After a few minutes, Darlene put her hand over the miniphone and spoke to Mallory. “They’re out on a call – all of them, ambulances, fire trucks. One of the chemical plants went up in a ball of fire and torched a cane field. The dispatcher is patching me into the sheriff’s car.”

“Don’t mention my name.” Mallory wound a bloody strip of Ira’s shirt around the bloody head wound. She couldn’t smell any smoke. The fire must be miles down the road.

Now Darlene broke the connection and closed her hand over the tiny phone. “The sheriff is pulling off the highway. He’ll be here in a few minutes.”

Mallory checked Ira’s pupils. He was holding his own. Darlene was not doing so well by half.

In her own strange way of offering comfort, Mallory said, “I know who did this. I’ll kill him for you, okay?”

Darlene was shaking her head in confusion. “No, Kathy.” She was talking in the mother tone now. “Cass wouldn’t want that, and neither would I. It has to end, don’t you see?” Her hand wound around Mallory’s arm. “The damage can’t just go on and on. All these years, all this damage.”

Mallory gently pried loose Darlene’s restraining fingers and stood up. As she was moving through the cemetery with slow deliberation, Darlene called out after her, “Kathy, don’t kill anybody.”

Mallory recognized the same worried intonation her own mother had once used to caution her not to touch a dead bird she had found in the yard. As she walked, she checked the chambers of her revolver, and ceased to hear Darlene.

She was on her way to Owltown.

Augusta fixed one eye to her telescope. Studying the wildlife? Charles thought not. “You aren’t bird-watching, are you, Augusta?”

“Not at the moment, but I do find birds more interesting than people. Killer humans are definitely the more gentle species. Now you take the way Cass was killed – no passion. You should see the owls and hawks rip and tear the meat. But death is quick. If you blink, you miss it.”

“I’m sure you manage to keep abreast of all the killing around here.” What was she looking at?

“Oh, I don’t know about that. I spend some of my time watching the stars. But there’s a kind of violence out there too. This whole world is careening through space with a real wicked spin. I try to lay back and roll with it, and I recommend that to you.”

But her telescope was not trained on the stars tonight. “I think you’re a bit less passive than that. You don’t just watch, do you? You’re a player.”

“You’ve been listening to stories, Charles.” She smiled, but never took her eye from the telescope. “They’re all true. I’m a murderess. Killed my own father.”

“I wasn’t thinking about that.”

“Your friend Riker is in trouble. They’re closing in on him.”

Charles ripped the glass from her hand. Augusta patiently helped him refocus on the fairgrounds where the tent used to be. Now the most prominent thing on the field was a large truck with a long, flat bed strung with Christmas tree lights and the brighter spotlights perched on stalks of steel. At the center of the truck bed was a glass-domed coffin. It reminded him of a display case for a preserved insect.

Perhaps a hundred people milled and reeled around the truck waving bottles and paper cups. The women were laden with gaudy jewelry and they wore bright party dresses of shiny materials. Even some of the men wore sequins, and here and there was a costume more appropriate to a Mardi Gras parade than a funeral. A band of musicians stood off to one side and a stilt-walker moved among them with bright silver streamers in both hands.

In addition to the coffin, there was a chair on the truck bed. It was gold and elevated like a throne. Malcolm Laurie sat there, dressed in his suit of lights. He pointed toward the center of the crowd. The people stepped back to clear a wide circle, and there at its center, Riker stood alone, out of place in his drab gray suit.

CHAPTER 26

Charles’s shoes had only hit on every third step in his descent, and now he ran the length of the hallway to Augusta’s back room. He was lifting the antique telephone receiver when he saw the note lying on the table: “I’m going to the sheriff’s office to check on Riker. Stay where you are!”

Her last phrase was so heavily underscored, Mallory was virtually shouting off the page.

He was examining the broken telephone cord when Augusta hurried past him on her way to a chest of drawers in the far corner.

“There’s a pack of men coming over the bridge.” She was ripping through the top drawer, and articles of intimate apparel were flying. “We got to leave, and fast.” She pulled out a very small handgun and slammed the drawer. She held the weapon out to him. “It’s only a single-shot forty-five, but better than nothing.” She stuffed it into the pocket of her dress and ran from the room. The cat seemed to grasp the sense of it before Charles did, and now the creature was following its mistress.

Charles quit the room and ran down the hall, racing the yellow cat. He closed the outer door on the animal, and it began to growl, not frightened at all, but genuinely pissed off.

“Let the cat out,” commanded Augusta.

He opened the door and the cat sped past him. Charles looked up at Augusta, astride the white horse and without a saddle. She danced the stallion closer to the courting staircase. “They’ll be at the cemetery by now. Get on or you’re a dead man.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to – ”

“I know a lynch mob when I see one, Charles. Want to live? Get on!”

Charles stepped on the second stair and swung one long leg over the rear of the horse to mount behind Augusta.

“Hold on tight as you can!” she yelled. They galloped across the wide grassy lawn.

He had not been on horseback since he was a child, and then he had sat in a proper saddle. Now he felt that he would fall in every passing second. The horse’s massive muscles were elongating and contracting as they flew over the long grass, heading for the great earthen dike, pitch-black against the sky.

He held Augusta by the waist and leaned into her neck to yell, “We’re going along the base of the levee, right? Around the tip of Upland Bayou?”

“Can’t,” she called back to him, heading straight for the great looming barrier. “Too many bad patches and wet ones,” she yelled into the wind. “The horse would lose his legs in the dark before we even got to Henry’s place.”

“When will Henry be back?”

“Not till late. Wrap your legs tight and dig in with your heels. We’re going the way the horse knows best. He’s been this route a thousand times.”

And now they were moving up the embankment. Skillfully she led the horse into a slanted approach to the road atop the levee. Charles held on tight, knees and heels to the horse’s hide, arms wrapped around Augusta, and certain that he would slide off as the horse faltered on the steep slope of Bermuda grass. But the animal never lost its forward momentum, finding purchase in the worn areas of dirt scumbling out beneath his hooves in a brown spray as he climbed up to the stars. Now the horse was running full-out across the levee road, along the top of the earth where it met the sky.

Charles looked back to the mansion. A small army of ants with pale white heads and hands emerged from the oak alley and converged on Trebec House.

The stilt-walker’s baggy pants obscured the glass-domed coffin as he tottered back and forth alongside the truck’s flat bed. Every one of the hundred mourners was dressed for a blowout party of free booze. A few men in the crowd had disguised their eyes with bright costume masks. Some wore feathers and capes. Gaudy colors bobbed and weaved as the liquor flowed and spilled, and cheap jewelry flashed in the beams of spotlights on tall metal stands around the truck. But Malcolm’s suit of lights outglittered all of them. He had forsaken his throne to straddle the coffin, riding it like a nightmare, waving one hand in the air, hailing his subjects and laughing.