“You’re a big help.”

“Sorry. I didn’t think you’d want me looking at that stuff until you’d checked it out.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry.”

I’m down to the sketchbook and the photo album. I’m about to start working through the photos when Michael speaks again, this time in a voice I barely recognize.

“Cat?”

When I look up, his face is pale. “What is it?”

He shakes his head, then passes the magazine to me. Stuck between two pages are three photographs. Each one shows a different child. Two are boys, aged about six or seven. The third photo shows a dark-haired girl of about five.

All of the children are naked.

“Is that you?” Michael asks.

My eyes are swimming in tears. “No.”

The boy in one photo looks oblivious to the camera, but the other boy looks scared. He’s holding his little penis as though he’s about to urinate, but I can almost see a man standing behind the camera, ordering him to touch himself.

My stomach is trying to come up. I want to stop it, but I can’t. Dropping the magazine on the floor, I get to my feet, run to a corner, and puke my guts out. As I come up for air, spitting and dry-heaving, something touches my arm.

I whirl and lash out, striking Michael hard across the face.

He blinks in surprise but doesn’t try to defend himself. I draw back my arm again and swing at his face with all my strength. Something clamps around my wrist and pins it in midair.

Michael’s hand.

“Cat?” he says softly. “It’s me. It’s Michael.”

A scream bursts from my throat with the force of an explosion. From deeper than my chest, really, deeper even than my diaphragm. The scream is what my fist would have been had it smashed into Michael’s face. A bolt of rage and humiliation and other things I can’t even name. When the scream finally dies, my hand still quivers an inch from his face.

“I think we should get out of here,” he says. “We can talk about this stuff at my house.”

I don’t respond.

“I’ll get the bag. We should take it with us.”

He pushes my fist down to my waist, then lets it go and kneels on the floor. He puts everything back into the bag, then leads me by the wrist back through the sculptures, toward the barn door.

I stop in my tracks.

Hanging from a rafter above me is a sculpture I didn’t see on my way in. It was shielded from view by the floor of the loft. But now I see it. It’s a hanged man. Stylized, but a hanged man all the same. Life-size, and ugly as death. The face has the anonymous oval shape that the statue in Louise’s house did, but the body is fuller. At first I think of suicide, but something about the sculpture has a more official look. As if the man was just hanged for some offense. The steel rope around his neck rises in a perfect line that terminates in a hook, which would allow it to be hung from almost anything.

“I’ve never seen that before. I thought I’d seen everything he ever did.”

No, says a voice in my head. You’d never seen the pieces in Louise’s house either.

“That’s different,” I say.

Is it? Apparently, your father did a lot of things you never knew about. Or never remembered

“Cat?” says Michael. “Are you talking to me?”

“What?”

“Come on. That scream was loud.”

He drags me toward the door, but my eyes remain locked on the hanged man.

As Michael pulls me through the trees toward Brookwood, I keep thinking of my father walking on water in my dream. When I woke, I felt certain that he was trying to tell me something. To help me. To send me the secret truth of his life and mine. But maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he was trying to apologize for something. Not literally, of course. I know he’s not communicating to me from the dead or anything like that. It’s my subconscious creating these images. And yet…

“I’m sorry I flipped out,” I say. “You don’t have to stay with me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” says Michael. “You have no business being alone right now.”

We’re never going to reach Brookwood. My legs feel full of sand, and the humidity hanging in the air makes it difficult to extract oxygen from it. “I need to talk to my mother.”

“Why?”

“She’s my father’s next of kin. I can’t see getting any kind of exhumation permit without her support.”

“Cat, you just looked at three Polaroids and a sculpture and you freaked out. Now you’re talking about looking at your father’s corpse? After it’s been decomposing for over twenty years?”

I shudder. “That will be easier to look at than those pictures.”

“Cat-”

“What else can I do, Michael? I have to keep digging until I uncover the truth. If I don’t, I’ll go mad.”

He stares at me with eyes full of pity and compassion. “I think you should talk to Tom Cage before you do anything else.”

“Dr. Cage?”

“Yes. Remember what he told me? Your dad confided in him quite a bit about the war. And Tom seemed to think a great deal of Luke. I think you need to hear what Tom has to say.”

“Nobody’s going to confess to their family doctor that they molested their own daughter.”

“Don’t be so sure. In the old days, the family doctor was like a priest. Especially in the South. He was the only person some people could legitimately unburden themselves to.”

I stop walking and sag against the gray trunk of an oak tree.

“What’s the matter?” Michael asks.

“Can you bring the car?”

He studies me for several moments. I see the doctor’s brain behind his eyes, searching me for signs ofwhat?

“Do you promise to stay here until I get here?”

“Of course. What are you worried about?”

“I’m worried that all this stress will trigger a manic state. If it does, you won’t know what you’re doing. And I think you’ll kill yourself one way or another.”

I slide down the tree trunk and settle onto the soft ground. The pain of the bark scraping my back is strangely welcome. “Please, Michael.”

“I’ll be back in two minutes.”

As soon as he disappears, I dump the contents of my father’s bag on the ground in front of me. The Playboy, the maps, the letters, the prunes, the sniper patch, the sketchbook, the spiral album of snapshots. I hold my breath as I open the album, with its photos tucked into plastic sleeves for posterity. I’ve never been more afraid to look at something in my life. If I find more photographs of children, I’ll simply keep holding my breath until I pass out. I’ve failed at that before, but today…

The first photograph shows a white-tailed deer in low light, a buck with ten antler points. Relief almost makes me exhale, but I don’t. Every photo in this book is a potential horror.

The next picture shows a black bear cub. The one after, a cottonmouth moccasin coiled around a cypress tree.

My heart stutters in my chest.

The next photo shows a naked brown body. But it’s not a child. Not a prepubescent one, anyway. It’s Louise Butler, thirty years younger than when I talked to her in her little house on the island. She can’t possibly be eighteen in this picture. She’s standing on the edge of the river at sunset, facing the camera without a trace of shame. The grace and power of her nude body make Lola Falana on the pages of Playboy seem common.

I flip the page.

Louise again, at river’s edge, this time sitting in profile against the sunset in what looks like the lotus position.

My mouth goes dry at the next image. In it, my father stands with one arm around Louise’s waist. She’s naked, but he’s wearing an old pair of denim cutoffs and nothing else. Bronzed by the sun, he looks as fit and happy as I ever saw him in life. The image is slightly off-kilter, as though he had set the camera on a log and shot the photo with a timer. I never saw him look that happy when he was with my mother.