ONE

Perhaps the murders were fated when I met Kris Ann, then moved with her here, to Alabama. The move was a change of plans. I’d meant us to live in Washington. We never did, and so three deaths began waiting in the ambush of time.

Seven years passed, and then Cade handed me the envelope. It seemed like nothing at all. I’d come from a Saturday partners’ meeting called to set new rates—nineteen southern Protestants and me at a long walnut table buffed so high I could see my face in it—trying to feel like one hundred eighty dollars an hour. It took some imagination. So when Cade caught me near the elevator and with a quick, chill glance at my blue jeans asked if I’d drop some papers with Lydia Cantwell, my only thought was to do that much for free.

Outside the morning was hazy from the smokestacks of our clients and the streets looked stale and a little hungover, like a room full of cigarette smoke after a long party. Behind my parking space the neon sign of a dingy department store murmured its fatigue in old-fashioned cursive letters. I tossed the envelope on the passenger seat and drove south with the top down through near-empty streets, then up and over a sudden barrier of green wooded hills until the city behind me dropped abruptly from sight.

Now the road curled downward past immense stone houses sheltered by pine and dogwood and magnolia. The air became clear, damp and heavy, and the feel and blueness of it merged with deep lawns and the bursts of pink and white to create that violence of beauty you can find only in the South, in April. Behind me Birmingham sprawled in a valley of heat and smoke: squat steel mills the corroded color of rust, concrete highways, low-slung warehouses, sinewy towers of glass and steel, sweltering streets. But the road ahead was shady and still. A lone black maid in stretch pants straggled by its side as though on a treadmill to eternity, her slow repeated movements speaking of boredom in the bone and brain, days endlessly the same. I passed her, turning down a road that traced the winding path of a valley in what had once been pine forest, the wind in my face.

There was nothing ahead but shadows. I took the curves fast—shifting and braking, accelerating and shifting—as a smooth radio voice from New York eased into a mass murder, the oil crisis, and a Gallup poll in which three out of four Americans thought things were getting worse. “Speaking last night in Atlanta,” he went on, “the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board warned that this country is threatened by permanent inflation which will change the lives of rich and poor alike.…” But there was nothing I could do about that, except not smoke my first cigarette. So I didn’t, and found myself at the Cantwells’.

Their drive began with a stand of oaks, continuing its gradual climb through magnolia and dogwood until it reached the crest of pines where the house loomed, a white brick monolith with gables and twenty rooms and the sense of weight that time brings. Seventy years before, Henry Cantwell’s grandfather had brooded on the site, then built: over time ivy had crept up the walls, hedges had grown, a formal garden had come to surround the slate patio in back, and, finally, Lydia Cantwell’s roses had lined the walk that led from the drive to the double door. I parked, taking the envelope, and followed it.

The grounds were shrouded in morning silence broken only by a few birdcalls and the rustling of pine boughs. The snarl of the buzzer when I pushed it sounded rude, and got no answer. But when I knocked, the door cracked open by itself.

I looked in, surprised, calling once. No one answered. I hesitated, then stepped inside.

The foyer faced a spiral staircase, with a sitting room to the left and the dining room opposite. Next to me was a low table. I placed the envelope there, turned to leave, stopped in the doorway, and then, turning back, picked it up again.

It was an innocuous manila, sealed only by two splayed metal fasteners that Cade’s secretary had put through the hole in its flap, then pressed down to each side. I pried the fasteners upright and opened the flap. Inside was a typed document of sixteen pages. I riffled it, then read again, this time carefully. When I had finished I checked for missing pages, found none, and reread the twelfth page, twice. Then I placed the papers back in the envelope and took it with me to the sitting room.

It was sparsely decorated, mainly from the past. On polished end tables were porcelain figurines—a sparrow, Marie Antoinette—that Lydia had collected. From above the fireplace stared an oil of her father, framed by candelabra and looking vaguely distressed, as if he smelled smoke. The built-in shelf next to that held portraits of more dead ancestors and a larger one of Henry Cantwell, gray hair neatly parted. The papers in the envelope reminded me that Jason’s picture had been removed. Then I noticed that Lydia’s was gone.

I called out.

No one answered. I walked past the fireplace through the open door to Henry’s library, filled with books: Lancelot by Walker Percy, some Aeschylus, much Faulkner and Camus, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and leaning next to that with a bookmark sticking from it, Crime and Punishment. Often I would find Henry in a cardigan sweater, amidst his volumes: the most reliable friends, he’d once remarked, full of consolation. But his half-glasses were on the shelf and his chair was empty. I returned to the sitting room, stopped, and listened.

I didn’t like finding the house unlocked, or its silence. Though in the seven years since, I’d been to the Cantwell’s perhaps a hundred times, I could still hear the sounds of our engagement party, when the house had been filled with people and laughter and the clink of a barman dropping ice in crystal. I’d begun awkwardly, conscious of Cade and worried that if I moved too quickly I’d slop champagne on the Oriental rugs. I had never met the Cantwells and, while Henry and Lydia were gracious, Jason watched me from one corner with a peculiar bright intensity, never coming forward. The chances of meeting a second northerner were nil and everyone else seemed to have money to burn, even Kris Ann’s florid uncle who had backed me to the fireplace denouncing the Berrigan brothers. Then Kris Ann appeared behind him in the crush. For an instant her look seemed probing and uncertain and then, knowing I saw her, she flashed me the dazzling, flirty, self-mocking smile that was an in-joke between us—her southern-girl smile, she called it—until it warmed the darkness of her eyes. I’d felt myself relax, and after that I remembered the moment precisely: her smile, the room, and the sounds of the party—so that now it seemed too quiet.

“Lydia?” I called, and then went back through the foyer to the staircase, glancing toward the dining room as I passed.

I stopped there.

Lydia Cantwell lay sprawled behind the dining room table. Her eyes bulged and her tongue protruded from a smear of lipstick. Her throat was circled with bruises.

It was a moment before I knew that I had crossed myself.

I went to her then, kneeling. Her wrist was stiff and cold to the touch. There was no pulse.

My limbs had gone numb and heavy. I stumbled back from her. Her terrycloth robe was pulled to mid-thigh and her legs seemed pitifully thin. Black hair straggled on the Persian rug, and I noticed, foolishly, that she had dyed the gray at her temples.

I felt a moment of awful tenderness, as if I should cover her legs. Instead I went to the kitchen and called the police. When I returned, my throat was parched and my mouth tasted bitter, like half-swallowed aspirin.

It was then I saw her picture.

It had been taken at a formal sitting and placed next to Henry’s in the other room. Now it sat on the dining room table. Someone had stabbed out the eyes. I rushed back to the kitchen and vomited.

I raised my head from the sink, breathed deeply, and went back to the dining room. The envelope lay where I’d dropped it, by Lydia’s hand. I picked it up and went outside. I didn’t look back at the woman, or her picture.

The porch was cool. Above the roses a hummingbird hovered in delicate suspension, a picture from a Chinese vase.

I walked to my car and slid the envelope under the seat.