“Do you regret anything now?”

“I regret everything now, but not that. It was the finest, purest time of my life. The last innocent period where I still believed in the myth that life was a thrilling adventure and everything was possible and there was true happiness to be found in this world.”

“What do you believe in now?”

She inhaled from her cigarette and let it out slowly.

“Nothing,” she said finally. And I believed her. It was in the dead look in her eyes, in the body piercing, as if to gore a great emptiness, in the tattoos, as if to scrawl onto her body some evidence of faith. It was in the way she drank in her situations, intently, the way she smoked, with the incessant dedication of a suicide, the way she held herself, like an actress searching in the wings for a line because she had none of her own. And most of all, it was in the way she screwed.

After she had clicked off into passivity I didn’t give up trying to bring her back. I kissed the flesh behind her ear and rubbed her crotch with my thigh and took hold of her hair. Though at Veritas I had been expecting something more, I wasn’t surprised this time when she left me alone in her bed with her body. But despite how I tried to revive her, she was gone, to someplace calm and innocent, to someplace full of youth and love, to someplace I could never follow, leaving me with only her flesh and my heightened desire. So what else was there to do? I caressed her pale flanks, indelibly marked in the green ink of her tattoos, sucked at her neck, dragged my tongue across the rough skin beneath her arms. Her mouth, newly rinsed with Scope, tasted as minty and new as a newly minted hundred-dollar bill and I grew ever more excited despite myself. To have sex with Caroline Shaw, I realized whilst astride her, was to peer into Rockefeller’s soul.

She lay there quietly for me, eyes open, saying not a word as I did what I willed with her. Her very passivity spurred me, her eyes staring at me, rich and blue, challenging. I straddled her and turned her around so those rich eyes were away from me and I entered her, pumping hard, pumping furiously, filled with anger at her stark passivity. And in the moment that I came, my teeth clenched in release, it was as if Mammon itself opened up its secrets to me and I started to grasp its dark power. It is utter emptiness, a vessel formed of nothing, filled with nothing, believing in nothing, an emptiness into which we are urged to pour our most essential truths. And what spurted out of me was not love nor compassion nor charity nor even need, what spurted out was all my wanting and my coveting, all my deep yearning for anything that anyone else might ever have, all my darkest ambitions for prestige and power and glory and ultimately what? Godhood? God help me. That was the next-to-worst part of screwing Caroline Shaw, the part that brought to light the ugliest shadows of my crippled soul.

The worst part was that I liked it.

“Do you think all that crap about Elisha Poole and my great-grandfather might have something to do with Jacqueline’s death?” asked Caroline.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Harrington seemed interested enough.”

“He did, didn’t he?” She took a drag from her cigarette. “I had a strange feeling in the restaurant when you and he were discussing this thing about Poole. It was more like a déjà vu than anything else, but I felt it. It was like there weren’t only three of us at the table anymore, there was someone else, sitting with us, casting a coldness over everything.”

“A ghost?”

“No, a presence, maybe just a memory. But it made me shiver.”

“Who? Your grandmother?”

“Someone else, someone strange to me. It was almost like my great-grandfather was there, listening to us talk about him. Is that weird?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it was just a draft.”

“Whatever it was, it was really cold.” She took another drag and then stubbed out her cigarette right on the table’s surface. “I think it’s time I learned the truth about my family’s history. I think I want to know everything that happened, from the very beginning to what is left of us now. I want to know if it was always rotten or if there was a moment of brightness before it turned.”

“Conciliation, expiation, redemption,” I said.

“Yes, I want to know about that too. Especially the redemption.”

“You might not like what you find.”

“I don’t care. What could I ever learn that could make things worse for me?”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive, as long as you’ll do it with me.”

“If that’s what you want.”

“That’s what I want. You’ll see it through to the end, won’t you, Victor? You won’t desert me like every other man in my life, will you?”

Perhaps it was all part of the masculine ego rush that comes after hard sex, accentuated by the glimpse I had caught of the dark truths in my soul, but just then I didn’t feel like every other man. Just then I felt within me a strange and unique power, not only to do financial good for myself but to do good for Caroline, too. She had said before that she wanted to be saved; maybe the truths I would unearth in her family’s past could provide the first crucial steps toward her salvation. It was a maybe, only a maybe, but a maybe could warrant a hell of a lot. As a lawyer I had gotten pretty damn good at self-justification.

“I won’t desert you,” I said. “I’ll see it through.”

“So where do we start?”

“I have an idea, but you’ll think it crazy.”

“No I won’t.”

“Forget it,” I said. “It’s too wild.”

She turned over on her stomach and drew her fingers lightly across my chest. “What is it, Victor? Whatever it is, no matter how insane, we’ll do it, I promise.”

“Anything?”

“I promise.”

“Well, what I think we should do next,” I said, sitting up and looking straight into those rich, blue eyes, “is dig up your grandmother’s garden.”

THE VAST STRETCH OF LAWN within the iron gates of Veritas was a sea of blackness, the windows of the mansion were dark. I parked the car on the upsweep of the driveway so as not to wake anyone who might have been in the house. It was a pitchy night, the moon was new, and in the expanse of sky that spread over the estate the stars peered forth like a million frog eyes. Caroline led with the flashlight as we made our way quietly around the house and to the rear gardens. In my right hand was a shovel we had just purchased from Home Depot for $9.99, a long-handled discount jobber with a sharp blade of flawed steel ready to chip at the first pebble. In my left hand was a kerosene lantern I had dug out of my closet from among my camping gear. We had stopped at a gas station to fill it with unleaded but I had misjudged the process and had drenched my pants with gasoline. Along with the fear of self-combustion was the dry sour smell that followed me wherever I moved.

As we sneaked around the ballroom side of the house, I tripped over a stone and cracked my shin. I let out a short sharp cry. Caroline turned the beam of her light into my face.

“Shut up,” she whispered fiercely, a shadow behind the blob of light. “If you can’t be quiet we’ll just forget it.”

“I’ll be quiet,” I said quietly. I rubbed my shin. “I just fell. Get that light out of my face.” I pushed myself back to standing. “Let’s go.”

“This was a bad idea,” she said, her inquisitor’s light still blaring in my face. “We should forget it.”

“You said you wanted to dig into your family history,” I said. “That’s just what we’re doing. It’s your house. I don’t know why you’re so jittery.”

“You don’t understand my grandmother. She wanted her garden left alone and she was not one to be defied.”

“She’s dead, Caroline.”

“If there’s anyone with the power to control this world from her grave, it’s my grandmother.”