"Turn out the light," she said.

He clicked off the lamp on the bedside table and the room dropped into darkness. She looked out the window and realized it was too late in the year for fireflies, that the red pinpoints of light in the pines were sparks tumbling out of the sky.

But it was not the threat of fire to her own house that made her heart stop. The narrow, grained face of Legion the overseer suddenly moved into her vision, no more than three feet on the other side of the glass. His eyes raked her nude body even as he was tipping his hat.

CHAPTER 6

The fire at the LaSalle home had started in the kitchen, probably by a dish towel that had been left near an open flame. The fire climbed up the wall and flattened on the ceiling, then spread through a hallway and was sucked by a draft up the staircase onto the second story. Mr. Julian had removed the phone from Mrs. LaSalle's bedroom long ago, after a judge in Opelousas and a U.S. attorney in Baton Rouge complained she was calling them in the middle of the night, claiming that Huey Long had been murdered by agents of Franklin Roosevelt.

The clerk from the plantation store was passing on the road when he saw the windows of the house fill with pink light. He was an excitable man, given to belief in demonic possession and the gift of tongues, and after the heat of the front doorknob seared his hand, he began shouting at the house and throwing dirt clods on the roof to alert those who might be sleeping upstairs.

He picked up a garden rake and broke the glass out of a living room window. The flames mushroomed up through the second and third stories like cold oxygen igniting in a chimney.

The store clerk and the black people from up the road tried to soak the roof with a lawn hose. They scooped dirt with their hands and threw it through the windows into the smoke and hand-carried water buckets from the bay but were finally driven back from the house by the heat radiating from the walls. They heard glass break in Mrs. LaSalle's bedroom and saw her hands on the iron grill-work, like the yellow talons of a bird extended through a cage. They never saw more of her physical person than her hands; the rest of her body disappeared in an envelope of flame.

An obese black woman grabbed her daughter and held her tightly against her stomach, smothering her daughter's head with her arms so she would not hear the sounds that came from Mrs. LaSalle's window.

But at Ladice Hulin's house, neither she nor Mr. Julian knew of these events. Legion waited outside for her and Mr. Julian to emerge. There was ash on his khaki clothes, a smear of soot on his cheek and one shirtsleeve.

"You were watching us through the window? You were spying on me?" Mr. Julian said incredulously.

"No, sir, I wouldn't say that. I come here to tell you somet'ing else. It's sad news, yeah. Miz LaSalle got burned up in a fire."

Legion turned his face away, but he watched Mr. Julian out of the corner of his eye to see the reaction his words would cause.

"What? What did you say?" Mr. Julian said. "Your home's gone, too. I hate to be the one to tell you, Mr. Julian."

Mr. Julian's face was bloodless, popping with sweat, even though the temperature was still dropping.

"We'll go back wit' you, Mr. Julian," Ladice said.

"I was the first one in her room. The deadbolt was locked from the outside. I took the key out and stuck it in the other side of the lock, so nobody ain't gonna get the wrong idea, no," Legion said.

"You did what? Say that again?" Mr. Julian said as though he could not sort through Legion's words.

"The key was almost melted. But I moved it to the other side of the lock, me. You ain't got to worry," Legion replied.

But Mr. Julian wasn't listening now. He walked to his car and started the engine and backed one tire into Ladice's garden, then drove down the road under an orange moon toward the smoke that rose from the ruins of his home.

Ladice looked up into Legion's face. He had removed his hat and was running a comb through his hair. His hair was black, like tar from a barrel, the vertical lines in his narrow face like those in a prune.

"You going in the field tomorrow, Ladice. It ain't gonna hep you to sass me about it, either," he said.

She started to speak, but he placed his thumb on her mouth.

“What did Legion do to her?" I asked Batist's sister.

She was a heavy woman, with a big head and wide shoulders and knees that looked like hubcaps. She sat in an overstuffed chair in a gloomy corner of her living room, her large hands squeezing each other in the cone of light from a floor lamp.

"Did Ladice have a child by Mr. Julian?" I asked.

"I ain't said that," she answered.

"Why won't you tell me the rest of the story? Mr. Julian and his wife are both dead," I said.

Batist's sister was silent a moment.

"He still out there. Maybe in St. Mary Parish. Maybe down by New Orleans. Some of the old people say he killed a man in Morgan City," she said.

"Who?" I said.

"Legion. He out there, in the dark. He don't like the sun. His face is pale, like it don't have no blood. I seen him once. It was Legion," she said.

She looked at the tops of her folded hands and would not raise her eyes to mine.

It was late when I got home and Bootsie was asleep. I ate a ham and onion sandwich in the kitchen, then brushed my teeth and lay down by her side and stared at the ceiling in the darkness. I could hear the cries of nutrias out in the swamp, an alligator rolling its tail in the flooded trees, the echo of distant thunder that gave no rain.

The moon was up and Bootsie's hair was the color of honey on the pillow. She was the only woman I had ever known who had a natural fragrance, like night-blooming gardenias. Her eyes opened and she smiled and turned on her side and put her arm across my chest, one knee over my leg. Her body had the curvature and undulations of a classical Greek sculpture, but her skin was always smooth and soft under my hand, virtually without a wrinkle, as though age had decided to pass her by.

"Anything wrong?" she said.

"No."

"You can't sleep?"

"I'm fine. I didn't mean to wake you."

She touched me under the sheet. "It's all right," she said.

I awoke at dawn and made coffee on the stove. The light was gray in the trees, the Spanish moss motionless in the silence.

"Did you ever hear of an overseer at Poinciana Island by the name of Legion?" I asked Bootsie.

"No, why?"

"When I was twelve, my brother, Jimmie, and I had a bad encounter with some low-rent people in City Park. A man opened a knife on us. One of the women with him called him Legion."

"Why do you ask about him now?"

"His name came up when I was checking out some background material on Tee Bobby. It may not be important."

"By the way, Perry LaSalle came by last night," she said.

"Perry is becoming a pain in the ass," I said.

"He told me you'd say that."

Before I went to the office I drove out to Ladice Hulin's house on Poinciana Island and asked her about the overseer named Legion and the death of Mrs. LaSalle in the fire.

"Mind your own bidness. No, I take that back. Get out of my life altogether," she said, and closed the door in my face.

The next day Perry was at my office door. Before he could speak, I said, "Why were you at my house the other night?"

"One of Barbara Shanahan's colleagues got drunk and shot off his mouth at the country club. Barbara and the D.A. think you're not a team player. I'm calling you as a witness for the defense, Dave. I thought I ought to warn you in advance," he replied.