d have just started driving. But ironically, the person she most wanted to see right now was in Essex. Who was also the person she least wanted to see. Stoney. Which was why she spent the entire morning having breakfast and idly looking around the shops on River Street. Putting off what she simultaneously desired and dreaded.

Anna’s experience the night before had not exactly been a fait accompli. God, she couldn’t even do cheating right.

She had stopped her stranger while he was going down on her. She still couldn’t believe it. He was as seductive as a man who’d attended an exclusive finishing school for sex, the way he’d stop and raise his head to watch her face, to gauge what she felt, throwing his dark curls back carelessly as he watched her. There was no hesitancy in him, no awkwardness, no insecurity. He was born for what he was doing; he kept lifting her up to some high place (heaven?) and leaving her there so skillfully, just long enough for her to float back a little, so he could bring her back up again, make her go even higher than she’d believed possible. It should have been the experience of a lifetime, something to remember in odd moments, when making love to her husband or just feeling the sunlight on her face in a certain way or hearing the expression “Blue Moon.”

It would have been too—if she hadn’t stopped him so she wouldn’t come. Suddenly she did not want to give him this, did not want to share herself with him. He was so suave she felt manipulated. She didn’t want him to know what her face looked like. And so she suddenly pulled away, got up, and began getting dressed. At first her companion looked dazed, an erection the size of a submarine nestled between his legs. When she headed for the door, he began to call her names, all the coarse and vulgar epithets men have invented for women. Anna stood outside the door after she slammed it, leaning against it, listening to the curses. Hot tears ran down her face, not because of the derogatory names but because she knew she could never tell Stoney what she felt now. It called for an ancient word she would bear alone, something so unstylish people would laugh if she said it aloud—heartsick, maybe. She had broken something fragile inside which could never be fused into place again. Yet she had aborted the moment’s pleasure on purpose: in her way she had finally paid back Rand Ayres.

By the time Anna pulled up in front of the McCloskey house, she had choked back the tears. Past and present. Tiredly she climbed out of the Subaru, the smell of unrequited sex still on her somehow in spite of her shower that morning, and walked up the sidewalk. Then she noticed that all the downstairs lights were on. She dreaded seeing Stoney. Would he be able to tell? (And worse—was this legitimate cheating, given that she didn’t finish it?) At the back door Anna fumbled in her purse for the door key, gazed for a second at the pond and the live oaks. It had been so long since they’d sat out there, Stoney throwing stones in the water. Sarah Roth’s murder had unleashed a madness none of them were safe from. Anna found her key and pushed it in the lock and turned the doorknob. The kitchen was blazing; the lights over both the sink and the stove were on. She knelt down to pet Silas. “Hi, boy. You leave on all these lights?”

She walked into the room. Beside the stove sat a full pot of soup, cold and untouched. Next to the pot was a bowl and a spoon. She turned around, called toward the hallway, “Stoney?”

When he didn’t answer, she crossed to the hall and stared up the stairs. “Stoney, you home?”

No answer. Anna hurried up the staircase and checked all the rooms but there was no sign of him. Where would he be this time of night? She came back downstairs and recrossed to the kitchen to look for a note. There wasn’t anything on the counter or on the refrigerator door. Obviously he’d left in a hurry, without eating the soup he’d warmed up for dinner. Finally Anna put her portfolio in her office and turned off some of the downstairs lights and locked the back door. Upstairs, she filled the bathtub with hot water. Thinking of Blanche DuBois and her hot baths in the hot summer, Anna slipped off her wrinkled dress and sank gratefully into the steaming, sudsy water. She lay there for a moment, her head cradled by the white ceramic ledge. Then she looked for her washcloth and saw that she’d left it on the sink across the room. So she soaped up her hands and took her right leg in her hands and washed it, enjoying the satiny feel of her own skin in the water. She washed her left leg the same way, ran her soapy fingers across her abdomen and over her breasts.

A half hour later Anna stood up and dried herself off, rubbing the towel between her legs with a longing left unquenched by the bizarre events in Savannah. She walked into the bedroom and glanced at the clock. Where was he? In a moment she pulled on a short gown, the silky fabric soft against her skin, and climbed into bed. The bed felt immense and she moved to the center of it and tried to go to sleep.

The hum of the cicadas outside the window throbbed in her ears and soon she got up again, thinking she’d close the window and turn on the air conditioner. What would it cost to put central air in this rambling old house? She stood at the window and breathed in the dense scent of midsummer, loam and fertilizer and narcissus and new-mown grass and ripening tomatoes. She grew warm at the window and the gown clung to her, already damp. That strange blue moon was still above her, outlining the trees around the pond with phosphorous. The live oaks glowed electric, overcharged, their thick hard trunks disappearing inside the soft folds of their leaved branches, which trembled and shuddered in the warm slow-moving wind.

Technically maybe she hadn’t broken her marriage vows but it was a moot point; she knew she would never be the same again. Anna looked back out the window. This place, this damn place. South Carolina always felt like the Mideast looked: hot, recondite, as dangerous as a black hole.

And intensely sexual.

Before she and Stoney had moved here, things had made sense between them. They were evenly matched intellectual companions. Good friends. Now they couldn’t even talk. Now all she did was lie sweating in a stupor of caged lust. Anna turned around, looked at the clock again. Where on earth was he? She licked her lips. Tonight was beginning to remind her of the night Sarah Roth was killed.

She leaned out the window and breathed in the fragrant night air. Late summer roses were just opening up; soon the chrysanthemums would bloom, that last flower before winter. In the distance she heard thunder. Moving closer, it rolled across the sky and rattled the windowpanes. A flash of lightning, another crash of thunder, and she could hear Silas moving around downstairs as he usually did during a storm. More lightning, the wind pounded against the house. Maybe it would finally rain. She listened intently. But it stopped dead in a second. Another electrical storm, nothing more. Just like all the other nights.