“You’re crying,” Michael says. “Are you okay?”

“I don’t think okay is something to be aspired to at a time like this. I just have to keep moving forward.”

He withdraws his hand and goes back to flying.

Just as I expect to be kicked over to voice mail, my mother answers in a sleepy voice that makes me think sedatives.

“Dr. Wells?” she says.

“No, it’s Cat.”

“Cat?” A brief pause. “I don’t understand. Are you at Dr. Wells’s house?”

“No. Mom, listen, I know about Ann.”

“Well, I figured you must have heard by now.”

“How are you doing?”

“Fine, I suppose. Considering. I’m at work, and it’s a very busy time for me. Which is good, I guess.”

At work? She sounds like she just woke up from surgery.

“I always knew this was a possibility with Ann,” she says. “One of her doctors even told me to prepare for it. He said that if this ever happened, I should know ahead of time that there was nothing I could have done to prevent it.”

“But is that how you really feel?”

She sighs heavily, and in the background I hear the Muzak she runs in her shop. “I don’t know. Look, I told you, I’m really busy today. I have to get out to Dunlieth to show the owner some new drapery fabrics.”

“Mom, I need to talk to you. Will you be at home this afternoon?”

“That depends on how long Dunlieth takes, doesn’t it?”

“Please try to be home. This is no day to be worrying about work.”

“Life goes on, Cat. I figured you of all people knew that.”

“What about the funeral arrangements?”

“Your grandfather’s taking care of all that.”

Of course. Nothing but the best for one of my daughters

“I don’t mind talking to you,” she says, “but I don’t want you to start trying to tell me how to feel about this. I deal with my own feelings in my own way. You know that.”

“Or you don’t deal with them.”

Chilly silence. “I may not wear my heart on my sleeve like some people, but I’ve managed just fine so far.”

“Have you, Mom? Has life really been fine all these years?”

“I think I’ve done a pretty good job, considering the obstacles life put in my way.”

God “How is Pearlie taking it?”

“I don’t know. She’s gone to the island. Deserted me with barely a word.”

This throws me. “The island? Pearlie hates the island.”

“Well, that’s where she went, right after she heard the news about Ann. I’ve got to go, Cat. If I don’t see you later, make sure you’re at that funeral. Ann would want you there.”

Like I would miss my aunt’s funeral? “Mom, why did I go riding in the orange truck with Grandpapa on the island?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve been having this dream about riding in that old truck with him, and it’s always raining.”

“Ohhh,” she says, her voice suddenly musical. “Daddy always got so tense when it rained, because no work could be done. You were the only one who could calm him down. He’d ride around the island showing you the birds and cattle and deer, and when he got back, he’d be tolerable to live with again. I think children are the only thing that keep men from being altogether savage. I just-”

“Mom,” I cut in, stopping what could become an endless flow. “Try to come home this afternoon, okay?”

“Bye-bye, darling.”

I hang up and pass the phone back to Michael, more dazed than upset. John Kaiser described my mother as furious over Ann’s death, and suspicious that she’d been murdered by her husband. Now Mom sounds like she’s on Thorazine. She often sounded that way when I was a child. Distracted, bored, out of it. Sedated. For some reason, I sense my grandfather’s hand in this. How easy it would be for him to give her a shot and remove the inconvenience of her emotions from his life.

“Cat?”

“I’m fine, Michael. Can you fly us over the island? Is it too far out of the way?”

“Well, the river’s just over the horizon to our left. You said the island is opposite Angola prison?”

“Just south of it.”

He banks the Cessna in a wide arc to the west, and almost immediately I see the silver line of the river ahead.

“Can you fly low?”

“Sure. We can buzz the treetops.”

“No thanks. Just low enough to make out cars and people.”

Michael laughs and begins descending.

Soon the river is a great silver serpent slithering across a vast green floor. On the near shore, endless ranks of trees march over the hills. On the far bank, flat fields of cotton and soybeans stretch as far as the eye can see. The river cuts through the land with implacable abandon, bisecting the continent almost as an afterthought.

“Can you believe we were right down there the night before last?” I ask. “Or all that’s happened since then?”

Michael tilts the plane a little and looks down. “I can’t believe you swam that river. I mean shit. ”

“Do you see an island?”

“I see a half dozen of them.”

“This one’s four miles long.”

Michael whistles low. “I think I was looking right at it without knowing it. There’s Angola prison. So that must be DeSalle Island.”

I can’t see it from my side, and Michael quickly realizes this. He banks and drops the nose, and suddenly we’re boring in on the long, humped mass of the island like a fighter plane on a strafing run.

“How high are we?”

“I’m going to stay at four hundred feet. You can see all you need to from there.”

In a matter of seconds, we’re roaring over the island. I’ve seen it from the air before: once long ago from the cockpit of a crop duster, then later from the basket of a hot-air balloon. Today’s view reminds me of that first trip, the landscape below flashing past at a hundred miles an hour. I see the hunting camp, the lake, the lodge, the pastures and the pond, and then we’re banking left to avoid what might be restricted airspace over Angola.

“Can you make another pass?”

“Sure. What are you looking for?”

“A car. A blue Cadillac.”

“I’ll climb to a thousand feet. You’ll have a better view between the trees.”

Michael executes a 360-degree turn, climbing as he goes. This time the island looks more like a satellite photo, the chaos caused by proximity now softened into geometric patterns. I see the road that runs the perimeter of the island and the branch that cuts south of the hunting camp, widening into an open space near the cluster of cabins that house the workers. Four white pickups are parked by the cabins. To the left of them, a baby blue sedan stands gleaming in the sun.

Pearlie’s Cadillac.

“Okay!” I tell Michael. “Let’s go home.”

“You saw the car?”

I nod and point northward, toward Natchez. I don’t really feel like talking now. I just want to know what drove Pearlie Washington to travel to the island where she was born, a place where, according to her, she is no longer welcome. One more mystery among many. Yet something tells me that if I could read Pearlie’s mind, all the other mysteries would be solved.