LITMIR.BIZ

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send out operatives on goodwill alone. Time spent working Alex’s case was time stolen from others—man-hours piling upon man-hours, each day’s accumulation taking a hefty bite out of her hemorrhaging retirement fund. On top of that, she was paying for gasoline, airfare between Jackson and Charlotte, private nurses for her mother … there was no end to it.

      The Charlotte apartment was her most urgent problem. For the last three years, she’d leased a condo in Washington, D.C. If she had bought it instead, she could have sold it tomorrow for double her money. But that was a pipe dream. A prudent agent would have dumped the condo after getting transfer orders, but Alex had kept it, knowing that her superiors would learn that she had and would see this as a tangible symbol of her belief in her eventual redemption. But now on top of the condo she had a six-month lease on a place in Charlotte, an apartment she’d slept in fewer than a dozen nights. She’d paid her second month’s rent to maintain the fiction that she was diligently working at her punishment duty, but she simply couldn’t afford to continue. Yet if she broke the lease, her superiors would eventually find out. She thought of possible explanations, but none that would mollify the Office of Professional Responsibility.

      “Shit,” she muttered, tossing the cold washcloth onto the other bed.

      Meggie leaped into the air, startled by the wet rag. Alex hadn’t seen her curl up on the bed, and now she had an indignant cat on her hands. “I’d be pissed, too,” she said, getting up and going to her computer.

      She logged on to MSN and checked her Contacts list to see whether Jamie was online, but the icon beside his screen name—Ironman QB—was red, not green. This didn’t worry her. Their nightly webcam ritual normally occurred later, after Bill had gone to bed. Though only ten years old, Jamie was quite talented with computers. And since one of the few things Bill was generous with was allowance—guilt money, she knew—Jamie had been able to purchase a webcam that allowed him to open a video link with Alex anytime that both of them were logged on to MSN. Secret communication with a ten-year-old boy might fall on the questionable side of the ethical spectrum, but Alex figured it paled in comparison to premeditated murder. And since Grace had charged her with protecting Jamie, Alex felt justified in maintaining contact any way she could.

      Leaving her MSN screen name active, she got up from the desk, took her cell phone from her purse, and dialed her mother’s house. A nurse answered.

      “It’s Alex. Is she awake?”

      “No, she’s sleeping. She’s on the morphine pump again.”

      Oh, God. “How’s she doing apart from the pain?”

      “No change, really. Not physically. Emotionally …” The nurse trailed off.

      “What is it?”

      “She seems down.”

      Of course she is. She’s dying. And she’s doing it alone. “Tell her I’ll call back later,” Alex whispered.

      “She’s been saying you might be coming back to Mississippi soon.”

      I’m already in Mississippi. Alex shut her eyes against the guilt of the necessary lie. “I may be, but I’m stuck in Charlotte for now. Are the doctors checking on her regularly?”

      “Yes, ma’am.”

      “Please call me if there’s any change.”

      “I’ll make sure someone does.”

      “Thank you. Good-bye.”

      Alex shoved her Glock into her waistband at the small of her back, flipped her shirttail over its butt, then picked up Meggie and walked outside to the parking lot. Room 125 faced the pool, which was empty at this hour. She felt like swimming some laps, but she hadn’t packed a bathing suit, nor had she thought to buy one when she was at Wal-Mart. The lobby building of the Days Inn was styled after an antebellum mansion, in imitation of Natchez’s primary tourist attractions. Beyond the lobby and a one-story line of rooms, an ancient tennis court lay beneath a rectangle of oak trees. Alex scratched Meggie’s ears and walked toward it.

      She had planned to register at the Eola Hotel downtown, which she remembered from a childhood visit to Natchez, but she’d found she couldn’t hack the rate. The Days Inn was fifty-nine bucks a night, Meggie’s fee included. Its parking lot led right onto Highway 61. Turn left and you were headed to New Orleans; turn right, Chicago. I’m losing it, Alex thought. Get a grip.

      She stepped onto the cracked green surface of the tennis court and sniffed the air. She smelled a heavy potpourri of verdant foliage: forest leaves, kudzu, and pine needles laced with honeysuckle, azalea, and sweet olive. She smelled water, too, real running water, not the sterile pool behind her. Somewhere nearby, a creek was winding its way through the forested city toward the mighty river that rolled only a mile to the west.

      Alex had only been to Natchez three times in her life, but she knew one thing: it was different from everywhere else. Most Americans considered Mississippi unique in their experience, but Natchez was unique in Mississippi. An arrogant city, to her way of thinking, though a certain amount of arrogance could be justified, especially about the past. The oldest city on the Mississippi River, Natchez had grown fantastically wealthy before the rich Delta upriver had even been cleared. Governed by England, France, and Spain in turn, the city had absorbed the style, manners, and architecture of those European powers and thus quite naturally saw herself as superior to the rest of the state of which she was nominally a part. This won Natchez few supporters outside her borders, but her cotton-rich leaders cared so little that they surrendered the magnificent city without firing a shot. It was for this reason that Alex, growing up in Jackson, had occasionally heard hisses when Natchez was mentioned in conversation. Yet that bloodless surrender had allowed the city to survive the terrible war intact, much like Charleston and Savannah, and Natchez remained a world unto itself, seemingly immune to history, outside of time.

      As the fertile soil surrounding Natchez was depleted, the cotton business moved north to the Delta, yet Natchez did not die. Decades later, travelers from around the world began making pilgrimages to the pristine jewel of the Old South, to see decadent opulence preserved as though by divine intervention (though in fact its beauty was maintained by the free labor of countless society ladies). Even the hard-shell Baptists in rural Mississippi had a grudging fascination with the river city whose bars stayed open all night and whose black-owned whorehouse was known by name in Paris. The discovery of oil beneath the old cotton fields resurrected the city’s vital spirit for another forty years, and some of its celebrated wealth returned. As a young girl visiting to take part in the Confederate Pageant, Alex had briefly been sucked into a social tornado that only old blood, new money, and simmering racial tension could generate. But by the time she visited again—during college with a sorority sister—the city had seemed a faded image of itself, everything smaller in scale, less vivid in color.

      During the past five days, Alex had read the Natchez Examiner from front to back every morning while following Thora Shepard on her runs. What she saw in those pages was a city still wrestling with the demons of its past. Half-black and half-white, this former capital of the plantation South could not seem to find its place in the modern world. Alex wondered what had brought a man like Chris Shepard back here after a topflight performance in medical school. Maybe the city sang a siren song that only its natives could hear.

      She walked back to the pool and set Meggie down at the shallow end. As the cat perched gracefully on the edge and lapped up the placid water, Alex thought of Chris Shepard in his white coat. After five weeks of frenetic investigation, her fate—and Jamie’s—lay in the doctor’s hands. She planned to give Shepard some time to think about today’s meeting, but not too much. During their next visit, she’d feed him more facts—just enough to set the hook. He’d been intrigued by that first nibble, she could tell. Who wouldn’t have been? She’d presented him with a classic murder mystery: Alfred Hitchcock brought to life. The problem was, it was Chris Shepard’s life. And Shepard’s wife. In the end, of course, the doctor’s decision about whether to help her would be based upon factors Alex could never know: the secret realities of his marriage, unfathomable currents of emotion

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