I never know what to say in these moments. If you say, Did you like them? you're putting the person on the spot. But what else can you say?

"I liked the first one the best," Althea offers. "I liked the others too, but I couldn't help feeling…"

"Be honest," I urge her, dreading what will follow.

"I always felt that your gift was bigger than the stories you were telling. I don't mean to be critical. But that first book was so real. I just think if you really understood what happened to Del, you'd have a story that would take all the gift you have to tell it."

Her words are like salt on my soul. "I truly wish I could help you. But I can't. If some new evidence were to come to light, the district attorney would be the proper man to see." I look at my father. "Is Austin Mackey still the D.A. here?"

He nods warily.

"I went to school with Mr. Mackey. He's a good man. I could-"

"He nothing but a politician!" scoffs Georgia Payton.

The old woman gets slowly to her feet, using her huge handbag as a counterweight. "He don't care none. We come here 'cause we thought you did. But maybe you don't. Maybe you was talking free in the paper 'cause you been gone so long you ain't worried 'bout what people thinks around here. I told Althea, you must be like your daddy, a hardworking man with a good heart. But maybe I told her wrong."

I flush again, suddenly certain that the men of the Payton family are intimately familiar with the guilt trip as a motivational tool.

Althea stands more slowly than her mother-in-law, as though lifting the weight of thirty years of grief. This time when she speaks, she looks only at the floor.

"I loved my husband," she says softly. "After he was killed, I never remarried. I never even went with another man. I raised my boy the best I could and tried to go on. I don't say it was hard, because everybody got it hard, some way. You know that, Dr. Cage. The world's full of misery. But my Del got took before his time." Her lower lip is quivering; she bites it to keep her composure. "He wanted us to wait to have children. So we'd be able to give them the things they needed. Del said our people hurt themselves by having too many children too quick. We just had one before he died. Del was a good boy who grew into a good man, and he never got to see his own baby grow up."

The mournful undertone in her voice pierces my heart. All I can see is Sarah lying in her casket at age thirty-seven, her future ripped away like a cruel mirage. Althea Payton breaks the image by reaching into her purse and taking out a folded piece of paper, which she hands to me. I have little choice but to unfold it.

It's a death certificate.

"When the ambulance men got to Del, he was already burned up. But they couldn't get him out of the seat. The springs from the seat had blown up through his thighs and pinned him there. That's why he couldn't get out, even though he was still alive after that bomb went off."

I stare at the brittle yellowed paper, a simple form dated 5-14-68.

"Look in the middle," Althea says. "Under cause of death."

I push down a hot wave of nausea. Thirty years ago, on the line beside the printed words cause of death, some callous or easily cowed bureaucrat had scrawled the word Accidental.

"As long as I live and breathe," Althea whispers, "I'll do what I can to find out the truth."

I want to speak, to try to communicate the empathy I feel, but I don't. Sarah's death taught me this. In the face of grief, words have no power.

I watch the Payton women follow my mother into the hall. I hear Georgia repeat her compliment about the fine house my mother keeps, then the soft shutting of the front door. I sit on the sofa where Althea sat. The cushion is still warm. My mother's slippers hiss across the slate floor of the foyer, the sound like a nun moving through a convent.

"The neighbors are standing out in their yards," she says.

Wondering at the sight of black people who aren't yard men or maids, I reflect. And tomorrow the maids and the yard men will return, while the two Mrs. Paytons sit or work in silent grief, mourning a man whose murder caused no more ripples than a stone dropped into a pond.

"I know that was hard," my father says, laying a hand on my shoulder. "But you did the right thing."

I shake my head. "I don't know."

"That boy's long dead and gone. Nothing anybody can do will help him now. But it could hurt a lot of people. Those two poor women. The town. Your mother. You and Annie most of all. You did the right thing, son."

I look up at my father, searching for the man Georgia Payton said he is.

"You did," my mother insists. "Don't dwell on it. Go wake Annie up. I'm going to make French toast."

CHAPTER 7

The couch in my father's medical office has heard many terrible truths: revelations by the doctor (you're sick; you're dying; they couldn't get it all), confessions by the patient (my husband beats me; my father raped me; I want to die), but always-always-truths about the patient.

Today the truth about the doctor will be told.

I can imagine no other reason for the sudden summons to his office. It requires a conscious effort to control my anxiety as I sit on that worn leather couch, waiting for him to finish with his last patient of the day.

After the Payton women left our house this morning, Dad took his old pickup truck to work so that Annie and I would have the BMW. Having no desire to endure the glares of the local citizenry, I spent the morning in the pool with Annie, marveling at how well she moved in the water and fighting a losing battle to keep her skin covered with sun block. Mom and I had tuna sandwiches for lunch, Annie a bowl of SpaghettiOs. When the two of them drove downtown to buy Annie new shoes, I retired to the library and read T. Harry Williams's Huey Long on the sofa until I fell asleep.

The telephone woke me at four-thirty p.m. I hated to chance answering it myself, but I thought it might be my mother.

"Penn?" said my father. "Can you drop by my office about five? Alone?"

"Sure. What's up?"

"I think it's time we had a talk."

"Okay," I said, trying to sound casual. "I'll see you at five."

I went to the bathroom and showered off the chlorine from the pool, then dressed in chinos and a polo shirt. Dad's office is only a couple of miles from the house, so I read another twenty minutes in Huey Long. When I fell asleep, the Grand Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, speaking from the "imperial klonvocation" in Atlanta, had just announced that he was going to Louisiana to campaign against Huey because of his pro-Negro policies. The Kingfish stormed into the press gallery of the state senate while the legislature was in session and announced that if that "Imperial bastard" crossed the Louisiana state line, he would shortly depart "with his toes turned up." The Klan leader wisely elected not to test the Kingfish's sincerity. As humorous as it seemed in retrospect, Long could all too easily have backed up his threat. I could see how dictatorial power might be an asset in solving sticky problems like racism. Of course, that road also leads to the crematorium ovens.

When I got to my father's office building, I used his private door. I'd known Anna, his chief nurse-an attractive black woman-for most of my life, but I was too curious to spend even ten minutes reminiscing about old times. I sat on the couch opposite his desk and waited in the lingering haze of cigar smoke.

During his first fifteen years in Natchez, Dad practiced in a sprawling downtown house. This was the era of separate waiting rooms for "colored" and white, but his only nod to this convention was a flimsy wooden partition set up in the middle of the room. On any day you could find whole families- white and black-camped out in that great room, kids playing on the floor, parents eating from bag lunches and waiting to see the doctor on a first-come, first-served basis. His new office, convenient to both hospitals and sterile as a hypodermic needle, runs like any other doctor's-almost. He has rigidly scheduled appointments, a gleaming laboratory, and modern X-ray facilities, but he still routinely brings everything to a standstill by spending whatever time he feels a patient needs for examination, commiseration, or just plain conversation.