LITMIR.BIZ

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or not. Big ifs. And even with my contacts at the crime labs throughout the state, a DNA comparison could take several days. In the meantime, I have only my memory—or the lack of it—to go on.

      I remember almost nothing from the night my father died, nothing before I walked through the rain to the dogwood tree and saw his body lying motionless on the ground. It’s as though I simply materialized from the grass. Without my voice. And it was more than a year before I spoke again. Why? Where was I when my father died? Asleep? Or did I witness something? Something too terrible to recall, much less speak of? Pearlie knows more about that night than she’s told me. But what is she holding back? And why? Once she states something to be true, she rarely goes back and adjusts her version of events. But maybe I don’t need Pearlie. For the first time in my life, I have a witness to that night’s events that cannot conceal or distort events: blood. The oldest sign of murder, Abel’s blood crying out from the ground—

       “Mayday!” cries a voice in my head. “Mayday! Mayday!”

      That voice is the product of five years of dive training. It tells me when I’m nearing the crisis point. The level of oxygen in my tissues has fallen to a point where most people would be unconscious. In fact, most people submerged for the length of time I have lain here would be dead by now. But I still have a margin of safety. My thoughts have condensed from a bright stream of consciousness to a single line of pulsing blue light. The message carried in that blue light has nothing to do with my past. It’s about my baby. She is here with me, cosseted in the sheltered pool of my uterus, a core organ if anything qualifies as one. Most women would excoriate me for risking my baby’s life this way. In another situation, I might do the same. But I’m not in another situation. A lot of women, finding themselves pregnant by a married man, would already have scheduled an abortion. But I haven’t done that. I will not. This is my baby, and I intend to have her. I risk her life only by risking my own. As for my motive … the pulsing blue thread of light in my mind tells me this: my baby can survive this. When we rise from this water, we will be one, and nothing Sean Regan says or does will have any power over us—

      My body tenses. Opening my eyes, I see a dark figure hovering above the water. Slowly, a golden spear separates from the figure and descends toward the surface, directly above me. I shove the rock off my chest and burst up into air and light, sputtering in terror. A tall man stands at the side of the pool, a ten-foot-long net in his hands. He looks more frightened than I.

      “I thought you’d drowned!” he cries. Then he blushes and turns away.

      I cross my arms over my breasts, only now remembering that I went into the pool in my underwear. “Who are you? Where’s Mrs. Hemmeter?”

      “Magnolia House.” He’s still looking away. “The assisted-living home. She sold the house to me. Do you want to put on some clothes?”

      I kneel so that the water covers me to my neck. “I’m decent now.”

      The man turns around. He has sandy brown hair and blue eyes, and he’s wearing khakis and a blue button-down oxford shirt. Several tongue suppressors protrude from his shirt pocket. He looks to be in his early thirties, and something about him strikes me as familiar.

      “Do I know you?” I ask.

      He smiles. “Do you?”

      I study him but can’t make the connection. “I do. Or I did.”

      “I’m Michael Wells.”

      “Oh my God! Michael? I didn’t—”

      “Didn’t recognize me, I know. I’ve lost eighty pounds in the last two years.”

      I survey him from head to toe. It’s difficult to reconcile what I see before me with my memories of high school, but there’s just enough of the old Michael left to recognize. It’s like meeting a man in the real world whom you first encountered as a cancer patient on steroid therapy—bloated and soft then, but now miraculously recovered, healthy and hard.

      “My God, you look … well, hot.”

      Michael’s blush returns, redder than before. “Thanks, Cat.”

      He was three years ahead of me at St. Stephen’s, then at the University Medical Center in Jackson. “Did you stick with pediatrics?” I ask, searching my mind for details.

      He nods. “I was practicing in North Carolina, but St. Catherine’s Hospital came up and recruited me. This town was desperate for more pediatricians.”

      “Well, I’m glad you came back. You own this house now?”

      “Yep.”

      “I used to swim here all the time.”

      He smiles. “Mrs. Hemmeter told me.”

      “Did she? Well, do you like it? The house, I mean.”

      “I do. I like being at the back of the neighborhood. It’s no Malmaison, of course.”

      “Be glad it’s not. You don’t want the upkeep on that place.”

      “I can imagine. Did you ever live anywhere else in Natchez?”

      “No. My dad came back from Vietnam with post-traumatic stress disorder. He couldn’t hold a job, so my mom came home from college, and they moved into one of the slave quarters. I was born four years later. We never left after that.”

      “What did your father do before the war?”

      “He was a welder.”

      “Is that where his sculpting came from?”

      “Yes.” I’m surprised Michael remembers that. After two years of wandering the woods and watching television, my dad fired up his welding equipment and began sculpting metal. In the beginning he produced huge, horrid pieces—Asian demons cut from steel and iron—but as time passed, his work mellowed and became quite popular with some collectors.

      “Is that a rock down there?” Michael asks, pointing into the water.

      “Yes. Your rock. I used it to keep me submerged. I’m a free diver.”

      “What’s that?”

      “I dive deep in the ocean using only the air in my lungs.”

      Michael looks intrigued. “How deep?”

      “I’ve been to three hundred and fifty feet.”

      “Jesus! I scuba dive a little, and I’ve only been to ninety feet with tanks.”

      “I use a weighted sled to help me get down quickly.”

      “That’s one extreme sport I’ve never heard of.”

      “It’s pretty intense. As solitary as you can be on this planet, I think.”

      He squats beside the pool, his eyes filled with curiosity. “Do you like that? Solitude, I mean?”

      “Sometimes. Other times I can’t stand to be alone. Literally.”

      “I learned to fly five years ago. I’ve got a little Cessna 210 out at the airport. That’s where I get my solitude.”

      “Well, there you go. Flying scares me to death. If I got into your Cessna, I’d need a doggie bag in the first two minutes.”

      Michael laughs and blushes at the same time. “You’re just trying to save my pride.”

      “I’m not. Flying scares me, especially small planes.” I look toward the trees that conceal Malmaison. “Have you met my grandfather yet?”

      He smiles in a way that’s hard to read. “The lord of the manor? Yeah. He still comes to the occasional staff meeting at the hospital, even though he’s more of a wheeler-dealer than a surgeon these days, from what I hear.”

      “For a lot of years now. By the time he was forty, surgery was just a prestige hobby for him.”

      Michael

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