“Explain.”

“I don’t need to explain, Sheriff. You know precisely what I mean. It’s all very well and good saying you’re in the club, but saying you are goes only so far. Every once in a while you have to do something that proves you’re in the club; otherwise folks start to get fidgety and unsettled. The Klan is on the decline. It might come to life again, but those who are out there with their mouths open, airing their opinions and whatnot, are becoming more and more rare as the years pass. It is not so fashionable nowadays, even down here, and if you are of that inclination, then it is expected that you keep your opinions to yourself, just to keep up appearances, you know? It’s a double-edged sword, especially when it comes to business. For some people, you have to say one thing, for others something else.”

“But your father has not been involved in business for some time, right?”

“Right, so that is a problem he has not had to deal with.”

“And Matthias?”

“I think you know where Matthias’s sympathies lie.”

“But does that extend further than his concern for his family? Is he just prejudiced when it comes to his sister getting involved with a colored man, or does it apply to everyone?”

“If you’re asking whether or not he goes out late at night with a pillowcase on his head, then no, he does not. Where he puts money, what he supports, whom he speaks with, where his allegiances lie, I do not know. You have to appreciate that my brother and I have not maintained the most amicable of relationships for quite some time.”

“So why do you stay at the house?”

“Have you seen the house?”

“Yes, I have,” Gaines said. “Not inside, but I was there very briefly, speaking to your brother a while back.”

“You could lose an entire family in that house. I can go for days without seeing him. It suits me to stay there right now.”

“For financial reasons?”

Della looked awkward for a moment, as if caught off guard. “I don’t see that—” She hesitated, turned to glance at Maryanne, standing in silence there by the back door. She sighed audibly, seemed perhaps exasperated. “For financial reasons, yes.”

“Do you think that if your father were able to maintain some coherence in his mental state, you could then explain your situation to him and he would help you?”

“It would not be a problem I would want to give him, Sheriff. I wouldn’t want to put him in the middle of any conflict I might be having with Matthias.”

“Are you not able to make financial arrangements to secure your independence from Matthias? Is that not possible?”

Della smiled. “However advanced into the twentieth century things may appear to be, Sheriff, there are some things that stay traditional. I have absolutely no influence or control over any aspect of the Wade fortune. In the event of my father’s death, everything comes under Matthias’s control. That’s the way he wants it, and that’s the way it will be. Perhaps that is unusual, but then my father has always been an unusual man. And taking into consideration the fact that my father is not able to manage his own affairs, he might as well already be dead, at least from a business point of view.”

Della lifted her coffee cup and drained it. She held it out toward Ross. “Same again, barkeep.”

“I think I’ll join you,” Ross said. “Anyone else?”

Maryanne and Gaines accepted coffee, declined the bourbon. Holland wanted both.

“So how is your life?” Gaines asked.

“Life is a waiting game right now,” Della said. “Waiting for my father to die, waiting for Clifton to be released, waiting for a revelation about how to handle this mess better than I am handling it right now.”

“You want some help?”

“You think you can help me?”

“I think we can help each other.”

“Seriously?”

“You doubt my intentions?” Gaines asked.

“I don’t know anything about your intentions, Sheriff Gaines. I appreciate the fact that you are trying to do something here, and I acknowledge that you made the effort to go on up to Parchman and see Clifton, ill-advised though it was, but I don’t know what your long-term plan is, no.”

“It’s very simple, Miss Wade. I want to find out if your brother was responsible for the deaths of Nancy Denton and Michael Webster, and if so, then I want to see him charged, arraigned, tried, convicted, and sentenced appropriately.”

“Do we hang folks for murder now, or do we fry them?”

“Not anymore, no. Death penalty has been suspended by the Supreme Court.”

“I didn’t know. So, it’d be a life sentence then?”

“Yes, it would.”

“Up at Parchman. That would be ironic, eh?”

Della was silent. She sipped her coffee. By the time she finished it, she would have gotten through a good three or four shots of bourbon. Maybe that was standard for Della Wade. Maybe that was the way she rounded off the edges of her awkward existence.

Gaines watched her. There was sadness there, no doubt about it, but deep-rooted, buried beneath the brave face she wore for the world. He did not envy the life she was living, and he knew that there was no amount of Wade money, present or promised, that would change the fact that she was desperately alone without Clifton Regis.

“Do you not hate Matthias for what he’s done?” Gaines asked.

“Hate him? No, Sheriff, I don’t hate him. There is no point hating him. What good would it serve? What problem would be solved by allowing him to upset me that much? No, I don’t hate him. I don’t trust him, and I don’t deal with him on anything but the most superficial terms. I know who he is and how he can be, and there have been times that he has demonstrated tremendous generosity and kindness, but it’s as if he’s at war with himself. He thinks he needs to be a certain way to survive, and that makes him arrogant and self-absorbed, but I don’t believe that’s who he truly is. The difficulty is that he’s been this way for so long that who he really is has been lost forever.”

Gaines nodded. He needed to ask Della Wade about something else, but he did not want to inspire any inherent impulse she might possess to defend her brother. He knew that she sensed this—if not in his expression, his body language, then in the seeming increase of tension in the room. It seemed that everyone was aware of this, for Della Wade pinned Gaines with a hard look and asked him outright.

“This is not all, is it?” she said. “There is something else.”

Gaines did not speak immediately. He started to explain, to walk around the edges of what he wanted to ask her, but she cut him short.

“Ask me the question, Sheriff. I cannot promise that I will know the answer, or even that I will answer it, but I am big enough to be asked.”

“January, 1968,” Gaines said. “Morgan City, Louisiana. Two girls were found murdered—”

“I remember it,” Della said.

“At the time—”

“At the time, there were a lot of questions. Some of those questions were asked of Matthias, but nothing was proven. There was no evidence to link Matthias to what happened to those children.”

“Just as there is no evidence to link Matthias to either Nancy or Michael.”

“You honestly think Matthias could have murdered little girls?”

“I don’t know, Miss Wade. I know Matthias even less well than I know you.”

Della sat without speaking for a good minute, perhaps two. It seemed so much longer, and the atmosphere in the kitchen was such that no one dared move or breathe. Even more than that, no one dared think.

Finally, she looked away toward Maryanne, not at her, just toward her, and then she turned back toward Gaines and shook her head. “I have nothing to say,” she said. “I do not want to think that my brother would be capable of such a thing. I know him, and I do not think he has it in him to do something like that. But, then, I did not believe he’d be capable of doing what he did to Clifton. I think what he did to Clifton was done out of jealousy, not prejudice or hatred, but jealousy.”