He found his weapon shining through the tall grass twenty feet from the house where he had parked the car. He was wondering if the stains on the grass might not be chicken blood after all – or maybe it was Fred Laurie’s blood.

What the hell?

He watched the horse race around the paddock. Now the animal reared up on his hind legs and knocked the crossbar off the fence. Hooves crashed down on the fallen bar and splintered the wood. The birds had picked up a contagion of panic and the volume of birdsong was building.

When he turned around, he was staring at a single-shot derringer, and Augusta was right behind it with her finger on the trigger. He stood up slowly and holstered his gun. His eyes never strayed to the derringer as he said, almost casually, “You wouldn’t shoot me.”

“Oh, Tom. You know better than that,” she said sweetly. “Of course I would.” She grinned wide and evil. “Do you really want to spend all damn day at the hospital while they pick this slug out of you?”

The dark idea crossed his mind that she would shoot anyone who threatened an animal on her land. Might she have found Fred in the woods? If that was what she was covering up, he wasn’t sure he wanted to catch her before she had time to dispose of the evidence. As Augusta had pointed out, Fred’s wife probably needed a rest from the beatings. “I guess I don’t need to kill a cat today. But I do need to find Kathy, and real fast. If you get in my way, I’ll forget how long I’ve known you, old woman. I’m too close to let – ”

“It always comes back to Cass Shelley’s murder, doesn’t it?” She lowered the gun; the game was done, and she was not smiling anymore. “Revenge is a real sickness with you, Tom. This isn’t what your father had in mind for you. Sheriff of St. Jude Parish should have been your first political office, not your life.”

“Well just look at you, Augusta – the damn queen of revenge. It’s your whole reason for living.”

“Oh, but I do it so well – with gusto and style. I make it a fine art. With you, it’s just an ugly occupation. Now move off my land or I’ll let fly with a bullet.” She lowered the short barrel of the derringer to his kneecaps. “Think you can catch that little girl with one lame leg?”

He backed up and eased himself into the car. When the wheels were spinning in a wide grassy lake, she fired the gun into the trunk.

God damn it!

In his rearview mirror, he could see her reloading just as the wheels found traction on more solid ground. Instead of driving forward, like any man who truly wanted to live, he backed up the car until he was abreast of her, and then he leaned out the window.

“Augusta,” he said, touching the brim of his hat in salute. “Don’t ever change.”

Her laughter followed after him as the car rolled away.

Before he was close enough to read the chiseled legend, Charles recognized the face on the new tombstone in the cemetery. Babe’s photograph was encased in a cheap wooden frame fixed to the stone. This would be the smallest of graves, only a hole in the ground for the urn. No tomb for Babe Laurie, nothing so grand.

“So when will they inter the ashes?”

“He won’t be cremated till after the big party at the end of the week” said Henry, looking down on the rough work of a cut-rate craftsman. “It’s a poor thing, isn’t it? Malcolm spent a fortune renting a fancy glass show casket for the wake, and almost nothing on the marker. Babe would have hated this. When he was alive, he thought he was king of the world.”

Charles nodded. He had encountered such a man when he was the freak child at Harvard, eleven years old in his sophomore year. In the course of research for his behavioral science project, he had observed a patient in a local hospital. The old man was ravaged by syphilis and given to shouting, ‘King of the world am I!’ But he had walked in an unkingly way, graceless, ungainly, and sometimes stumbling.

The old man had demanded that young Charles bow and use the proper title whenever the boy addressed him. A doctor had been present and explained to Charles that it was a hospital rule never to yield to the whims of dementia. The boy had dutifully complied with the policy and refused the king his due. Toward the end of this study period, the child had even had the temerity to explain to the old man that this was for his own good.

The old man had disagreed, and a fit of temper had been followed by convulsions. Then the doctor had gently pushed Charles from the room and turned back to his patient, who was screaming and being tied down with restraints.

The following day, the boy had returned to the old man’s room, bearing flowers as a peace offering – bright blooms of every color, a veritable palette of apologies. But Charles found the room empty, the bed stripped of its sheets. The king of the world had died the previous evening.

The doctor and his nurse spent the next hour calming the hysterical little boy, trying to convince Charles that he had not killed the old man. Then, speaking to the brilliant child as equals, they had carefully explained the hell of the disease, the damage they could not reverse because treatment had come too late, and finally, the mercy of the old man’s death as a release from suffering. The tantrum and the convulsions, they said, were merely behaviors common to dementia paralytica.

Eleven-year-old Charles had responded with behaviors common to childhood. He had cried, thrown down his guilty flowers and run away.

Now Charles, the grown man, hunkered down by the tombstone to look at Babe’s portrait, and a young king of the world looked back at him. The symptoms the old man had endured might have been in this younger man’s future had he lived another fifteen or twenty years.

“Henry? Who do you think killed Babe Laurie?”

“I don’t know. Does it matter?”

Charles was about to speak when Henry signaled for silence. He could hear voices from the bridge over Upland Bayou, and Betty Hale’s was the loudest.

“Now stay together,” said Betty, shepherding her flock of ten guests across the bridge. One damn fool was veering off on the side road. “You don’t want to go in that direction, Mr. Porter. Three feet off the path and you’re into Finger Bayou.”

Mr. Porter was entranced by the worn wooden arrow pointing the way to the old Shelley place. Perhaps he took it for a traffic sign, for she could see he was longing to obey it despite the No Trespassing sign posted on a near tree.

“Is the bayou very deep, Mrs. Hale?”

“Well, no. But you could break your backside trying to get yourself out of there.” Yes, he would definitely crack his ass if he fell on his face.

“Now if you’ll all gather round, please.” Betty pointed up through a break in the trees. “That house is where the bats come from.” Cameras began to click photographs of the roof and its round window as souvenirs of last evening’s bat races.

“It’s more than a hundred and fifty years old,” said Betty. “It was built by the Trebec family. Miss Augusta is the last of the line. When she dies, the house passes over to the state of Louisiana.”

“So she’s leaving it to the state as a historical site?” asked the woman from Arizona.

“No, her father arranged that in his will,” said Betty. “He put all his money in a trust fund. Augusta only got a caretaker’s salary.”

“Some caretaker,” said an elderly woman, eyes focussed through field glasses. “There are holes in that roof.”

“Oh, the whole place is a wreck,” said Betty. “The roof is the least of it. It’s a damn shame to see one of those beauties go to ruin that way. Augusta Trebec is the Antichrist of the St. Jude Parish Historical Society. They invoke her name every time they cuss.”

The line got a smattering of laughter, and Betty decided to leave it in the tour speech.