“Do you want it to be the same?”

I did not answer him directly. “I read up on white deer a few years back, the mythology of white deer. There’s quite a bit of it, going back a thousand years. They’re very rare.”

“What kind of mythology?”

“Christians talk of a white stag that carried a vision of Christ between his antlers. They believe it’s a sign of impending salvation.”

“That sounds nice.”

“There are legends that go back much further. The ancient Celts believed something entirely different. Their legends speak of white deer leading travelers deep into the secret parts of the forest. They say a white deer can lead a man to new understanding.”

“That’s not too bad, either.”

I looked up. “They say it’s a messenger from the dead.”

CHAPTER 11

We ate in silence. Dolf left and I got myself cleaned up. In the mirror, I looked haggard, my eyes somehow older than the rest of me. I pulled on jeans and a linen shirt, then I walked back outside, where I found Robin sitting on the picnic table holding part of a carburetor. She stood when she saw me. I stopped on the porch.

“Nobody answered when I knocked,” she said. “I heard the water running and decided to wait.”

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I came to apologize.”

“If it’s about earlier-”

“It’s not,” she said.

“What then?”

A shadow crossed her face. “It was Grantham’s call.” She looked down and her shoulders drew in. “But that’s no excuse. I should not have let it go this far.”

“What are you talking about?”

“If this had been in the city, or in some crowded place, he probably would not have felt the need-”

“Robin.”

She straightened, as if to receive punishment. “She wasn’t raped.”

I was speechless.

“She was attacked, but not raped. Grantham wanted that kept quiet until he saw how you all reacted.”

Not raped.

My voice grated. “How who reacted?”

“You. Jamie. Your father. Any of the men who could have done it. He was watching you.”

“Why?”

“Because sexual assault doesn’t always end in rape, because it is not always as random as people might think, and because of where it happened. The odds of a chance encounter way out here are slim.”

“And because he thinks I’m capable.”

“Most people are bad liars. If you knew that there had been no rape, it might have shown. Grantham wanted a look.”

“And you went along with it.”

She looked miserable. “It’s not an uncommon tactic, withholding information. I had no choice.”

“Bullshit.”

“That’s your emotion talking.”

“Why did you decide to tell me?”

She looked around as if for some kind of help. Her palms turned to catch light from the low-hanging sun. “Because things look different in the light of day. Because I made a mistake.”

“Zebulon Faith is impotent,” I said. “Maybe that’s why she wasn’t actually raped.”

“I don’t want to talk about the case,” she said. “I want to talk about us. You need to understand why I did what I did.”

“I understand perfectly.”

“I don’t think that you do.”

I stepped away from her and my hand found the edge of the open door. She knew that I was going to close it between us. Maybe that’s why she said what she did. “There’s something that you should probably hear,” she said.

“What?”

Robin looked up. “Grace has never been sexually active.”

“But she told me-”

“The doctor confirmed it, Adam. In spite of what she said to you, it’s pretty clear that she has not had a lot of boyfriends.”

“Why would she tell me that?”

“I think it’s like you said, Adam.”

“What?”

“I think she wanted to hurt you.”

The road to my father’s house was baked hard, and red dust settled on my shoes as I walked it. The road bent to the north and then rounded east before cresting the small rise that eventually sloped to the river. I looked down on the house and on the cars parked before it. There were a few of them, and one I recognized. Not the car itself, but the license plate, J- 19C, a J tag, the kind issued to sitting judges.

I walked down, stood next to the car. There was a Twinkie wrapper on the seat.

I knew the bastard.

Gilbert T. Rathburn.

Judge G.

Gilley Rat.

I stepped away from the car as the front door to the house swung open. The judge backed through it like a dog was after him. One hand clutched a sheaf of papers, the other, his belt. He was a tall man and fat, with a fine, woven hairpiece and glasses that flashed small and gold on his red, round face. His suit was expensive enough to camouflage much of his size, but his tie still looked narrow. My father followed him outside.

“I think you should reconsider, Jacob,” the judge said. “It makes all of the sense in the world. If you would just let me explain further-”

“Is there some problem with my diction?” The judge deflated slightly and my father, sensing this, took his eyes off of him and saw me standing in the drive. Surprise flashed across his face, and his voice dropped as he pointed a finger at me. “I’d like to see you in my study,” he said, then turned back to the judge. “And don’t you go talking to Dolf about this, either. What I say goes for him, too.” Without waiting for a reply he turned back into the house.

The screen door slammed shut behind him, and the judge shook his head before turning to face me as I stood in the shade of a pecan tree. He looked me up and down, studied me over the top of his glasses, as his neck swelled out and over his collar. We’d known each other for years. I’d appeared in his courtroom once or twice back when I was young and he still sat on the bench of the lower court. The charges had never been very serious, mostly drinking and brawling. We’d never had a real problem, until five years ago, when he signed off on the felony arrest warrant for Gray Wilson’s murder. He could not hide the contempt in his eyes. “This is an unfortunate decision,” he said. “You showing your face in Rowan County again.”

“Whatever happened to ‘innocent until proven guilty,’ you fat bastard?”

He stepped closer, topping my height by a good four inches. Moisture beaded on his face and in the hair along the side of his head. “The boy was killed on this farm, and your own mother identified you leaving the scene.”

“Stepmother,” I said, and matched the man’s hard stare.

“You were seen covered in his blood.”

“Seen by one person,” I said.

“A reliable witness.”

“Jesus,” I said in disgust.

He smiled.

“What are you doing here, Rathburn?”

“No one’s forgotten, you know. Even without a conviction, people remember.”

I tried to ignore him.

“We take care of our own,” he said as I opened the screen door and looked back. His finger pointed at me, and his watch gleamed on his doughlike wrist. “That’s what life in this county is all about.”

“You mean that you take care of your own campaign contributors. Isn’t that right?”

A deep flush crept up the fat man’s neck. Rathburn was an elitist bigot. If you were rich and white, he was usually the judge you’d want. He’d often come to my father for campaign money, and had always left empty-handed. I had no doubt that his presence here had something to do with the money at stake on the river. He’d have his finger in the pie somewhere.

I watched him search for words, then squeeze into his car when nothing came to him. He turned in the grass of my father’s lawn, then blew dust up the hill. I waited until he was gone from sight, then closed the door and went inside.

I stopped in the living room and heard a floorboard squeak upstairs. Janice, I thought, then walked to my father’s book-lined study. The door stood open, and I knocked on the frame out of long habit. I stepped inside. He stood at the desk, back to me, and his weight was on his hands. He’d lowered his head to his chest, and I saw the length of his neck, the sunburned creases there.