shudder, but the rain never comes. I’ve checked my iPhone at least a dozen times, but as yet I’ve received no call or text from Blake Donnelly or Arthur Pine. Perhaps my father’s death has made them reluctant to call, but I can’t imagine sentimentality getting in the way of Poker Club business—especially with their reputations and even their liberty on the line. More than once I’ve worried that they might decide to kill Beau Holland rather than force him to stand trial for Buck’s murder, then present me with a fait accompli. Claude Buckman and company are nothing if not practical.
I took it upon myself to remove the assistive apparatus of Dad’s illness from the front room, though I could see it upset Mom to watch it packed away. She wanted it out of sight, but its removal was like an erasure of his final months in this house. During the silent caesuras between neighbors’ visits, she and I sit in the den, going through old photo albums she dug from a cabinet in the guest room. Most date to before Adam’s death. Some of the best pictures are from those rare occasions—once every year or two—that it snowed in Bienville, and we hauled pizza pans out to the Indian Village to slide down the snow-covered ceremonial mounds. In one shot, Dad, wrapped like a Sherpa, carries me up a steep mound while Adam, who looks about seven, trudges beside him like Edmund Hillary summiting Everest. No one looking at these photos would guess that this happy triumvirate would be shattered only a decade later.
“Duncan did his best,” my mother says beside me. “He really did.”
“I know,” I tell her, granting her this fiction.
“I wish he could have lived to see you reopen the Watchman.”
All I’ve done so far is pass the keys to Ben Tate, who has a skeleton staff downtown, setting up tomorrow’s edition. Ben’s more than a little pissed that I’ve restrained him from going hard after the Poker Club, and I can foresee problems in hewing to the deal I made with Buckman. But right now Ben is content to focus on the murders of Buck and Sally, as well as the imminent arrival of the Department of Archives and History archaeologists who will assess the paper mill site.
“We’ll do it tomorrow in style,” I tell her. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to take that portrait of Dad from your bedroom and hang it in the lobby of the building.”
This takes her by surprise, and moves her deeply. I have seen other widows become faithful tenders of their husbands’ legacies. “I think that’s a wonderful idea,” she says. To hide her tears, Mom changes the subject. “I’ve heard Buck Ferris’s memorial is tomorrow afternoon, out at the cemetery. Do you plan to go?”
“Sure, of course. I didn’t know.”
“I’d like to go with you. Buck did this family a great service.”
That he did. “We’ll go together.”
As she turns the album’s pages, I see the shining faces of people I haven’t spoken to in years. Bienville children who grew up and spread across the country, though most remained in the South. In every photograph, the kids seem oriented in relation to Adam, like bodies of lesser density finding their position in relation to a star.
“That boy was something,” Mom says softly. “Wasn’t he?”
“He was.”
As she slowly turns the pages, moving through Christmas presents and Fourth of July firecrackers, I remember Tim Hayden talking to me in the little park up the street from Nadine’s bookstore. “Mom, can I ask you something personal?”
“About your father?”
“No, Adam.”
“Of course.”
“Did you ever wonder if he might be gay?”
“Adam?”
I instantly regret the question.
Mom lays her hands flat on the plastic-covered album pages, draws back her head, and looks at me. “What makes you ask that?”
“I . . . never mind. I just wondered.”
After a few moments, she smiles in a way I’ve never seen before, defenselessly, as though allowing her deepest self to become manifest on her face. “Of course he was,” she says. “Your father never knew. I don’t think Duncan could have handled it. Not back then. Although . . . for him, Adam could do no wrong. I suppose that would have tested his love.”
“How long have you known?” I ask.
“Oh, I suspected when he was a little boy. Never mind why. Mothers know these things, if they pay attention. They don’t always react well, of course. But they know. At least I did.”