LITMIR.BIZ

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my sternum—Nathan Malik took a position on the psychiatric faculty at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson.

      “Jesus Christ,” I whisper.

      Malik was at UMC during the two years I was there. I did know him. But something is wrong. I didn’t know the man in this picture as Nathan Malik, but as Dr. Jonathan Gentry. And Gentry wasn’t bald, not even close. Higher up the page, I find what I’m looking for. Nathan Malik was born Jonathan Gentry in Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1951. He legally changed his name in 1994, one year after I was asked to leave medical school. I pick up my cell phone and speed-dial Sean, sweat breaking out on my face and neck.

      “You got something?” Sean says without preamble.

      “Sean, I know him! Knew him, I mean.”

      “Who?”

      “Malik.”

       “What?”

      “Only his name wasn’t Malik then. It was Gentry. He was on the faculty at UMC in Jackson when I was there. He had hair then, but it’s the same guy. I couldn’t forget those eyes. He knew that professor I had the affair with. He actually hit on me a few times. I mean—”

      “Okay, okay. You need to get—”

      “I know. I’ll leave as soon as I can get out of here. I should be there in three hours.”

      “Don’t wait for anything, Cat. The task force is going to want to talk to you bad.”

      The calm I experienced in the pool has fled me. I can hardly keep a logical thought in my head. “Sean, what does this mean? How could this be?”

      “I don’t know. I’m going to call John Kaiser. You call me when you get on the road. We’ll figure it out.”

      Though I’m alone in the room, I nod thankfully. “I will. I’ll talk to you soon.”

      “Bye, babe. Hang tough. We’ll get this straight.”

      I put down the phone and gather the sheets from the fax tray. There are three now. As I turn toward the study door, it suddenly opens as though of its own volition.

      Towering in the doorway is my grandfather, Dr. William Kirkland, his angular face lined with care. His pale blue eyes survey me from head to toe, then take in the room.

      “Hello, Catherine,” he says, his voice deep and precisely measured. “What are you doing in here?”

      “I needed your fax machine, Grandpapa. I was just about to head back to New Orleans.”

      A shorter man in his thirties peers around my grandfather’s broad frame. Billy Neal, the unpleasant driver Pearlie complained about. His eyes flick up and down my body, making private judgments that produce a smirk. Grandpapa gently but forcefully pushes his driver backward, then walks into the library and closes the door. He’s wearing a white linen jacket and a necktie. On the island he dresses like a laborer, but in town he is unfailingly formal.

      “I’m sure you don’t want to leave before we’ve had a chance to visit,” he says.

      “It’s pretty urgent. A murder case.”

      He smiles knowingly. “If it was that urgent, you wouldn’t be in Natchez in the first place, would you? Unless someone was murdered here while I was gone?”

      I shake my head.

      “That’s a relief. Though I can think of a few locals I wouldn’t mind seeing hurried along to their final reward.” He walks to the sideboard. “Sit down, Catherine. What are you drinking?”

      “Nothing.”

      He raises a curious eyebrow.

      “I really have to go.”

      “Your mother told me you found some blood in your old bedroom.”

      “That’s right. I found it by accident, but it’s definitely blood.”

      He pours himself a neat Scotch. “Human?”

      “I don’t know yet.” I glance longingly at the door.

      Grandpapa removes his jacket, revealing a tailored dress shirt with rolled-up sleeves. Even at his advanced age, he has the corded forearms of a man who’s worked all his life with his hands. “But you’re assuming that it is.”

      “Why do you say that? I never assume anything.”

      “I say that because you look agitated.”

      “It’s not the blood. It’s the murder case in New Orleans.”

      He hangs his jacket on a rack in the corner. “Are you being completely truthful about that? I just spoke to your mother. I know how much the loss of your father hurt you, how it’s haunted you. Please sit down, Catherine. We should talk about your concerns.”

      I look down at the faxed pages in my hands. The hypnotic eyes of Nathan Malik stare up at me, prodding me to leave for New Orleans. But then an image of glowing footprints comes into my mind—one tiny and bare, the other made by a boot. A work boot, maybe, or a hunting boot. The NOMURS killings have a claim on me, but I cannot leave Malmaison without knowing more about those footprints.

      I take a deep breath and force myself to sit.

       ELEVEN

      My grandfather sits in a leather club chair and regards me with interest. He’s an imposing figure, and he knows it. William Kirkland looks the way people want their surgeons to look: confident, commanding, untroubled by doubt. Like he could operate ankle-deep in blood and only get calmer as the situation deteriorated. God endowed my grandfather with that magical combination of brains, brawn, and luck that no amount of poverty could hold in check, and his personal history is the stuff of legend.

      Born into the hard-shell Baptist farmland of east Texas, he survived a car crash that killed his parents while they were traveling to his baptism. Taken in by his widowed grandfather, he grew into a boy who worked from “can see to can’t see” in the summers and in the winters managed to score so highly in school that he attracted the attention of his principal. After receiving a full athletic scholarship to Texas A&M, he lied about his age and enlisted in the marines at seventeen. Twelve weeks later, Private Kirkland was on his way to the Pacific islands, where he won a Silver Star and two Purple Hearts as he fought his bloody way toward Japan. He recovered from his wounds, then used the GI Bill to graduate from A&M, where he won a scholarship to Tulane Medical School in New Orleans. There, he met my grandmother, the demure princess of Tulane’s sister college, H. Sophie Newcomb.

      A Presbyterian and a pauper, my grandfather was initially regarded with suspicion by the Catholic patriarch of the DeSalle family. But by sheer force of personality, he won over his future father-in-law and married Catherine Poitiers DeSalle without changing his religion. They had two daughters before he finished his medical training, yet still he managed to win top honors during his surgical residency. In 1956 he moved his young family to his wife’s hometown—Natchez—and joined the practice of a prominent local surgeon. The future seemed set in stone, which, as a believer in the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, suited my grandfather just fine.

      Then his wife’s father died. With no male heir to take over the DeSalle family’s extensive farming and business interests, my grandfather began to oversee those operations. He showed the same aptitude for business that he had for everything else, and before long he’d enlarged the family holdings by 30 percent. Surgery soon became almost a hobby, and he began to move in more rarefied business circles. Yet he never left his rural past behind. He can still split a fifth of cheap bourbon with a group of field hands without their guessing he’s the man who pays their wages. He runs the DeSalle empire—his family included—like a feudal lord, but without sons or grandsons to carry on his legacy, the weight of his frustrated dynastic ambitions

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