“Enough,” Della said. “Enough now.”

“You’re right, Miss Wade. It’s all circumstantial or coincidental, and no, I do not have anything that I can prove or substantiate, but sometimes an intuitive feeling possesses more substance than anything else.”

“And you thought that because of what happened with Clifton, I might be willing to help you incriminate and expose my brother as a murderer?”

“Miss Wade, I do not know for sure that he is a murderer.”

“But you believe he is.”

“I consider him the most likely contender.”

“Jesus Christ,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. “This is just a nightmare, a fucking nightmare.”

“I understand.”

She looked up suddenly. “Do you? Do you even have the faintest idea what it’s like to be told that your own brother is a murderer, that he murdered someone twenty years ago, an innocent girl for God’s sake, and he’s lived with that for two decades?”

Gaines shook his head. “No, I don’t. I don’t have a clue how this must feel.”

Della sighed. “I am upset with you, Sheriff Gaines. I am upset with Maryanne. I am upset that you went to see Clifton. Clifton knows I love him. He doesn’t need to ask me. He knows I love him enough to wait for however long it takes. The moment he’s out, we are gone, seriously. And we will be gone so far and so fast that Matthias will not even know about it until it’s too late to do anything. And it’s not only Matthias that makes it difficult for us to have a future together. A white girl and a colored man cannot have a relationship here. It is not possible. That is just the way of things. We should have been smarter. We should have been more careful. I have to accept responsibility for what happened, as I was the one who gave him the money. It was a stupid and impulsive thing to do, and we learned a hard lesson. But I am patient, and I can wait, and then Clifton and I will wish this part of the world goodbye, and we won’t be coming back. I want you to know that if Matthias had seen this letter, then Clifton would be dead. You understand?”

“I do, yes,” Gaines replied.

“And he asked you to send word back from me?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Well, if you go up there again, you tell him that nothing has changed, that everything is the same. But you tell him, Sheriff Gaines. No one else. You do not pass on a message. You do not send the message with someone else. And if you cannot go there, then you do nothing. Are we clear on that?”

“Yes, we are. Absolutely.”

“Okay then,” Della said. She turned to Nate Ross. “What you got that’s halfway toward moonshine in this place?”

“Got some good bourbon,” Ross replied.

“Well, I need some. I need a good slug in a cup of coffee.” She took a packet of cigarettes from her jacket pocket and lit one.

“So how was Clifton?” she said.

“He looked good,” Gaines replied. “As good as could be expected under the circumstances.”

“You know he’s a musician, right? You know I met him through Eugene?”

“Yes, he told me that.”

Della smoked her cigarette for a while. Ross brought her the laced coffee. She drank half of it, nodded at Ross, who then added more bourbon.

“Okay, okay, okay,” she said, almost to herself. “This is not what you think it is, Sheriff Gaines. This is not just a matter of walking up to the house and accusing my brother of murder and trusting that he will fall apart and confess.”

“I appreciate that, Miss Wade.”

“So what the hell do you think I’m going to be able to do?”

“Well, the mere fact that you have not leapt to his defense tells me something.”

“What, exactly? What does it tell you?”

“It tells me that you believe he might have done this, that such a thing would not have been beyond him.”

She smiled sardonically. “My brother is a man of many faces, Sheriff. Those who know him do not really know him, and those who don’t know him know more than they think. Who he is, and who he wants the world to believe he is, are two different things entirely.”

She hesitated for a moment. Gaines said nothing, his silence the best encouragement.

“He wants everyone to believe that he’s the master of his own little world. He runs my father’s businesses, or at least he pretends to. He appears every once in a while at the plants, at the refineries. He tells the people there what to do. They listen; they acknowledge him, and once he’s gone, they do what they were going to do before he showed up. He knows it, they know it, and it’s an arrangement of tacit consent. It works just fine on both sides. They get to make the companies and businesses work, and he gets to take the director’s salary.”

“And your father?”

“What about my father?”

“He doesn’t manage the businesses anymore?”

“My father is seventy-six years old, Sheriff Gaines. He has not been involved in any real capacity in his businesses for at least five years. After the illness—”

“The illness?”

“He was ill, seriously ill. At first they believed it was some kind of heart condition, but it wasn’t. Then they said it was a nerve disease, a deterioration of something in his brain, but he didn’t have the right symptoms. No one seems to know what was wrong with him, but it got worse and worse, and then it seemed to level out. He reached a state about a year or a year and a half ago, and he doesn’t seem to have gotten any worse since then.”

“And how is he? What effects has this illness had on him?”

“Everything, Sheriff. Everything about him has changed. He has moments of lucidity, but rarely. The times I have with my father, I mean, really have with him, are so few and far between these days. An hour or two a week, if I am lucky. He is elsewhere. He doesn’t remember the simplest things, and yet he can recall precise details of some event that happened fifty years ago as if it was yesterday. He rambles; he talks incessantly about nothing, and then he is completely silent for days at a stretch.”

“Is he aware of what happened with you and Clifton?”

“Sheriff, sometimes he doesn’t even know who I am, and I live with him.”

“And if he had known about you and Clifton, what would he have said?”

“You mean, would he have let me get involved with a colored man?”

“Yes.”

“No, he would not. Well, I think he would have done everything he could to discourage me, but if I had fought him—and believe me, I would have—he would have finally relented. He would not have let me stay here, but he would not have disowned me, neither in name nor financially.”

“And he would not have threatened Clifton or had him sent to Parchman.”

Della smiled ruefully. “Whatever has been said about my father, he was never a vindictive man. He was a businessman. He was tough, aggressive, but he was not cruel.”

Gaines looked at Ross, at Holland, at Maryanne. It seemed as though he might have been angling for some unspoken moral support, and Della picked this up immediately.

“What?” she asked.

“There’s a question I want to ask you, but I don’t want to cause offense—”

“Do I seem like the sort of person who is going to take offense at being asked a question, Sheriff?”

Gaines sighed and shook his head. “I don’t know what kind of person you are, Miss Wade.”

“Well, ask me the question, and if there’s gonna be a fistfight, then you’ve got three friends here to hold me down if it gets dirty.”

“Your father . . . his political persuasion, his loyalties, so to speak—”

“Ask the question, Sheriff. Politeness has its place, but directness serves us far better in the long run of things.”

“Is he Klan?” Gaines asked. “That direct enough for you?”

Della shrugged. “Well, at least I know what you’re asking me now.”

“So?”

“Politically, yes, personally, no. But then, such a balance cannot easily be maintained around here, if you know what I mean.”