“Did Grandmama Catherine ever suspect anything?”

“She never said nothing to me. But Mrs. Catherine sure knew when to disappear. And she let Dr. Kirkland spend a lot of time with those girls alone. I saw it when they stayed up here during Christmas, when the girls was little. If Dr. Kirkland was gonna be around the house during the day, Mrs. Catherine would find somewhere else to be. It gave me a bad feeling, but what could I say about it? Times was different back then. A maid like me couldn’t open her mouth about something like that. All I could do was be there for those girls when they got upset. Try to ease their pain a little bit.”

“Did you ever see anything yourself?”

She shakes her head. “Looking back, I think Dr. Kirkland made sure I didn’t.”

“How did he do that?”

“He’d walk this property all hours of the night, just like your daddy. I think that’s one reason he didn’t like Mr. Luke. He couldn’t prowl around without being seen anymore. The few times Dr. Kirkland caught me out after nine, he warned me to stay indoors. Said he might shoot me by accident, thinking I was a burglar. So I stayed right in this house unless I got called out by him or Mrs. Catherine.”

In hindsight, it all seems so obvious. What’s missing is the historical context. The idea that Dr. William Kirkland, respected surgeon and paragon of virtue, could be tiptoeing around his antebellum mansion molesting his daughters was virtually unthinkable forty years ago.

“What about the island?” I ask.

Pearlie shifts uncomfortably in her chair. “What about it?”

“Do you think he bothered any children there?”

“If he did, nobody would tell me about it.”

“Why not?”

“Cause I left there and never went back. I turned into a house nigger. They think I’m Dr. Kirkland’s slave, bought and paid for.”

“Why didn’t you ever go back?”

She looks at me with something like scorn. “Why you think? There was a man there I had to stay away from.”

“Who?”

“My uncle.”

“Why did you have to stay away from him?”

She snorts. “Why you think, girl? Same kind of trouble as this.”

“Sexual abuse?”

“They don’t call it that on the island. They call it getting broke in. The men do, leastways, and some of the women, too. I got broke in by my uncle when I wasn’t but twelve. He wouldn’t let me alone. If he hadn’t had to go to jail for a while, I’d have wound up pregnant or worse. So when I got a chance to get off the island, I took it.”

From somewhere in my mind, a new image rises. A small black girl walks along a gravel road. Out of the shimmering heat an orange pickup truck appears, and then the man who pays her father and mother offers her a ride.

“Ivy never told you any stories?” I ask. “Nothing that made you suspicious? Even I’ve heard things about the kids there being scared to walk the roads alone.”

Pearlie folds her hand on the table. “Baby, a man with a taste for that kind of thing don’t stop doing it. He takes what he needs whenever he can get it. I’ll tell you something else. I think the women down there know about it. That’s why they tell spook stories to keep their children off the roads. But they don’t tell their husbands nothing, you can bank on that. They don’t want them going to the death house at Angola for killing the boss man.”

“Do you know that, Pearlie? Or just suspect it?”

She shrugs. “Does it make a difference?”

“In a court of law, it makes all the difference in the world.”

She spits out air in a rush of scorn. “You ain’t getting Dr. Kirkland in no courtroom. He too smart and too rich. Men like him don’t go to jail. You got to know that by now, girl.”

“Times have changed since you were young, Pearlie.”

A parched laugh escapes her lips. “You believe that?”

“Yes.”

“Then you ain’t smart as I thought you was.”

Pearlie’s cynicism pisses me off. If all women were like this, we’d still be chattels and not citizens. On the other handI grew up in a much more privileged world than she did.

“You never answered my question, Pearlie. Why did you go to the island yesterday?”

The bow of her shoulders sags. “A couple of years ago, a family moved off the island real quick. I heard about it later. They had one child, a four-year-old girl. They just packed up and left without a word. I wanted to find out if that was because of Dr. Kirkland.”

“Did you?”

She inhales from her cigarette as though drinking the nectar of the gods, then holds the smoke in her lungs for as long as possible before letting it out in a long blue stream. “No,” she says finally. “Nobody would talk about it. They all scared.”

“Was that the only reason you went down there?”

She turns her dark gaze onto me, and at last I feel the full power of her instinctive intelligence. All her life Pearlie has hidden her quick understanding; that’s what she was raised to do. But the death of my aunt-one of “her babies”-has caused a tectonic shift in the old woman’s soul, and Pearlie Washington is never going to be the same.

“I don’t think Mrs. Catherine died by accident,” she says in a whisper. “I never did.”

This statement shocks me to the core. “Are you saying Grandmama Catherine was murdered? She couldn’t have been. People saw her fall into the water.”

“Did they?” Pearlie’s eyes glint in the dark. “She was standing off by herself when she went in. But did she fall? Did that sandbar really cave in? Mrs. Catherine practically grew up on DeSalle Island. You think she’d stand on a weak sandbar like some city fool and not know it? No, child. No more than Mr. Luke would let somebody sneak up on him after he was in the war. I think Mrs. Catherine finally found out something so bad that she couldn’t live with it. If she’d gone to the police, she’d have ruined her family name forever. Her children were already full grownI think she just couldn’t see what else to do but die. I think she drowned herself in that river, baby.”

Suicide? A seventy-five-year-old woman? “What do you think she saw, Pearlie?”

The old woman’s shoulders drop even lower. “A few years ago, when I was cleaning Dr. Kirkland’s study, I found some pictures.”

My breath catches in my throat. “What kind of pictures?”

“The kind you don’t have to take to the drugstore to get developed.”

“Polaroids?”

She nods.

“What were they of?”

“You and Miss Ann.”

My face is burning. “Doing what?”

“Swimming in your birthday suits.”

“Together?”

“No. They must have been took twenty-five years apart. Neither of you was more than three in the pictures, and nekkid as the day you was born. Both in a swimming pool somewhere. If those pictures had been mixed up with a bunch of others, I wouldn’t have thought nothing of it.” Pearlie holds up a bony finger, the nail painted with red polish. “But just those twoand took so far apart. It gave me a cold feeling. Like the devil walking over my grave.”

“You think Grandmama found those pictures?”

“She found something. The month before she died, Mrs. Catherine wouldn’t hardly say a word to nobody. Had a far-off look in her eyes. Hopeless.”

“Pearlie, I found some pictures of naked children hidden in the barn-in Daddy’s things.”

She looks stunned. “Mr. Luke had pictures like that?”

“Yes. But knowing what I know now, I think he did exactly what you did. He found some of Grandpapa’s pictures. But he kept them. I’ll bet he was going to confront Grandpapa with them. They might even have been what made him suspicious enough to check my room on the night he died.”

“I been looking for more pictures like that,” Pearlie says, “but I ain’t found none yet. Lord, the misery that man done caused. He’s sick, that’s what he is.”

I get up and pull the curtains away from the kitchen window. Malmaison stands majestic and silent as a royal sepulchre. “He’s not going to hurt any more children,” I say softly. “That stops today.”