When I got back home later that evening,, Jimmie had already arrived from New Orleans and installed himself in the spare bedroom. Jimmie was a funny guy. He had earned the nickname "Jimmie the Gent" for his manners, intelligence, and sharp dress, but his success in the world was also due to the fact that, like my father and mother, he could do many things well with his hands.

As a Depression-era family we worked from what people used to call "cain't-see to cain't-see," which meant from before first light to well after sunset. My father was a natural gas pipeliner and derrick man on drilling rigs out in the Gulf, but he considered industrial work, with regular hours and paychecks, a vacation. Real work was the enterprise you did on your own, with nobody to back you up but your family. We broke corn together, butchered and smoked our own meat, strung "trot" lines baited with chicken guts through the swamp across the road, milked cows and hoed out the vegetable garden before school, calved in the early spring, trapped muskrat in the winter, sold cracklins and blackberries off the tailgate of a pickup for two bits a quart.

In the summer, Jimmie and I built board roads with our father through tidal marshland where you plodded all day through ooze that was like wet cement. In the spring, we caught crabs and crawfish by the washtub with chunks of skinned nutria, and sold them to restaurants in New Orleans for twice the price we could get in New Iberia or Lafayette.

Before she fixed our breakfast, my mother would return from the barn smelling of manure and horse sweat, a pail of frothy milk in one hand and an armful of brown eggs smeared with chickenshit clutched against her chest. Then she would pull off her shirt, scrub her hands and arms with Lava soap under the pump in the sink, and in her bra fill our bowls with cush-cush and make ham-and-onion sandwiches for our lunches.

Jimmie and I both had paper routes in New Iberia's red-light district. We set pins in the bowling alley and with our mother washed bottles in the Tabasco factory on the bayou. My father hand-built the home we lived in, notching and pegging the oak beams with such seamless craftsmanship that it survived the full brunt of a half dozen hurricanes with no structural damage. My mother ironed clothes in a laundry nine hours a day in hundred-and-ten-degree heat. She scalded and picked chickens for five cents apiece in our backyard, and secretly saved money in a coffee can for two years in order to buy an electric ice grinder and start a snowball concession at the minor league baseball park.

Our parents were illiterate and barely spoke English, but they were among the most brave and resourceful people I ever knew. Neither of them would consciously set about to do wrong. But they destroyed one another just the same – my father with his alcoholism, my mother with her lust and insatiable need for male attention. Then they destroyed their self-respect, their family, and their home. They did all this with the innocence of people who had never been farther away from their Cajun world than their weekend honeymoon trip to New Orleans.

Jimmie's suitcase lay unopened on the bed in the spare room, but through the kitchen window I saw him in the backyard, wearing shined shoes, pleated dark slacks, a pomegranate-colored tie, and dazzling white dress shirt, his Rolex watchband glinting on his wrist. He had folded his sleeves up on his forearms and was screwing down a new brass hasp on Tripod's cage door. He stepped back and tested the door, then began pouring from a bag of Snuggs's dry food into Tripod's bowl.

"Snuggs might not appreciate your expression of charity at his expense," I said, walking down the steps into the yard.

"I already checked with him. He said the eats you buy him are third-rate, anyway," he replied.

I was always amazed at how much we resembled one another, even though we were only half brothers. He didn't have a white patch in his hair, as I did, and his prosthetic eye had a peculiar gleam trapped inside it, but our height, skin coloring, posture, facial structure, even the way we walked, were the same. I sometimes felt a reflection had stepped out of the mirror and would not allow me to be who I thought I was.

"I just got back from talking with Valentine Chalons. I've caught him in at least two lies," I said.

"Why does he want to lie about Ida Durbin? He wasn't even born in 'fifty-eight."

"The Chalonses supposedly had business ties to the Giacanos. The Giacanos had part of the hot pillow action in Galveston. Ida was working in one of their joints," I replied.

"That doesn't make sense. If Ida was killed by a pimp or some cops on a pad, why would the Chalonses care? They wouldn't even know her name."

"When they lie, they're guilty. Val Chalons is lying," I said.

"Maybe. Maybe not, Dave. You don't like rich guys. I'm not sure how objective you are."

I picked up Tripod and set him inside his cage. He felt heavy and solid in my hands, his tail flipping in my face. I started to speak, but this time kept my own counsel.

Jimmie latched Tripod's cage door and poked one finger through the screen to scratch his head. Jimmie's jaws were closely shaved, the small cleft in his chin filled with shadow. "I keep thinking maybe she got away from whoever abducted her. A few times I thought I heard her voice on a jukebox, singing backup maybe or even doing a solo. I always wanted to believe those demos we sent to Sun Records got her out of the life. Kind of a crazy way to think, huh?"

No different from my thoughts, I started to say. He waited for me to speak. "What are you thinking?" he asked.

"She's dead. That's why the Chalonses are running scared," I said.

"No, there's some other explanation," he replied, wagging one finger back and forth, as though he had the power to change the past.

That night I dreamed of Galveston, Texas, in the year 1958. In the dream I saw the salt-eaten frame houses where girls with piney-woods accents took on all comers for five dollars a pop, while down by the beach snub-nosed hot rods roared past a drive-in restaurant, their exposed V-8 engines chrome-plated and iridescent with an oily sheen, their twin exhausts thundering in a dirty echo off the asphalt. The sky was purple, streaked with fire, the palm trees like scorched tin cutouts against the sun. I woke at four in the morning and could not sleep again, my heart congealed with a sense of mortality that I could not explain.

In the darkness I drove to the cemetery in St. Martinville where my third wife, Bootsie, was buried. Bayou Teche was coated with fog, the crypts beaded with moisture as big as marbles. Downstream I could see the steeple of the old French church impaled against the stars, and the massive Evangeline oak under which I first kissed Bootsie Mouton and discovered how the world could become a cathedral in the time it takes for two people to press their mouths against one another.

I sat on a steel bench by Bootsie's tomb, my head in my hands, unable to pray or even to think. I did not want the sun to rise or the starlight to go out of the sky. I wanted to stay inside the darkness, the coolness of the fog, the smell of nightdamp and old brick stained with mold. I wanted to be with my dead wife.

At eight o'clock I sat down at my desk and went to work again on the case of the Baton Rouge serial killer. So far, all of his known victims had been women. Almost all of them had been abducted from their homes or driveways in upscale neighborhoods, often in broad daylight. There were no eyewitnesses. With the exception of the black woman whose body had been found not far from the convent at Grand Coteau, all of the victims had been white and educated.