This was almost too much for Charles. His parents had never allowed him to run indoors, lest he damage some old and valuable piece of china glass – Augusta had ridden a horse through the house.

He followed her up the grand staircase, and as they passed by the open doors along the hallway, she gave him a running commentary.

here were precious clocks in every room, all stopped at the same time, the hour of her father’s death.

Augusta said, somewhat disgusted, “The house is made of cypress. Termites cannot penetrate it. The walls will not fall down. These floors are made of heart pine, and there’s hardly a patch of wood rot. However, I am making some headway with the roof. It’s got some prominent holes that’ll let you see daylight. The poor bats, though. They don’t take too well to direct sun. Some of them are migrating to the lower floors.”

He peered into the last room before the next staircase. The carpet was spotted with dung. Bats had indeed taken up residence here. Against one wall was an elaborately carved canopy bed. He had only seen one like it at a New York auction house. Mosquito netting partially covered the bed in a wreckage of gauzy spiderwebs and woven rotted threads of cotton. A dead bat lay on the mattress, its molding body fusing with the material.

They continued up the stairs and into the attic, where he found more antiques serving as homes to spiders. At his feet lay a broken Federal bull’s-eye mirror.

“Wait here a minute,” said Augusta. “I’ll make sure they’ve all cleared out. There’s only been a handful of bat rabies cases in the past thirty years, but you never know.” She disappeared through a doorway, and the scent of something foul came wafting through the brief opening.

He turned to the only source of light and air. This was not the round window facing the town. This one afforded a view of the land at the back of the house. A pair of field glasses lay on the broad sill.

Looking down, in the hour of dusk, he could still make out what once had been a carefully planned maze and stepped terraces of lush vegetation. This was the good bone structure of a ruined garden. He could imagine it in bygone days when the shrubs had been carefully trimmed and the flowers confined to their beds. A flagstone path wound through the grounds, disappearing in places where it was overgrown with plants reverting to the wild, blooming in random bouquets of blue and red. More exotic flames of orange were -

Oh, but now two bright-colored blossoms took flight, and all the flowers called out to one another. Birds – the garden was alive with birds. In a chain reaction of motion, all the colors were rising from the foliage in a brilliant wave, fluttering on the air and singing songs.

He picked up the binoculars and trained them on the small pecan trees and shrubs. Here and there, he picked out the conical tops of bird feeders spread throughout the avian sanctuary.

This was no side effect of Augusta’s neglect; it was an act of creation.

She was back again, standing beside him, and the flowers continued to fly and sing.

“My compliments, Augusta. It’s the most beautiful garden I’ve ever seen.”

“Let me show you the view from the other side while we still got some light. Hold your nose when you pass through that door.”

He did as she suggested, but the stench of dung and urine was overwhelming, and his eyes stung. He could feel the crunch of bugs beneath the soles of his shoes, as she led him around the stalagmites of droppings with the beam of her flashlight.

Not all the bats had flown at sunset. A pair of tiny eyes gleamed with reflected light. He turned away quickly, not wanting to alarm the creature into sudden flight. When they had cleared the midsection of the attic and passed under an archway, a breeze of fresh air alleviated the smell. Light penetrated the roof through a gaping hole between the wooden ribs of the ceiling. Foliage had attached itself to sod trapped by the wind in the cross wood of exposed beams. Ironically, he recognized the encroaching plant as resurrection fern.

And now he noticed that another bat had been left behind. The animal was revolving in circles on the floor, trailing a torn wing in the dust.

“I wonder if that cat’s been up here.” Augusta looked down at the poor beast and shook her head. “Now that one – see the red metal on his leg? He was banded fifteen years ago. The government man wanted to mark a lot more of them that way, but he had clumsy hands and crippled as many bats as he did right, so I run him off the place. That bat is the old man of the colony.”

And now it was at the end of its life. The injury to its wing fit well with a cat’s claw. If the bat could not fly, it could not feed. “What’s the name of the bat?”

“Charles, if you ever hear me giving pet names to flying rodents, you can tell them it’s time to put the old woman away.”

“Sorry, I meant the species. Brown bat? Serotine?”

“The government man who checks the bands, he calls them big brown bats or sometimes Genus Eptesicus. I call them owl food.” The old woman was standing at another round window overlooking the town. A telescope stood on a tripod, its long barrel pointed down to the earth. A notebook lay open on the sill and bore a crude map recording the sites of nests.

This was what the bird in flight must see. The whole countryside was laid out before him. Augusta pointed to a Victorian house on the other side of the cemetery. A wide dirt-colored ribbon led away from the building, and he recognized it as the mystery road along Finger Bayou, the one with the blank sign.

“That’s Cass Shelley’s place.” She moved the telescope closer to the glass and focussed it. “Here, take a look.”

He put one eye to the lens. The Shelley house bore a recent coat of paint. The shrubs had been cut back, and all the flowers kept to the perimeters of rock gardens surrounding the trees in the front yard. There were no signs of neglect, and that was odd for a property in Augusta’s stewardship.

Beyond the boundary of wide Upland Bayou were the homes and shops of Dayborn. Augusta was pointing to the line of trees beyond the town square.

“Now you see that windbreak of trees? That’s the end of Dayborn’s proper limits and the beginning of Owltown. That’s where the New Church roadies live in their cracker box houses and mobile homes.”

He followed her pointing finger to a crescent of neon lights bounded on its far side by another bayou.

“Owltown never sleeps,” said Augusta. “Twenty-four hours a day, you can buy liquor and drugs. Gambling goes on till daybreak. That’s the Lauries’ work. Almost everyone in that place is related to the Lauries by blood or marriage. Don’t you go there after dark, unless you take a gun.”

“Why is it called Owltown?”

“Oh, it’s had that name forever. Up till thirty years ago, we used to have quite a population of rare owls on that plot of land. That was before the damn Lauries took over the habitat and cleared the horseshoe bend on the lower bayou to make a fairground. Damn waste.”

“I gather you dislike these people.”

“It wouldn’t bother me if the whole place burned to the ground. I don’t trust myself to go to Owltown with matches in my pocket.” She moved the telescope back to the side of the window. “Well, now you’ve seen it all.”

“Thank you for the tour.”

“My pleasure, Charles. Anything else I can do for you?”

“You can tell me how Cass Shelley died.”

She was genuinely surprised. “I thought Henry or Betty would’ve told you that by now.”

“I never thought to ask them. So, how did Mallory’s mother die?”

“I believe the attack was outside the house. That’s where Henry found Kathy’s dog. Poor beast was half dead. Cass’s bloody handprints were all over a good portion of one side of the house where she must have been driven back to the wall. The grass was covered with her blood, and they found two of her teeth there. And there were rocks scattered around – lots of rocks. They had bits of her skin and blood on them.”