Maryanne looked up at Gaines, perhaps lost somewhere in her recollection and then remembering Gaines’s presence in front of her. She smiled. “It wasn’t a hugely important purpose, of course, but it was a purpose. It was a reason to get up in the morning, and he seized it. And he had money then, of course, and he insisted on paying for things and buying things for Nancy and me. One Christmas, we were all invited to the Wade house for their Christmas Eve party, and Michael bought dresses for both of us from a store in Biloxi. Silk dresses, yellow and pink, and flowers, too, and we went up there to the big house and felt like we were in Gone with the Wind.”

Maryanne laughed softly. It was a beautiful sound.

“He was always like that then. Generous, kind, patient. We all loved him, but whereas he cared for me and Matthias and the others greatly, he loved only Nancy. Anyway, it was June of 1952. Michael would have been in his late twenties by then, and Nancy, she would have been . . . well, yes, it was just three or four days before her fourteenth birthday. I remember now. We had a party planned, just something simple, but considering what happened, we had to cancel it. Anyway, it was June, and everything was fine, everything was normal, and then we got word that there had been a terrible fire at the plant. It wasn’t the whole plant, because each section had its own building, if you like. Auto things were made in one factory, metal pressings in another, enamel goods in another, you know? Anyway, by this time, Michael was one of the foremen in the building where they cast things in iron or steel or whatever. They had these huge containers of sand, because they used sand to make the molds for some of the things they manufactured. They were like enormous wooden barrels, but raised up about six feet high, and they held tons and tons of sand. So, there was a fire somewhere in the back of the building, and there were maybe twenty-five or thirty men working in that building. Once the fire got a grip, there were a number of them trapped in one section of the building. What happened was that the wooden legs of these sand barrels gave way, and these things came over and created this obstacle between one part of the building and the next. There were a number of men behind this great mountain of sand. The sand was scorching hot, and they couldn’t climb over it and they couldn’t get around it. So Michael took half a dozen other men, and they went outside the building from the other end. They took digger trucks and some kind of wagon and they drove those trucks into the back wall again and again until they breached it, and they made an escape route for the men who had been trapped inside. But not all of them came out, and Michael figured they must have been overcome by smoke or something. The fire department had arrived by then, and because the summer had been so hot, the river was low, and they couldn’t get the water up as fast as they needed it. Anyway, Michael took a team of firemen in to show them where these workers were trapped, and they disappeared into the smoke and not one of them came out. Not the workers who’d been left behind, not the firemen. Just Michael. The roof came down, and then the back wall collapsed, and the firemen and the workers were trapped in there and they died. Somehow Michael came out. And, after what had happened in the war, that’s when he became known as the luckiest man alive.”

Gaines had watched her talking the entire time. The more she spoke, the more alive she appeared to become. As if to recount this terrible tragedy had somehow reminded her of not only her own mortality, but also her own aliveness. There was something truly captivating about the woman, as if something inside her was alight and yet hidden behind the shadows of the past. Past experience had buried who she was, and in speaking of these things, perhaps some small avenue of escape had become visible.

“And Michael?” Gaines asked.

“He withdrew to a degree, just as he had after his return from the war. We still spent time together, and he was still as much in love with Nancy as he’d ever been, but something had changed. It wasn’t even identifiable. It wasn’t something you could put your finger on. He wasn’t crazy. He didn’t act crazy. Nothing like that. It was like there was only seventy-five percent of him there, whereas before there had been a hundred. And then, after Nancy’s disappearance two years later . . . well, that’s when he really started to display signs of the lonely, crazy man he became. After that, I hardly ever saw him. I didn’t want to see him. When I did see him, he spoke about how he was a curse on everyone around him, about how he had made a pact with the devil, about how his own life had been spared twice, but that the price he now had to pay was the sacrifice of the one person he truly loved. It was too much to listen to him. It overwhelmed you. It was scary, terrifying, you know? It was obsessive.”

“And he stopped seeing you and Matthias completely after Nancy’s disappearance?”

“As best he could. He told me that he didn’t dare spend time with us. That if we stayed together, then we would go the same way as his friends in Guadalcanal, the same way as the people he worked with in Picayune, the same as Nancy. He believed that he was protecting us by becoming reclusive, by never seeing us, by staying away.”

“And you were all with her the night she disappeared, right?”

Maryanne smiled. “Yes, and that was the last time I saw her. It was the last time we were all together in the same place at the same time.”

“So what happened that night?”

“Nothing happened, Sheriff. Nothing at all. It was the same as so many other times that we had been together. It was a summer evening, August, 1954. We were in the field. We had the old record player from Matthias’s house. Catherine had left much earlier, and then when Matthias went back to get the record player, he took Eugene and Della with him. Then there was just the four of us in the field at the end of Five Mile Road near the trees, and we played music and we danced. And then Michael and Nancy went into the trees, and she never came out again.”

“And the police?”

Maryanne shrugged. “They found nothing. No sign at all. Don Bicklow was the sheriff at the time. George Austin was his deputy. They asked around; they spoke to Michael, to Matthias, to all three of us, and we didn’t know what had happened.”

“What did Michael tell them?”

“That they had gone into the trees together, that it was dark, that they had gotten separated but that he could still hear her singing. And then it went quiet, and he couldn’t hear her anymore. He went looking, and he called out for her. He got no answer, and he thought that maybe she was just hiding from him, that she would suddenly jump out from behind a tree to scare him, but she never did. Then he came out to the field again, and I was there with Matthias, and Michael figured she would be with us. She wasn’t, and so Michael and Matthias sent me home, and they went into the trees again to look for her, and after about an hour, they still hadn’t found her and they went to the Sheriff’s Office.”

“And when Michael and Matthias went back into the trees, did they search together, or did they split up?”

Maryanne shook her head. “I have no idea.”

“And Don Bicklow figured she was a runaway, and that was the end of it, right?”

“Seemed so, but now we know different. Now we know that Michael found her body, and then he did what he did . . .”

“We think that Michael found her body,” Gaines said. “We cannot be sure what really happened from the evidence we have.” Gaines leaned forward and looked at Maryanne directly. “What do you think really happened, Miss Benedict?”

Maryanne smiled. “Miss Benedict? No one calls me Miss Benedict, Sheriff Gaines. I am an institution here. I am the crazy lady who lives alone with cats and flowers and memories. I am just Maryanne.”