“Take it,” he says. “Do you good.”

No, it won’t, I say silently. It’ll hurt me. It’ll poison my baby.

“What are you thinking, Catherine?”

I don’t speak. I’m not sharing my only pure secret with anyone.

“I’m not sure what to do now,” he says. “You’ve had problems with depression in the past, and I was damn little help to you. I was from the old school. If I couldn’t palpate it, irradiate it, amputate it, or resect it, it wasn’t a problem. I know different now. I worry that telling you this could trigger a major depressive episode. Are you still taking SSRIs for that?”

I don’t reply. My silence must remind him of the wordless year that followed my father’s death, because it spooks him.

“Catherine?” he says in an anxious voice. “Can you speak?”

I don’t know. Am I speaking now?

“Surely you have some questions. You always do.”

But I’m not me anymore.

“Well, after you’ve had time to absorb this, I think you’ll see why I don’t want you bringing outsiders here to search that room for more blood. No possible good can come from anybody learning what I just told you. None at all. But great harm could result.”

“Who else knows?” I whisper.

“No one.”

“Not Pearlie?”

A solemn shake of the head. “She might suspect, but she doesn’t know.”

“Mother?”

“No one, Catherine.”

“Did you really examine me that night? After the police left?”

He nods sadly.

“What did you find?”

A deep sigh. “Vaginal and anal irritation. Old scarring. Your hymen wasn’t intact. That’s not conclusive in itself, but I knew what I’d seen. If I’d waited ten minutes to go into that room, I’d have found more evidence. And if a forensic team had tested your bedsheets back then-”

“Please stop.”

“All right, darling. Just tell me what I can do.”

“Nothing.”

“I’m not sure that’s true. Now that you know the truth about your past, it might be helpful to speak to someone. I can get you access to the top people in the country.”

“I have to go.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere.”

“Why don’t you stay here for a while? I’ll have Pearlie fix a room upstairs. You don’t ever have to go back into that slave quarters again. You’d have never lived there in the first place if it had been up to me. It was Luke who refused to move in here. I offered him a whole damn wing. I guess now you know why. Anyway, you take a few days and start trying to get your mind around this. It could take a long while to really deal with it.”

I can’t believe this is my grandfather talking. His philosophy was always unequivocal: When life throws you a curveball, you knock that son of a bitch right down the pitcher’s throat. I actually heard him say that many times. Yet here he stands, talking like he’s been watching Dr. Phil with my mother.

“I have to go now, Grandpapa.”

I turn and walk quickly to the French doors that lead out onto the lawn. His footsteps follow me, then stop. In a moment I’m standing in bright sunlight on an endless plain of freshly mown grass.

And there the tears come. Great racking sobs that make my ribs hurt. I fall to my knees and bend over the grass the way I would if I were puking drunk. But I’m not drunk. I am desolate. What I want most is out of my skin. I want to take a knife, slash myself from my pubic bone to my neck, and crawl out of this disgusting body.

“Catherine?” calls a frantic female voice. “What’s the matter? Did you hurt yourself?”

It’s my mother. She’s kneeling in the flower beds near the front entrance of Malmaison. The mere sight of her throws me into panic. When she gets to her feet, I stand and race for the far corner of the house.

Rounding the corner of Malmaison, I sprint along the back wall of our slave quarters. My bedroom window flashes at my left shoulder, and I shudder at the sight of it. There’s my car. My connection to New Orleans. My escape. Mom’s cries fade as I slide behind the wheel and slam the door. The revving motor is the first thing that slows the spinning panic in my chest.

Throwing the Audi into gear, I roar out of the parking lot, spraying gravel against the wall of the slave quarters. Never have I wanted to leave a place so badly as I do Malmaison at this moment. Of course there is only one way to truly leave this place behind.

Die.

DeSalle Island rises out of the Mississippi River like the back of a sleeping dog. The long, low line of trees stretches four miles north to south, three miles east to west. It’s so big, you wouldn’t know it was an island without crossing it.

The setting of my childhood summers, the island is as much a part of me as Natchez and New Orleans, yet it stands utterly apart from them. Apart from everything, really. Nominally part of Louisiana, it is in truth subject to no authority other than that of my family. It was created when the Mississippi River, having wound back upon itself like a writhing snake, finally cut off its own tortuous bend with a great rush of floodwater that shortened its course by more than five miles. Left in the wake of that cataclysm was a great island covered with timber, rich topsoil, wild game, and the shacks of a dozen black families that worked for my ancestors for 150 years-first as slaves, then as sharecroppers, and finally as wage earners. Floods eventually smothered the topsoil with sand and killed the oaks and pines, but the blacks worked on, raising cattle instead of cotton, managing a deer camp, and doing whatever else kept food in their children’s bellies. The only whites who come here are members of my family, or business associates of my grandfather’s invited here to hunt.

I’m parked where the narrowest part of the old river channel flows through a treacherous plain of mud. Here a dirt causeway stretches across the old channel to the island. Every spring it’s washed away by overflow from the river, but every summer it’s rebuilt, the cost being split between my grandfather and an oil company that operates several wells on the island. The river is high for this time of year, and the backwater laps against the edges of the causeway with maybe an inch to spare.

I’ve been parked at the end of the causeway for twenty minutes, trying to decide whether it’s safe to cross. A line of thunderclouds has been blowing up from the south for the past hour. If they cut loose with enough rain, the causeway could disappear under the rising water. It’s happened before.

I drove the seventy miles here in a state of near hypnosis, my only goal to reach this place where my father spent so much time, to somehow solve the tragic mysteries of his life and mine. I was conscious enough to call Sean twice, but he didn’t answer. That means he’s with his wife. If he were in a task force meeting or even at a fresh murder scene, he would have at least text-messaged me back. Sothe father of my baby is almost certainly trying to save his marriage.

After failing to reach Sean, I felt an irresistible compulsion to speak to Nathan Malik. I called his cell phone, but it kicked me over to his voice mail. I wanted to leave a message, but I didn’t. If the psychiatrist is still in jail, his cell phone is probably sitting on the desk of some FBI agent. It might even be in John Kaiser’s pocket. Whoever has it has probably already put the Bureau’s technical machinery in motion, trying to trace the number of the person who called their main suspect.

When I couldn’t reach Malik, I started paging through my digital phone book. That’s one thing you do when you’re depressed. One thing I do, anyway. Go through my phone book calling friend after friend, praying for a sympathetic voice. I call people I haven’t seen in months, and even years. But todayI didn’t do that. As the rolling hills of southwest Mississippi swept me into the boot of Louisiana, I called directory assistance and got the number of Michael Wells’s medical office. It took some convincing, but his receptionist finally put me through. I told Michael I’d really like to talk to him, if he had some time.